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The present paper intends to discuss the amount to which scapegoating (as understood by René Girard in ‘The Scapegoat’) can be applied to Camus’s novel ‘The Stranger’. While issues arise when we are trying to apply Girard’s definition of scapegoating to the famous novel by Camus, this paper shall try to prove that they are only apparent issues, and that the novel is a perfect illustration of Girard’s theory.

Myths have always been significant parts of the oral traditions of preliterate societies. As the creative repository of indigenous communities, myths express the shared ecosystem of communal ideologies and cultural identities. As vital narratives, myths—whether in their symbolical, literal or allegorical multimodalities—are artistically constructed to serve cosmological and ontological purposes. Given their very universal appeal and representation, myths frequently exhibit cross-cultural correspondences, borrowing motifs, themes, and characters from remote, neighboring or dominant cultures. Intertextuality, the weaving together of diverse cultural elements within myths, suggests that texts are part of a larger network influencing and shaping one another, fostering dialogue and meaning production through interaction. It encompasses practices like ritual performances, quotation, allusion, parody, pastiche, and adaptation, encouraging readers to be active participants in uncovering hidden layers of meaning. Earlier studies on ritual practices for restoring social order and cosmic balance have established the criticality of the scapegoat motif. While engaging intertextuality and social drama as theoretical framework, this study examined layers of cross-cultural parallels of the scapegoat motif in the Yoruba myth of Ayélála and the Judeo-Christian narrative of Jesus. In both myths, the scapegoat emerges as a character or entity burdened with blame or punishment for the sins or troubles of others, often sacrificed to restore communal harmony or absolve guilt.

This article takes a historicizing and structural approach to anti-Chinese racism, a stream of anti-Asian racism, understood as a system of meaning making for power advantages in changing contexts (Hall 2021[1997]). Based on textual data, observations, and interviews and drawing on literature on scapegoat racism and the sacrificial politics of threat and security (Girard 2021[1977]), it advances the following arguments: first, current discussions about anti-Asian racism are often narrowly focused on individual acts of hateful attacks, overlooking the anti- Chinese scapegoating discourse that is at the root of discriminatory and hostile treatment of the Chinese, particularly those with Mainland Chinese background. Second, the anti-Chinese scapegoating discourse has revived the anti-Communist Sinophobia during the Cold War with exaggerated claims about the threat of China and perceives the “Bad Chinese” in the Chinese diaspora as threats to Canada. Third, the anti-Chinese scapegoating discourse not only fuels racist and discriminatory treatment of the Chinese, it also diverts our attention away from serious issues in Canada that do not have much to do with China or the Chinese diaspora.

Remarkably, even those people who profess to follow a religion with beliefs that all people are created in the image of their god experience hate that degrades or eliminates their ability to empathize with the group of people who are being scapegoated. What facilitates their acceptance of such negative stereotypical narratives about entire groups of people? Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, holds the Thomas P. Hackett, MD, Endowed Chair in Psychiatry at MGH, and is the Director of the Dauten Family Center for Bipolar Treatment Innovation and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical Research Education, Division of Clinical Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Much is still unknown, but as the virus causing this disease has spread, so has misinformation and xenophobia. Unfortunately, this has followed a predictable pattern of connecting people to diseases.1 The pandemic has reinvigorated old stereotypes of Chinese people and fears of Chinese food, including the notions that they consume pets. Recently, a US senator stated that the \"Chinese virus\" originated from a \"culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs\" (e.g., https://bit.ly/ 2yBFl0D). His statement reflects an old belief system linking race and disease. For example, Prince A. Morrow noted in 1898, \"China . . . has been the breeding-place and nursery ofpestilential diseases, cholera, plague, as well as leprosy, from time immemorial.\"2(p946) According to this belief, races are biologically distinct and, therefore, prone to specific diseases or apt to manifest them in unique ways. Such logic was used to justify the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies and the beliefin diseases such as \"drapetomania\" (the \"illness\" of slaves escaping their masters).3 Samuel Cartwright and others published articles that espoused a belief that racial minorities were biologically and socially inferior. Left to their own devices, minorities would ultimately \"degenerate\" and die off. A major concern for the White population was that interracial marriage would cause degeneration of their race. These concerns in the United States catalyzed the popularity of eugenics, helped establish antimiscegenation laws, justified slavery, restricted immigration, and encouraged deportation.4Although medicine no longer condones such beliefs, ideas from this overtly racist period are still deeply ingrained. This includes believing that racial minorities feel less pain than Whites, sanctioning drugs such as BiDil that have been approved for only African Americans (and no other races), and using \"racial correction factors.\"5,6 Such practices perpetuate the erroneous belief that racial groups are inherently different.

We study the Black Death pogroms to shed light on the factors determining when a minority group will face persecution. Negative shocks increase the likelihood that minorities are persecuted. But, as shocks become more severe, the persecution probability decreases if there are economic complementarities between majority and minority groups. The effects of shocks on persecutions are thus ambiguous. We compile city-level data on Black Death mortality and Jewish persecutions. At an aggregate level, scapegoating increases the probability of a persecution. However, cities which experienced higher plague mortality were less likely to persecute. Furthermore, for a given mortality shock, persecutions were more likely where people were more inclined to believe conspiracy theories that blamed the Jews for the plague and less likely where Jews played an important economic role.

Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms—mob violence against the Jewish minority—broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions. When economic shocks occurred in times of political stability, rolling over or forgiving debts was an equilibrium outcome because both sides valued their future relationship. In contrast, during political turmoil, debtors could not commit to paying in the future, and consequently, moneylenders and grain traders had to demand immediate (re)payment. This led to ethnic violence, in which the break in the relationship between the majority and Jewish middlemen was the igniting factor.

Sociological theory and historical precedent suggest that pandemics engender scapegoating of outgroups, but fail to specify how the ethnoracial boundaries defining outgroups are drawn. Using a survey experiment that primed half of the respondents (California registered voters) with questions about COVID-19 during April 2020, we ask how the pandemic influenced attitudes toward immigration, diversity and affect toward Asian Americans. In the aggregate, the COVID prime did not affect attitudes toward immigrants, but did reduce support for policies opening a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and reduced appreciation of California’s diversity. Respondents reported rarely feeling anger or fear toward Asian Americans, and rates were unaffected by the COVID prime. A non-experimental comparison between attitudes toward immigrants in September 2019 and April 2020 found a positive change, driven by change among Asian-American and Latino respondents. The results provide selective support for the proposition that pandemics engender xenophobia. At least in April 2020 in California, increased bias crimes against Asian Americans more likely reflected politicians’authorization of scapegoating than broad-based racial antagonism.

In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national constitution is partially responsible for the country’s economic and social inequality. It is thus unsurprising that changing the scope of the country’s social rights was a major focus of the recently failed constitutional reform effort. However, we argue that the long-running claim that Chile’s social problems were due to the limited nature of social rights can be thought of as social rights scapegoating, by which we mean that commentators blamed outcomes on constitutional rights, even though there is little evidence that countries’ socio-economic outcomes are a product of their social rights.