Contagions of hate

Blame is one of mankind’s oldest defenses. You can see this readily from the presence of blame in so many of the stories involving the origin of things. Even in the Garden of Eden, blame is there, passed from the man, to the woman, to the snake. It’s always been exceedingly difficult for people to grasp that there are misfortunes that occur without the intervention of a malevolent hand, human or inhuman.

Surrounded by so many inexplicable dangers – from the weather and disease to earthquakes and eclipses – many of our ancestors believed these were punishments from the gods. And since the gods saw everything, surely that meant that one of those amongst us must have done something that displeased them. Surely one amongst us must be the one to bear the blame… and perhaps, if we punish them, the rest of us will be spared.

And for some, it was a simple leap from there to this: that as long as someone is punished, the rest of us will be spared.

The word “scapegoat” comes from a translation of a term used in the Jewish ceremony of Yom Kippur, also known as the “Day of Atonement.” During the ceremony as described in the book of Leviticus, one of two sacrificial goats is saddled with all the sins and transgressions of the people of Israel, red tassels tied to its horns, then abandoned in the wilderness. Using the scapegoat allows the community to symbolically pass on and expel their sins and their guilt – an unrelated creature is punished so that the community will not have to be.

In other cultures, these scapegoats were not goats at all, but humans – usually the marginalized and already outcast who made convenient and expedient sacrificial targets. In some cases, these human scapegoats were merely made into pariahs… but for those like the pharmakos in ancient Greece, the ritual cleansing came at the cost of the physical torment and, at times, their lives.

On one level, the impression is that human society has moved past the ancient practice. After all, most criminal justice systems link punishment and penalty to at least some semblance of actual individual responsibility. You cannot come before a judge, admit your guilt and send someone else to prison for your crimes.

Yet any but the most privileged amongst us will know that impression is a lie. Human society has rarely been able to rise above the need to blame unrelated groups for societal ills or natural disasters. For those in power, scapegoats provide an easy distraction, a way to focus the anger of the crowd away from the fact that the powerful have failed or refused to deploy that power for the benefit of the many. For those that feel helpless in the face of misfortune, finding someone to blame gives them a sense of control, that echo of those ancient beliefs: Surely if someone is punished, things will get better for me and mine.

But the world does not work that way. No virgin sacrifice has ever kept a volcano from erupting. No witch burned at the stake has ever opened the gates of heaven. And no amount of hatred of Asians will make COVID-19 disappear.

When the news reports began about the disease spreading in Wuhan, many of us all knew that racism against Asians would redouble. Unfortunately, we were right: the pandemic has caused a massive increase in racism and xenophobia against many people of Chinese descent, people of East Asian descent, people of South Asian descent and people from the Pacific Islands.

Much of the news involving hate incidents comes from the United States. Data from the group Stop AAPI Hate revealed that over 6,000 hate incidents against Asians and Pacific Islanders were reported to them since the beginning of the pandemic, the most horrific of which was the mass shooting in Atlanta that resulted in the death of eight people, including six Asian women. A recent survey revealed that over 2 million Asian American adults had experienced anti-Asian hate since the onset of COVID-19. And for every person that has experienced it and admitted it, you can be sure there are more that have blocked it out or failed to process the hate as being racially motivated.

But the problem isn’t limited to America – anti-Asian hatred is on the rise in nations such as France, Brazil, Australia, Italy, Russia and several nations in Africa. Neither have Asians been any better at their treatment of their fellows – Human Rights Watch has reported COVID-19 related discrimination against Chinese people in South Korea, Japan and Indonesia. The same goes for here at home as well, where I have Filipino-Chinese friends whose families have experienced discrimination because of COVID-19.

It’s even easier to see the true nature of scapegoating when we see how often it’s applied to the most vulnerable in society. In India, fear of COVID has been used to incite more hatred of the Muslim minority. Migrant workers and their families, particularly affected by mobility restrictions and quarantines, have also suffered gross discrimination. In China, the discrimination was flipped against vulnerable African workers as reported by HRW.

In data covering the spike of hate incidents in America, the majority involved women, always a vulnerable group, and many of the most high-profile violence involved attacks on the elderly, those whose apparent physical weakness makes them attractive targets for hate-fueled assaults (something to remember today, on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day).

The pandemic has caused untold amounts of suffering. COVID-19 remains something that should be feared. But our suffering and our fear cannot justify irrational hatred of those who are different, of those who are other than ourselves. This is more important now than even during the early stages of the pandemic. The quarantines that reduced our exposure to the virus also reduced our exposure to discrimination… and when one ends, so too will the other. As governments around the world move to vaccinate their populations, they must exert efforts to immunize minds and hearts as well. Otherwise, we will be trading one contagion for another – and this one is more insidious, more sinister and not subject to any medical vaccine.

A year and onwards we are so fastidious with the way we cleanse our hands, and rightly so. But it is high time we apply that same rigor to the cleansing of our hearts.