Mascots for Systemic Sin
Harold Chandler was one of eight kids who all went to Circle High School in the seventies and eighties. He was the youngest one of the brood. The Chandlers named all of their children in alphabetical order—A through H—with Harold being the last.
They were dirt poor. When we think of dirt poor, this is the family that fits that particular bill of goods. The home was not a place large enough for such an expansive group. As I recall, they used well water so Harold, who was in my class, rarely came to school bathed. They didn't have electricity (I found that out because his older sister, Glynis, invited me to her senior prom my sophomore year).
We treated Harold like shit. Not so much a situation of active bullying but there was no question he was shunned by most kids in school. His oldest brother, Bryan, was a source of legendary thuggery. The stories were that he was a petty thief and was expelled for it his junior year.
So when someone broke into the office after hours and stole money and vandalized the place, Harold was the almost automatic scapegoat for the crime. Not that he had ever given anyone a reason to suspect that he was a thief but that he was from a family of thieves because they were poor (dirt poor) and his oldest brother was a known criminal.
I don't think they ever proved who did the deed—hell, maybe Harold had committed the crime—but in recollection, the only reason he was accused was that he was a stereotypical kid from the wrong side of the tracks.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in 2013. Recently it was uncovered that Khan-Cullors managed to amass millions of dollars and purchased extravagant homes all while professing her belief in Marxism.
After news of Khan-Cullors luxury living hit the press, other members of the Black Lives Matter organization called for an investigation. “If you go around calling yourself a socialist, you have to ask how much of her own personal money is going to charitable causes,” said Hawk Newsome, the head of Black Lives Matter Greater New York City. “It’s really sad because it makes people doubt the validity of the movement and overlook the fact that it’s the people that carry this movement.”
The current conservative spin is exactly that. Because Khan-Cullor seems to be nothing more than your standard race grifter, she becomes a scapegoat for the most progressive civil rights movement in sixty years. For half the country's population, her financial indiscretions paint the entire movement as suspect. She becomes a negative representative of an organization comprised of few who could afford four or five multi-million dollar homes.
The word “scapegoating” originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16.
According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal.
Then the goat was beaten with reeds and thorns, driven out into the desert, and the people went home rejoicing.
Violence towards the innocent victim was apparently quite effective at temporarily relieving the group’s guilt and shame.
The reverse of this ritual is now in play. Instead of the goat taking on the sins of the tribe, the tribe takes upon the sins of the goat.
The incompetent, brutal, and bigoted police officer paints the entire 900,000 American law enforcement community as incompetent, brutal, and bigoted.
The looters using an otherwise peaceful protest as cover to rip-off a Target for a plasma screen gives permission to those disinclined to agree with the protest to dismiss the cause.
The rich and powerful Hollywood rapist convicts all rich and powerful Hollywood types as rapists.
It's a strange twist on the form but it isn't entirely unexpected. We aren't looking at individuals and their behavior today as much as we are why the systems in place allow (or at least refuse to stem) the behavior of the worst among us. Each individual anecdote about someone's lived experience becomes a puzzle piece to reduce whole institutions and practices as evil. As it is the opposite of scapegoating, I'll call it mascoting.
Instead of seeing these mascots as outliers, their mere existence is used to suggest widespread corruption. Each mascot becomes a sole representative of a greater ill.
Adolf Hitler is a mascot for any leader who is racially intolerant and authoritarian. Any leader who seems too ambitious, too angry, too dictatorial inevitably evokes the comparison.
The mascot for #MeToo is, without question, Weinstein. The big, fuzzy, unattractive über-powerful Hollywood mogul who solicited blowjobs, spanked his junk into plants, and raped Annabella Sciorra is the poster boy for all aging white men in charge of the entertainment industry.
AOC is mascot for the Socialists in government. Ibram Kendi is the mascot for the Critical Race Theorists. Tucker Carlson is dressed to the nines as avatar for all that is bad at Fox. Kristen Sinema (AZ) is the picture of fence-riding, anti-minimum wage Democratic obstructionists. Derek Chauvin represents all white cops. George Floyd fronts for all black men.
Ah, if life were so simple and easy to categorize. The fact that this reduction of systems to the behavior of individuals is pockmarked with error, replete with misrepresentation, and in direct conflict with the bizarre nature of human beings doesn't stop us. We do it anyway.
Maybe if we focused on positive mascots? Tom Hanks as mascot for white dudes? John McWhorter as the de-facto black guy stand-in? Eric Talley adumbrates all police officers and Kevin Feige epitomizes the wealthy, powerful Hollywood executive?
Harold Chandler was certainly a part of his family but was nothing like his sister and it was unfair to judge him based upon the actions of a brother he was unlikely to know well combined with the poverty he was born into and had no choice in. He was more complex than that. His poverty and the fact that he was outcast doesn't make him a saint but it doesn't make him the mascot of sinners, either.
As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
