There’s a cartoon, a not very funny one, that’s been circulating on social media for some years now, and it goes like this:
A rich white man, a poor white person, and an immigrant of color are shown sitting around a table with a plate of 20 cookies. In the second frame, the rich man helps himself to 19 of the cookies, and says to the poorer white person, “Careful, that immigrant is going to steal your cookie.” In other words, “Watch out for that other guy — he’s the threat. The two of you can fight over what little is left while I make off with 19 cookies.”
Throughout human history, we have always had a tendency to find someone to blame for our problems, or for our misdeeds. It can be so much easier to accuse someone else instead of looking in the mirror and admitting that we missed the mark. And as we see in the cartoon described above, we can also point fingers to distract others from activities we prefer no one notices.
This practice of focusing a spotlight on one group or individual to distract from the actions of others has a name. It’s called “scapegoating.”
In the Book of Leviticus, an elaborate ritual of atonement for sin is spelled out: instructions from God to Aaron, who was Moses’ brother. Following a ritual slaughter of a bull and a ram, instructions were given for a ritual using a live goat. The text reads, “Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness … The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free into the wilderness.” (Leviticus 16:21-22)
By the laying on of hands, all the people’s sins for the year were transferred onto the head of the goat, and the goat carried them far away into the wilderness.
And somehow the term “scapegoat” has been with us ever since. The actual practice of scapegoating has been a part of human life even longer, probably from the beginning of time.
We live in a time when the scapegoating of other people is taking place everywhere we look. It’s a well-known feature of authoritarian regimes: an effort to create an enemy for people to join forces against. We don’t have to remember back very far to the Nazi era and the treatment of Jews, communists, and LGBTQ people. In fact, we are seeing this repeated today, that same pattern of needing an enemy, and the exact same groups being treated as scapegoats. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Particular contempt has been aimed at transgender people and at immigrants, especially those who do not identify as white. In the case of both immigrants and trans people, we are told that these people threaten our safety, that they are criminals in our midst, that their goal is to prey on helpless women on playing fields and in restrooms. This scapegoating causes great harm to our society; it generates fear, hatred, and division. It results in the society seeing these people as less than, as dangerous, and somehow not quite as human as those in the mainstream.
Last Friday, a drag artist who grew up in Gloucester abruptly cancelled a performance planned as part of the Harbor Loop Summer Concert Series. The artist, Lady Carmen Brulee, took this step in response to some hateful comments made publicly. It’s as though, during this era of heightened threats and hate speech, that we have forgotten the long history of drag, spanning centuries. Suddenly, because it’s becoming increasingly normal to attack other people who we perceive as threatening, even drag gets pulled into this damaging dynamic.
Ultimately, this treatment of each other hurts us all. Our city is not made stronger by hatred and threats, regardless of who they are aimed at. We are diminished, because we risk becoming ever more fearful, more easily threatened. As a result, we begin searching for more and more people to blame, to try to drive away. Let’s not allow Gloucester and Cape Ann to become smaller, or intimidated.
In announcing her decision, Carmen Brulee wrote this on social media: “Hopefully we can end up living in a world that doesn’t normalize spreading hate and gossip so that artists like me can live freely without living in immense fear.”
That is my hope for us all.
The Rev. Janet Parsons is minister at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church.