Observing Omelas: Racial scapegoating in the age of supremacy
In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved.
My therapist recently recommended a wonderful short story by the legendary author Ursula Le Guin, aspects of which it is my pleasure to present here. He told me about this story as we were discussing the nature of scapegoating; what it means, where it comes from, and just how potent and powerful a tool it is when a culture wants to maintain its own pseudo sense of superiority.
The short story begins with a presentation of what seems to be a perfect utopia. A city celebrating the best of what it is in a festival, all colours and riches, all fun and gaiety. Yet, hidden under one of the houses is the flipside, the shadow if we will. Hidden in a small room, sitting in its own defecate is a child, a being, an it who is occasionally observed by the residents of the city, a thing which is watched from a distance as if it were in a zoo. This is the shadow side of the city, the darker side, which it does not want to own or acknowledge. This person is the scapegoat.
The term scapegoating, when observed through a Jungian lens, involves a group, a culture etc, taking what it dislikes of itself and either destroying it, or sending it out into the desert to wander on its own (Perera, 1986). Building upon this then, racial scapegoating is something which black peoples around the world endure in supremacist spaces. From the vilification of migrants before they even come to these shores, to the drive to protect white women from the hordes of non-white men who are supposed to want to take advantage of them, scapegoating, or racial scapegoating is an experience which marks the racialised other as a threat.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not in fact go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two then leave home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates.
In the wonderful television programme, Adolescence, there was the story of a young white boy, a boy very much infected by what is called toxic masculinity, so much so that he murders a young woman for no other reason than she turned him down it seems (Barantini, 2025). The power of this piece was that it presented a pretty accurate picture of masculinity in the current era. Yet, there were still politicians who called the story unrealistic because the protagonist was not black, the programme was not set in an English inner city, and there were no drugs around.
The problem with racially scapegoating a whole group to take responsibility for the ills of a society, not just that it denies there is a problem within the society which is doing the scapegoating. It is actually that the real victims, that of white women in this instance, then become the unheard, unseen, unrecognised real victims of the horrors of systems which whole groups deny even exits.
So, given the sheer number of women who sadly are harmed or die at the hands and knives of perpetrators they often know in domestic violence incidents are white, to make out that knife crime is a black only crime invisibilises a massive community which needs all of our support.
In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.
Racial scapegoating is also something which I have endured on a personal level. I have often written about the abuses of my marriage in these blogs and spoken about the horrific nature of being married to someone who if I did not do what she wanted would punish and denigrate me. One of the things that I have not really spoken about was the silencing and distancing nature of the abuses. Taking on the shadow of a narcisstically wounded woman, being her scapegoat by any other name, also meant that I was not allowed to have a voice of my own. Any speaking up or speaking out was punished, shouted down, or put down. Being told that I was stupid, that I didn’t know what I was talking about, or just plain being ignored, these experiences take a lot out of the scapegoated other.
They can ripple outwards into ones working life, where one is often seen as less than by colleagues, or they can become enacted in spaces where one hopes to feel safest, like around ones own peers (because even within groups, scapegoating can occur as a means of ridding that group of its own shadow).
They wear that person down, draw out all of their energy until there is little to nothing left of them. No will, no cause to continue living, no energy. It is an experience which can often leave one feeling that one might wither and die.
Yet, there is also always something more within. Always something of oneself which wants more, to be more, which wants to survive. Escaping the shackles of racial scapegoating therefore involves ridding oneself of the shadow of those who wont own theirs. It is a standing up, a speaking out, a moving forward with ones own ways of being. It is a returning to ones own sense of being unburdened by the unowned hatred of those who see themselves of perfect yet are anything but.
The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a great deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, ‘eh-haa, eh-haa, and is speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes, it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
(Guin, 2007)
References
Barantini, P. (2025). Adolescence. Netflix. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31806037/
Guin, U. Le. (2007). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. A Companion to Science Fiction, 408–419.
Perera, S. B. (1986). The Scapegoat Complex: toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Inner City Books.