Scapegoats Are Chosen, Not Found: How Harm Protects Itself by Blaming the Innocent

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Scapegoats Are Chosen, Not Found: How Harm Protects Itself by Blaming the Innocent

2026 marks 100 years of celebrating Black History month in the US. When people do evil, they rarely call it by its name. Evil is not brave l

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2026 marks 100 years of celebrating Black History month in the US. 

When people do evil, they rarely call it by its name.
Evil is not brave like that. It doesn’t build those muscles.
It hides.
It studies language.
It learns how to sound reasonable while doing harm.

And one of the oldest tricks it learns is scapegoating.

People who do harm become brilliant at blaming Black people, vulnerable people, and specific women.
They become skilled at pointing fingers at good people.
They grow eloquent when silencing truth tellers.
And they are especially practiced at sacrificing children—while insisting it’s for order, tradition, or survival.

This is not accidental.
This is strategy.

Black people are blamed because history trained the world to see Blackness as expendable, disruptive, or deserving of punishment.
Good people are blamed because goodness exposes rot without raising its voice.
Truth tellers are blamed because clarity dissolves lies faster than force ever could.
And children are blamed—or reframed as symbols, tools, or threats—because protecting them would require adults to restrain their own power.

So the harm is renamed.
Cruelty becomes “discipline.”
Control becomes “guidance.”
Erasure becomes “unity.”
Sacrifice becomes “necessary.”

And anyone who says, This is wrong, is told they are the problem.

But here is the quiet truth, steady as breath:

Scapegoating is not confusion.
It is not fear.
It is not misunderstanding.

It is an admission.

It says, “I know what I’m doing—and I need someone else to carry the weight of it.”

Many women know this pattern because our bodies, boundaries, and labor have been used this way for centuries.
We recognize when harm dresses itself up as responsibility.
We feel it when “protection” requires our silence, our submission, or our children’s pain.

And on days when the noise is loud—
when the lies pile up,
when the grief is close to the surface,
when the exhaustion settles deep in the bones—
it matters to remember:

Clarity is not cruelty.
Naming manipulation is not aggression.
Refusing scapegoats is not rebellion—it is preservation.

Protecting Black life, protecting children, protecting truth, protecting women’s boundaries—this does not weaken humanity.
It steadies it.
It keeps it from collapsing under the weight of unacknowledged harm.

You do not need permission to see what is happening.
You do not need approval to draw lines around what must not be sacrificed.
You do not need to carry blame for refusing to participate in lies.

Seeing clearly is an act of care.
Setting boundaries is an act of love.
Protecting life—especially when you are tired—is how humanity survives.

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