Every year, on the day of atonement, the ancient Hebrews took two male goats and presented them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. Then the high priest cast lots to determine the fate of each goat.
One they would kill as a sacrifice to the Lord to cleanse and make sacred the sanctuary. The other, the scapegoat, they would present to the Lord alive.
The high priest would lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess upon its head all the guilt and misdeeds of the Israelites. All of their sins he would transpose to the goat, and the goat was then banished to the wilderness, carrying on its back the weight of the faults of the Israelites, and thus freeing the Israelites to flourish in peace.
The goat was cast out to suffer for the sins of others and was called the scapegoat.
This was the ritual according to Leviticus that was passed down through the ages, adopted by the ancient Greeks. It survives not only in individual interactions but within nations and castes. For the ancients, the scapegoat served as the healing agent for the larger whole. In modern times, the concept of the scapegoat has mutated from merely the bearer of misfortune to the person or group blamed for bringing misfortune.
“This serves to relieve others,” wrote the Jungian psychologist Sylvia Brinton Perera, to free “the scapegoaters, of their own responsibilities, and to strengthen the scapegoaters’ sense of power and righteousness.”
In a caste system, whether in the United States or in India or in World War II Germany, the lowest caste performed the unwitting role of diverting society’s attention from its structural ills and taking the blame for collective misfortune. It was seen, in fact, as misfortune itself.
Thus the scapegoat unwittingly helps unify the favored castes to be seen as free of blemish as long as there is a visible disfavored group to absorb their sins. “Scapegoating, as it is currently practiced,” Perera wrote, “means finding the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrongdoing, blamed for it and cast out of the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness, atoned (at one).”
A scapegoat caste has become necessary for the collective well-being of the castes above it and the smooth functioning of the caste system. The dominant groups can look to those cast out as the cause of any fate or misfortune, as representing the worst aspects of society. “The scapegoater feels a relief in being lighter,” Perera wrote, “without the burden of carrying what is unacceptable to his or her ego ideal, without shadow.” The ones above the scapegoat can “stand purified and united with each other, feeling blessed by their God.”
In the American South, the designated scapegoat was expelled not to the wilderness but to the margins of society, an attempted near banishment from the human race. Many men and women in the dominant caste blamed the people they enslaved for poor harvests or for meager returns, called the people who worked as many as eighteen hours a day for the enrichment of others lazy, and took out their frustrations on the bodies of those they held captive.
The caste system spared no one in the scapegoat caste. When pregnant women were to be whipped, “before binding them to the stakes, a hole is made in the ground to accommodate the enlarged form of the victim,” a Mr. C. Robin of Louisiana wrote in describing what he had witnessed.
“The Negro becomes both a scapegoat and an object lesson for his group,” the anthropologist Allison Davis wrote. “He suffers for all the minor caste violations which have aroused the whites, and he becomes a warning against future violations.”
After the Civil War, Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war. Well into the twentieth century, into the lifetimes of people among us today, lynchings served as a form of ritual human sacrifice before audiences sometimes in the thousands. People drove in from neighboring states, schools let out early so that white children could join their parents to watch men in the dominant caste perform acts of sadism on people from the subordinate caste before hanging them from the limb of a sycamore. Lynchings almost always occurred “at the hands of persons unknown,” performed “in a collective way so that no one person could be blamed.”
“Whites were unified in seeing the Negro as a scapegoat and proper object for exploitation and hatred,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal, a leading social economist in the 1940s. “White solidarity is upheld and the caste order protected.”
As scapegoats, they are seen as the reason for societal ills. The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses. Thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.
In the United States and in India, people in the dominant caste have blamed stagnant careers or rejections in college admissions on marginalized people in the lower caste, even though African-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India are rarely in positions to decide who will get hired at corporations or admitted to universities. In the United States, it is a numerical impossibility for African-Americans to wreak such havoc in employment and higher education: there are simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding.
Notably, while affirmative action grew out of the civil rights movement fought by lowest-caste people and their white allies, decades of analysis show that it is white women, and thus white families, rather than African-Americans, who became the prime beneficiaries of a plan intended to redress centuries of injustice against the lowest-caste people. Scapegoating nimbly obscures the structural forces that make life harder than it has to be for many Americans for the benefit of a few, primarily in the dominant caste. It blames societal ills on the groups with the least power and the least say in how the country operates while allowing the larger framework and those who control and reap the dividends of these divisions to go unchecked. It worsens during times of economic tensions when the least secure in the dominant group attacks a group in the minority “for structural economic problems that actually harmed both,” one social scientist observed, “and that neither caused.”
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The human impulse to blame a disfavored outsider group puts the lives of both the favored and disfavored in peril.
