Reasons We Scapegoat Others During Disease on NPR’s Goats and Soda

The scapegoating of immigrants and others that has worsened the pain of the pandemic has a long history.  NPR’s Goats and Soda weaves together several scholarly theories to descrbe and explain the history of scapegoating during public health outbreaks. They point out that Jews were blamed when Christian mobs during the Bubonic plague and that immigrants ot the US from Ireland, Italy, and China have been variously faulted for polio, cholera and other diseases. 

First comes the disease.

Then the scapegoating. 

This bias occurs around the world.

And it’s not anything new.

Many  examples come from Debora MacKenzie, author of the new book Covid-19: The Pandemic That Should Never Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One.  Tahseen Shams, assistant professor of sociology at University of Toronto and author of Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World provides other examples specifically conjuring immigrants include Haitian immigrants blamed for AIDS, African immigrants blamed for Ebola, and Chinese immigrants blamed for SARS and now COVID-19.

NPR turns to Mark Schaller, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, for the evolutionary impulse behind othering; Schaller says that aversion to unfamiliar outsiders is an instinctual, unconscious response to avoid the risk of infection, and that it forms part of the behavioral immune system — a kind of psychological parallel to the physical immune system.

It’s a fascinating read or listen.

MHC