Scapegoats, Prejudice,
and Respect

A Sermon by
Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered Sunday, March 22, 1998

At The First Parish in Bedford

Prejudice is a pernicious, horrible and very human thing, and the Holocaust that we remember in those haunting childrens’ songs is history’s prime example. Have any of you been to the new Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.? I have not and want to, but did you notice in last week’s news that its director has been forced to resign? Yasser Arafat wanted to visit, and the director refused, and then the museum directors insisted that he allow Arafat to come, and the director invited him, but by then Arafat said forget it; and so eventually the director of the world’s most important museum about prejudice was forced to resign, accused of prejudice. Surely the Holocaust’s trauma persists.

Elie Wiesel says the Holocaust’s horror cannot be described: it is beyond words. In an interview I heard him use the word "ineffable" — not really believable; it cannot be taken in. In another interview I heard a woman who survived the death camps say, "In the beginning after the holocaust, we didn’t talk about it. Maybe that was wrong," she said. "But how can you talk about something that you didn’t even believe yourself even though you went through it?"

Two-thirds of the pre-World War II European Jews were killed. When in January I visited a small Transylvanian village called Cehetfalva, their minister casually said to me as we passed by some shops, "You know, all these shops used to be owned by Jews." There are no Jews in Cehetfalva today.

Also in today’s newspaper there is Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, and so many others.

At an individual level — for each of us — there’s probably nothing more humiliating, frustrating, and disfiguring than to be the subject of prejudice — not to be seen for who we are, but to be put in a box, dismissed, snubbed, overlooked, disregarded, pre-judged, and even sometimes persecuted because of: appearance, the color of our skin, our language, the nation or religion or political party to which we belong, or because of our age, our occupation, our opinions, our level of wealth, a disability, or simply because we’re a minority, not like others, not part of the larger group.

Prejudice, as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, destroys both victim and perpetrator. What causes it, and why is it so difficult to eliminate?

I’m going to talk about root causes this morning, but first I must distinguish between the causes and the occasions. Sometimes, for example, I’ve heard that religion is the cause of discrimination, or politics, or nationality. And "if we could only eliminate religious groups, or political groups, or get rid of all the national boundaries and flags, we’d solve the problem."

I don’t think so. We might get rid of that particular expression of prejudice, but prejudice is a cast of mind and soul — and any number of things can trigger it. There are infinite occasions for prejudice: ethnic difference, racial difference, religious difference, national difference, political difference, ideological difference, class difference, sex difference, sexual orientation or affectional difference, difference in appearance or ability, difference in age...wasn’t it Jonathan Swift who imagined a war between those who sliced their cooked eggs on the big end and those who sliced their cooked eggs on the little end. And Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book: those who buttered their bread differently went to war. Infinite are the occasions that can trigger the prejudiced mind and soul.

So, if not these things, what are the causes of prejudice?

I imagine prejudice to be like a tree where the underground roots are the causes of prejudice — the biological and psychological factors — that are mostly invisible but nourish the whole tree.

The trunk is all the social, cultural, economic, political, historical, geographical, and personal family factors which determine the shape of the tree. And the branches represent the occasions of prejudice; they bear the fruit of prejudice: racism, homophobia, sexism, etc., etc.

So I want to talk about the roots, and I can think of five. And please note that these roots are natural and necessary parts of every human being. Prejudice, let’s say, is the downside or the risk of the inherent possibility that is contained in these natural and necessary components.

Five roots of prejudice:

First, the development of one’s personal identity requires the formation of a shadow self. Maybe you already know the concept of a shadow; it can also be called ego and alter-ego. And, no doubt, if there is a tap-root to prejudice, then this is it: the formation of a shadow in our personality.

In a nutshell, it works like this: In the development of an ego, our natural wholeness is divided into pairs of opposites. We say "yes" to one thing and "no" to another. We divide our world into good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral, this and that, us and them, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, God and the Devil.

Human beings don’t just live by instinct or urge; we shape, we form, we civilize, we cultivate, we domesticate, we enlighten. And whenever we focus light on one thing, what happens? A shadow is created. The more we strive to be good, pure, clean, diligent, disciplined, perfect; the stronger grows the unconscious urge to be bad, impure, dirty, sloppy, carefree, and wild.