On an autumn evening in October 1989, a suburban Boston couple, expecting their first child that December, were driving home from a childbirth class. The husband, twenty-nine-year-old Charles Stuart, was the reserved and ambitious store manager at a luxury furrier downtown. His wife, thirty-year-old Carol DiMaiti Stuart, was a petite and gregarious attorney. They had bought a split-level house in the suburbs and had already decided that if that baby was a boy, they would name him Christopher. They were both children of the dominant caste, who had risen from modest, blue-collar backgrounds. They had just celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary.
That evening, they were driving home through the neighborhood of Roxbury, which had been the landing place for waves of European immigrants and, after World War II, became mostly black, poor and working class, ravaged by the war on drugs. The husband was behind the wheel of their Toyota and had taken a somewhat circuitous route. At a traffic light in the Mission Hill section, shots were fired, hitting the wife in the head and the husband in the abdomen, both at close range. The husband was in better shape than the wife, and he called police dispatch from his car phone. His wife died at the hospital of the massive wounds she sustained. Their baby was delivered in the wife’s final hours, two months premature, and named Christopher as his parents had wished. He lived for only seventeen days.
The night of the shooting, Charles Stuart told police that a black man with a raspy voice and wearing a jogging suit had forced his way into the car and had mugged
and shot them. The tragedy triggered every deep-seated fear and horror in Boston and across the nation. The husband’s desperate call to police dispatch aired repeatedly on television, as did video footage of paramedics pulling the mortally wounded wife from the Toyota.
Outraged over an incomprehensible tragedy, the city went into action and began a massive manhunt. Mayor Raymond Flynn vowed to “get the animals responsible” and ordered every available detective diverted to the case. Officers combed Roxbury and stopped and strip-searched every man who fit the description, which meant almost any black man on the streets, hundreds of them. The hunt for a suspect became the near singular fixation for weeks. The dragnet yielded a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed black man with a criminal record whom Charles picked out in a police lineup. People began calling for the death penalty.
For months, officials had paid little notice to inconsistencies in the husband’s behavior, distracted as they were by a storyline tailored to their expectations. The night of the shooting, Charles had driven around aimlessly for thirteen minutes while talking to dispatch, rather than heading back to the hospital that the couple had just left, claiming not to recognize any landmarks in the city he had lived in all his life. “He never tried to comfort his wife, never called her name,” according to Time magazine. “In the ambulance to the hospital, he only asked about the seriousness of his own wound, and never about his wife’s condition.”
Not long before, he had taken out several insurance policies on his young and healthy wife. After his release from the hospital, he collected on one of them and promptly bought a new car, a Nissan Maxima, and a thousand-dollar pair of women’s diamond earrings. It turned out that he had been staying out late on Friday evenings and into the early morning hours to the consternation of his wife in the months before her death. He had been seen with a young blond woman who worked summers at the furrier and whom he had arranged to phone him at the hospital, though she vehemently denied a relationship as the story broke. He had told friends he did not want the baby, that it would disrupt his climb up the social ladder.
Those contradictory details were not powerful enough to dislodge the fixed assumptions about the case. But there had been a third person involved on the night of the shooting, and as Christmas approached, that person began to crack. It was the husband’s brother, Matthew. Charles had planned ahead for Matthew to meet the car at a rendezvous site the night of the shooting. Before the brother arrived, Charles had stopped the car and shot his wife in the head, after which Charles pointed the gun at himself, intending to shoot his foot but misfiring into his torso instead. Charles told his brother to take and dispose of Carol’s jewelry and purse and the gun that Charles had used to kill her. This would make it look like the robbery he would later report to the police.
But afterward, the brother’s conscience began to plague him, and he told other members of the family. He said he thought he was helping his brother in an insurance scam when he got the purse and gun, not in a murder plot. Word got back to Charles Stuart that his brother was planning to go to the police and testify against him in exchange for immunity. With the investigation closing in on him, the husband jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River that January. His brother, Matthew, later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and possession of a firearm, among other charges, and served three years in prison.
In the end, the husband alone was responsible for the death of his wife, but the caste system was his unwitting accomplice. He knew that he could count on the caste system to spring into action as it is programmed to do, that people would readily accept his account if the perpetrator were black, believe the dominant-caste man over subordinate people, focus on them rather than him, see the scapegoat caste as singularly capable of any depravity, and would deflect any suspicion away from him. The story didn’t even have to be airtight to be believed. It needed only to be plausible. Any sympathy would accrue to him and not the scapegoat caste, which bears the burdens of someone else’s sins, no matter the protestations.
