Week 3: Scapegoating
My school started off with some difficult news this week. In our 8am Monday morning meeting we were told that one of our students had been shot. Our minds quickly turned away from the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history to the realities of life in Chicago for many of the young people we work with everyday.
The student is going to be OK. Only one bullet entered and exited the leg. We don’t really know a lot about the details but according to our principal it was a drive-by shooting right around the time of Super Bowl kickoff. Our student was walking down the street with a group of people when a car drove up and started shooting. No one else was injured. According to the police it is not being investigated as a “gang related” shooting because none of the people they interviewed were known gang members, including our student.
Do you have a picture of the student in your head? I used no pronouns to describe the student, but do you picture the student as a male? I probably would. Over 80% of our school is Hispanic, is that what you pictured? Or did you picture one of our few White or Asian students? Regrettably, if I was in your shoes reading this for the first time I probably would have pictured an African American male. Even more regrettable is that I would have been correct. African Americans make up less than 10% of our school’s population but this is the second African American male at our school that has been shot this year. The other student was shot in the leg as well under similar circumstances.
I am not here to talk about the details of these shootings because I don’t know enough about them and I don’t think that is productive. However, I would like to talk about blame. Who is to blame for these shootings? The students? They shouldn’t have been where they were? The Black community? Is this their issue? The police, are they not doing enough? The government, for allowing the proliferation of guns? WHO IS TO BLAME? My answer is not easy but it is simple. Us. We are to blame. All of us. If we don’t accept the blame then we have no chance at the solution. Think about it…do people sit around finding solutions to problems that they don’t think are their own? Nope.
The easy thing to do is to blame someone else. We have been blaming each other for years. However, now Donald Trump is trying to unite us by providing a group to blame. This is called scapegoating. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Instead of accepting responsibility for our country’s own issues we are going to pick a vulnerable group and blame them. It happened this week just as the wounded Intrinsic student was getting out of the hospital. Trump was meeting with police from around the country and and he said “...so much of the problems — you look at Chicago and you look at other places. So many of the problems are caused by gang members, many of whom are not even legally in our country." I wish the reason that two of my students were shot this year was because of one rogue group of people that we could simply deport. However, anyone familiar with Chicago knows that undocumented immigrants have little to nothing to do with our problems. Let’s just look at some simple numbers. There are about 200,000 undocumented immigrants in Chicago and there are about 3 million people (Source). How can one honesty blame our city’s problems on less than 10% of the population. Textbook scapegoating.
Trump Scapegoating
I don’t teach the student who was shot this week but I taught him when he was a 9th grader so I know him. I actually see him and his friends everyday a few times because they have a spot in the hallway where they hang out in between periods and I say “what’s up” as I pass. They weren't there this week and it mattered. There was a hole in my day because there was a hole in his leg.
The spot: This is where the student and his friends hang. Not this week.
Young people can be very inspiring and so a couple of years ago I started collecting quotes from them in the assignments they complete or discussions we have. I take the best ones and I write them in the back of my classroom. There is one up there right now that helped me formulate my writing for this week.
Lexie understands that we have to solve our own problems. She is not trying to place blame on others. Inspired by Lexie I have three questions for us.
- Do we accept blame for the problems in our neighborhoods, cities, countries and world?
- Do we reject scapegoating in all it’s forms?
- What are we going to do about it?
Upstanders do something while bystanders do nothing.
Well said Mike! I'm reading the Diary of Anne Frank, with my ESOL 2 Class. Students in my classes speak 18 different languages, and are at different places on their journey to English mastery, but many of them are very perceptive and are quick to note the parallels between the current political climate in the US, and the scapegoating tactics in 1930's Europe.
ReplyDeleteDom? I think this is you. Agreed, since we know what happened from the scapegoating of the 1930s it's seems extreme to make the comparison but it's a fair warning for us not to head down that same path. Scapegoating starts slow and it's our job not to let it gain momentum. Thanks for the insight!
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