If we repress and deny, and push down our shadow-self, we can be left with a hollow shell of a personality — which is why it’s essential that we be allowed to safely connect with emotions and feelings and have some knowledge of our potential and desires and drives — even if we choose not to act on them — because wholeness is genuine and feels right. We’re offended by a goody two-shoes not because they’re a goody two shoes, but because they’re phony.

There’s a book by Alice Miller, titled For Your Own Good (as in "I’m only doing this for your own good") in which she does a study of Adolf Hitler, looks at him as he was when he was a child — a kid like any other kid, not an evil monster from the womb, but a kid whose natural self was abused and split off.

What happens to the side of us, the shadow side, that we reject in our self-development? It doesn’t simply evaporate, but what happens is that it accumulates, it builds, it disturbs in dreams, and if it’s not acknowledged or dealt with, it can be displaced and projected outward.

It can take the form of a prejudice, sometimes a fierce prejudice and hatred. It’s no surprise, among individuals or nations, that some of the most intense prejudices are perpetuated by people who are the mirror image of one another: Israelis and Palestinians are among the first to come to mind. No one can push my buttons more effectively than someone who reminds me of my own shadow self. I consciously try to be a fairly even-tempered resilient common-touch sort of person. But conflicts that touch me deeply bring out a temperamental, moody, testy, haughty monster. My pet monster.

And when you add one and one and one and one to get a group, you have a potent force which can erupt in destructive and disfiguring ways in our communities and world.

Some people become the ones on whom the shadow falls, our designated shadow-carriers — the scapegoat, the black sheep — a term which itself carries a particular prejudice.

Think about all the ways that groups need an enemy, and will create one when there is none. Making Russia or Iraq into the evil empire — which, while in part true — also preserved the American self-image of making the world safe for democracy, and kept us from looking at the ways in which our actions have sometimes been directly contrary to our espoused beliefs.

Racist stereotypes have foisted on people of color the innermost angst of white folks. Gentiles made Jews the scapegoats. And most often the cast-off projections have to do with the most intimate things: sexuality, cleanliness, food habits. Last Saturday there was an article in the New York Times about Jews, Christians, and pigs. Pigs became symbolic of Jews — Jews didn’t eat them, so Christians did — to prove they weren’t Jews. Someone has written a book researching the history of breeding pigs, feeding them, circumcising them, detecting disease in them, and slaughtering them — and when I was in Transylvania there was the January disnooles, pig-killing, where there’s a whole ritual of knifing the pig between the shoulder blades, lining the plum brandy glasses up along its spine, and celebrating the whole process. I was shown proud photographs of families surrounding the carcass...and it’s not too far a stretch to say that its origins — like that of eating ham at Easter — is a not-so-subtle way of saying, Hey, we’re not Jewish!" Sorry to ruin your appetite.

So the capacity to split apart our natural wholeness and to develop and to cast off our shadow is what I call the tap-root of prejudice.

We need and love community — it’s natural to want to belong and community is necessary to our very survival and safety. Thus we create an in-group — our community. And those outside the in-group are out-groups. Now the formation of an in-group doesn’t necessarily imply hatred of an out-group. Just because one loves and is attached to one’s family, community, religion, ethnic heritage, or country doesn’t mean one despises other such groups. It may even be that to the extent one is secure and loves one’s in-group, one can feel empathy for other such groups.

Nevertheless, our need to belong to a group provides for the possibility of prejudice against other groups.

I came across this story in another church newsletter recently:

Third: The love of the known and the fear of the strange. Until the age of six months, a newborn baby will usually be happy in most anyone’s arms — something confirmed for me last week when I had the pleasure of visiting one of the new babies in our congregation. After six months, a child will cry when someone unknown, no matter how friendly, picks the child up. The child may quickly adjust if there’s no danger, but the first instinct is to withdraw and be afraid.

And this fear of the strange or unknown continues to one or another degree throughout life. The strange, the different, the new, the alien, the odd, the unusual, the weird is always to some degree unsettling — a factor that has limited the growth of Unitarian Universalist churches. It’s natural and a normal protective device.

But it too is a root of the possibility of prejudice, for our prejudice falls on the stranger within our midst: the recent arrival, the foreigner, the minority, the one of different color, or different appearance, or different religion, or different language, or different thinking. It falls upon the non-conformist, the oddball, the lefty, the gay, the lesbian, the differently-abled, the scarred, the stutterer, the unclean, the diseased, the gypsy, anyone different or strange. And it doesn’t take much to be different or strange.

