Broken Scapegoats

Late thoughts on the George Floyd/Derek Chauvin thing.

NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with René Girard’s insights into the scapegoat mechanism, I'll probably be talking right past you. For a very brief introduction, see here. If you have a long drive ahead of you, the CBC did a series on Girard that is well-received by scholars. I've linked to the mp3 files below: 

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

(If I were you, I'd download them, as the internet isn't nearly as forever as some claim it to be.)

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What does the scapegoat mechanism have to do with George Floyd and Derick Chauvin? While examples of the scapegoat mechanism abound, in this case I see a particularly illustrative example of how this mechanism, which is already very wrong in a moral sense, can go wrong further.

Insistences that Floyd was a scapegoat for white supremacy or Chauvin a scapegoat for racial grievances are both are misapplications of the term. A scapegoat is one (or a small group) around whom competing factions join together and set upon as responsible for all their collective sins. The ganging up on and subsequent destruction of the scapegoat is a unifying experience. The encounter between Floyd and Chauvin only exacerbated existing divisions, largely due to folks getting the scapegoat mechanism all messed up. Floyd was deified without ever having been demonized. Chauvin was demonized with no prospect of deification.

There can be little debate over whether a man who was buried in a golden casket and whose death site has become a shrine and destination of religious pilgrimage has been deified. This attaches to the scapegoat mechanism insofar as victims of scapegoating, according to Girard, become deified. The peace-bringing catharsis of the collective murder ascends them to godhood. The trouble is, Floyd was never a scapegoat.

The main reason Floyd was not a scapegoat is because no one knew him. His famous death was preceded, not by infamy, but by obscurity. Yes, a scapegoat by definition can only be perceived after the fact, but they must also by definition be vilified beforehand. The collective sins of the nation could not be cast upon Floyd and he could not be held responsible for them for the simple fact that nobody had ever heard of him. The rally around the dead martyr is only cathartic if it gets its start in a mob targeting the live miscreant. 

Retroactive vilification simply doesn't work to create a scapegoat. After-the-fact condemnation of a saint is deconstruction. Naturally, devotees to the saint—no matter how newly minted—rush to defend their patron. The factions unsurprisingly parted along the same lines as any grappling with race issues in 21st c. America.

The other reason Floyd cannot be a scapegoat, he was not collectively murdered. There is an argument that Floyd wasn't killed by one cop, but by a system of white supremacy that everyone is complicit it. But that argument doesn't work, because no one identifies as part such a system; not those who oppose it, not those who deny its existence, and certainly not the tiny fringe of white identitarians who feel disenfranchised by an increasingly multicultural status quo. A system with no adherents has no one to give it up. 

Something that did not count against Floyd becoming a scapegoat—but it will nonetheless help us understand why there are no scapegoats from this episode—is that Floyd did seem guilty of the thing of which he was accused, passing counterfeit bills. There is truth to the argument that Floyd does not have to be a "perfect victim." However, a scapegoat is not merely one who receives excessive punishment for a crime he did commit. The crucial thing is that the scapegoat is accused of crimes he did not commit and found guilty. Even if one takes the cynical view that Chauvin's actions constitute a summary execution of Floyd for the "crime" of being black, one cannot make that argument without allowing that Floyd fit the "crime" for which was punished, no matter how unjustly. 

The encounter between Floyd and Chauvin never could have generated a lasting moment of "What have we done?" It immediately degenerated into "What has he done?" "He" refers to both Floyd and Chauvin, because "he" always belongs to "them."

I've already noted the backdrop for this episode, race issues in 21st c. America. It's this larger crisis that both sides subconsciously hope can be resolved by casting an appropriate scapegoat. Unfortunately, what occurred was the creation of a smaller crisis in search of its own scapegoat. If Floyd represented a false hope, then Chauvin was the man most responsible for giving people false hope, since it was his hand—or knee, rather—that effected Floyd's ascension. 

Chauvin received the vilification that Floyd did not; he was made the avatar of a white supremacist system that over-polices and disproportionately kills black men. However, there remains the matter that nobody identifies with such a system. As ethereal as this system is, there was never any chance that Chauvin's conviction would snap people from the trance. Public figures no less prominent than the President locked-in their approval of a guilty verdict before it was even deliberated. And upon its announcement, the cries of "not enough" and "more work to do" rang out almost instantly. 

To be sure, Chauvin was found guilty of three unintentional crimes, so one can hardly say he was accused of more than he himself committed to. Then again, the language around the supposed white supremacist system that all are allegedly complicit in, even if they won't admit it, increasingly suggests that said system acts in precisely such a way as Chauvin is convicted of: unintentional harm and witless neglect. Far from being a scapegoat, Chauvin is just as quickly dismissed as merely a symptom of the problem he was only just the face of.

Scapegoating is, of course, terrible. It is no lasting solution to any problem.