White Scapegoats

Daniel Penny, Sarah Comrie, and the return of human sacrifice.

Illustration by Contra (Sources: Olha Saiuk via Canva)

America is not becoming more secular. Religious rituals, complete with human sacrifice, are all around us. One such ceremony can be observed whenever whites have encounters with aggressors who are black.

It goes like this: when a white person attempts to protect themselves or others from a black offender, there ensues a ritualistic public shaming of the former. It happens before all the facts are known and even when there is enough evidence to determine the white person was in the right. It is an extremely destructive phenomenon guaranteed to hasten our national unraveling by sowing discord. But it is important to consider it for what it is: a ferociously religious impulse in a society convinced of its secularity.

That is why if you attempt to understand this increasingly everyday occurrence using reason, it does not make sense. And it shouldn’t because it is the old religious desire to appease angry deities in secular garb. James Burnham reminds us that during the French Revolution, the Jacobins announced “the reign of Virtue and Reason,” and crowned the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. There is nothing new under the sun.