Sam Keen, in his book Faces of Enemy, writes: "Fighting between unlike ethnic groups is most likely to invoke the image of the barbarian and to be more ferocious than between those who share some cultural similarity. A majority of American soldiers during WW II who had seen Japanese prisoners felt all the more like killing them; whereas more than half of those who had encountered German prisoners said, "It’s too bad we have to be fighting them, they are men just like us."

Fourth: The need to categorize, the tendency to stereotype. We have to put things into categories; sometimes we must make quick judgments — we can’t take the time to evaluate and judge every situation on its merits or every person by his or her qualities and character.

But this need to generalize can also lead to over-generalizing, stereotyping, pre-judging. And this is a root that nourishes prejudice. Laziness or busyness or inertia or complacency or being self-satisfied can cause us to be content with categories and not go deeper, or go beyond first impressions.

Sometimes we do what is called "re-fencing." That is — we can make an exception to our general rule, open the fence briefly as in, "Some of my best friends are..." and then quickly close the fence and keep the field as it was and our general prejudice intact. There is the story of the Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like." Re-fencing.

Fifth and last: the desire for unity/the loss of the individual. A final root of prejudice I’ll call the desire for unity. I’m thinking here of the marvelous experience of wholeness and unity, the feeling of being one. It’s something — as a Unitarian Universalist — I love to talk about from this pulpit. The danger is that our desire for unity can do two things: it can make us uncomfortable with healthy conflict; it can also wipe out the one who is out of step.

There is something very, very compelling about the experience and the feeling of being caught up with others in the same activity or same state of being. Marching together, moving arms and legs in unison. Playing as a team. Singing together, or responding together in the same way. Being of one heart and one soul and one strength.

This is what good ritual does — it brings people together, it binds them together into a blessed state of oneness.

I’m thinking of an example during WW II when a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp happened to be in a situation where he observed one of the very impressive Nazi ceremonies. The effect of the ceremony was so powerful that this individual reported he had all he could do to keep his arm from coming up in a Nazi salute!

The desire for unity can lead a group to rely on consensus for decision-making. Consensus can be a very good and very slow method of reaching decisions; very good because it waits until everyone is aboard. Consensus can also empower the squeakiest wheel. Families that run on consensus do whatever the most dysfunctional member wants.

As a species and as individuals we desire unity and oneness and need ritual in our lives. But these beautiful things can also sway us, carry us away, and put us in a group-mind that can run over others, run over the one who is out of step. The mystical dimension can wipe out the ethical dimension. And, thus, it is another root of the possibility of prejudice.

So these are the five roots of the possibility of prejudice: 1) the development of personal identity/formation of a shadow; 2) the love of community/division into in-groups and out-groups; 3) the love of the known/the fear of the strange; 4) our need to categorize/our tendency to stereotype; and 5) our desire for unity/our loss of the individual. Now whether or not prejudice will manifest itself, and how, depends on all the other conditions in our lives: all the social and cultural conditions. The way, for example, a child is raised, whether in an atmosphere of freedom and respect for its own integrity and value.

The most important inner work we as individuals can do is to try to become a little more aware of our own shadow, and to be aware of the downside of our love for community, our desire to conform and be liked, our love of the known and the familiar, our tendency to categorize, and our desire for unity and oneness.

When we are more aware of our inner self and when we see others more clearly, the result is respectfulness — for self and others. That’s the value I hope to promote in each of us, in this First Parish community, and in our larger world. Knowing ourselves well enough that we see things as they are, without prejudice; neither accepting others’ projections upon ourselves nor projecting our own anxieties upon others.

We’re dealing with biological/psychological realities here; and I’m not saying that prejudice is inevitable, but we must know that the possibility of it is inevitably built-in to our species and built-in to us as individuals. We can’t wish or legislate it away. The germ of prejudice is a germ we all carry. None of us is free from it; nor can we be permanently inoculated against it.

I think I am safe in saying that the question is not whether or not we have prejudice, but to what degree do we have it, and to what extent are we aware of it. By looking to the roots of prejudice, the roots of our own prejudice, we can begin to do our little bit in lessening the effects of its horror in our lives and encouraging a little more respectfulness, for ourselves, for our community, and for our world.