The caste system had given Charles Stuart cover and endangered the life of Carol DiMaiti Stuart, as it had for white women in the Jim Crow South, where husbands and lovers knew that a black man could be blamed for anything that befell a white woman if the dominant caste chose to accuse him. This is not to say that any group is more prone to criminality or subterfuge than another. It is to say that one of the more disturbing aspects of a caste system, and of the unequal justice it produces, is that it makes for a less safe society, allowing the guilty to shift blame and often to go free. A caste system gives us false comfort, makes us feel that the world is in order, that we automatically know the good guys from the bad guys.
It is possible that nothing could have saved Carol Stuart’s life, given the man she was married to. We will never know. Had the husband not been able to depend upon the universal decoy of black criminality, had he not been able to count on the instinctive reviling of the lowest caste and the corresponding presumption of virtue of the dominant caste, had he not been able to correctly assume that the caste system would act on his behalf, perhaps he might not have been as brazen, perhaps he might have tried something else, divorce, for instance. Perhaps he might not have felt as free to attempt something so heinous. Perhaps the wife might not have been killed, their son not been lost, at least not that night and not in that way, if he thought the suspicion would rightly be trained on the actual perpetrator from the start.
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Decades later, in the years of anxiety after the 2016 election, Anthony Stephan House, a thirty-nine-year-old project manager in Austin, Texas, was getting ready to take his eight-year-old daughter to school. It was just before seven in the morning on March 2, 2018. Something prompted him to go to his front door, and when he stepped over the threshold, he noticed a package on the porch. As he picked it up, it exploded. He died shortly after his arrival at the hospital.
His death was ruled a homicide for obvious reasons at first, but the investigation quickly pivoted away. House was African-American, living on the working-class black and Latino east side of Austin with its aging ranch houses and ramblers. The police figured that the bombing might be drug-related. Maybe it was intended as retribution for a drug dealer but left at the wrong house. They considered another possibility, that maybe he had detonated the bomb himself, a theory that blamed the victim for his own death.
“We can’t rule out that Mr. House didn’t construct this himself and accidentally detonate it, in which case it would be an accidental death,” Assistant Police Chief Joseph Chacon said.
“Based on what we know right now,” Brian Manley, then interim police chief, told reporters the day of House’s death, “we have no reason to believe this is anything beyond an isolated incident that took place at this residence and in no way this is linked to a terroristic attack.”
Those assumptions would prove to be tragically misdirected. Ten days later, seventeen-year-old Draylen Mason, a high school senior who was a beloved bass violinist with the Austin Youth Orchestra, discovered a package outside his family’s door. When he brought it inside, it exploded in the kitchen, killing him, and leaving his mother critically wounded. They, too, were African-American. Later that morning, a few miles away, a seventy-five-year-old Latina, Esperanza Herrera, was critically injured when a package left at her mother’s house detonated when she picked it up.
It was only then, ten days after the first bombing, that the Austin police began warning citizens to take precautions with unknown packages. A serial bomber was at large in Austin, had been at large from the first bomb attack. The bombings were now being considered a possible hate crime. The fact that the victims were black and Latina meant that some people could distance themselves from the bombings if they chose. Until the bomber expanded his reach. Less than a week later, on the other side of Austin, two white men in their twenties were walking in a well-to-do white neighborhood when
a bomb triggered by a trip wire detonated in the street and seriously injured them.
Two days after that, a bomb exploded on a conveyor belt at a FedEx warehouse, and another was discovered at a FedEx before it could detonate. The police now raced at warp speed. Surveillance cameras caught images of the man who had dropped off the last package bombs and recorded the license plate on his car. The police began tracking him by the location of his cellphone. They discovered that the suspect was a twenty-three-year-old unemployed white man named Mark Conditt, who was from a conservative Christian family. The day after the explosion at the FedEx warehouse, a SWAT team closed in on him. Cornered by officers, Conditt detonated a bomb inside his car and blew himself up.
Spectacular police work had brought the bomber down within twenty-four hours, aided in no small part by the suspect’s own change in tactics but also by their taking swift action once the caste blinders were removed. The police chief apologized to black citizens and to the family of the first victim, who had been portrayed as a suspect in his own death. But African-American residents, the scapegoat caste, were left with lingering questions, questions whose answers they lived with every day: Why had the police paid little heed when the first bombs killed or harmed people of color? Why had they disregarded the potential threat? Why did authorities wait ten days to warn the public? Why did they let precious time pass, blaming the first victim for his own death?
“How messed up is it that police can make it seem like the person did it themself?” Fatima Mann, an advocate for poor families in Austin, told The Washington Post. “It’s insulting and offensive and tiring.”
A scapegoat, like the man who was the first to die in Austin, is seen by definition as expendable. People can come to disregard the predicaments facing people deemed beneath them, seeing their misfortunes as having no bearing on their own lives, seeing whatever is happening to them as, say, a black problem, rather than a human problem, unwittingly endangering everyone.
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