The Scapegoat: A Perspective
Circumstances and emotional breaks often create criminals. A child might grow up in tough poverty and have a parent or two who has tried to instill a certain respect in that child, but the environment conducive to criminality and that child’s tiring of being “the good kid”, can produce a crime. But does that produce a “criminal”?
So, why didn’t Barack Obama become a drug dealing thug? He didn’t grow up in tough poverty. He lived a middle class life and therefore escaped being stereotyped. How does one get stereotyped? By the legal system, human services and their peers. Often times, the family gets in on it also. There are some families who destroy their own like it’s no big deal. Blaming the scapegoat is the way to go, man. If you’re a criminal.
Racists, and I do mean black and white, would say, Barack got breaks because he was raised by white people. Oprah Winfrey wasn’t raised by white people. Snoop Dog, the player wasn’t raised by white people. Condeleeza Rice wasn’t raised by white people. Michelle Obama wasn’t raised by white people. Johnny Cochran wasn’t raised by white people.
How people become criminals often is largely decided by what the general consensus is.
When I was in college, I had a black professor by the name of Timmony. Mr. Timmony was a well educated man who’d grown up in rank poverty. He used to steal tires off of cars and he often committed random acts of vandalism. Mr. Timmony taught Criminal Justice. He was a very interesting man. His life story was full of instances where he could very well have ended up in prison, instead of on his way to teaching at the college level.
Mr. Timmony grew up in an environment rife with the circumstances for him to become a criminal. What saved him was intervention by someone not related to him.
What also saved Mr. Timmony was his intelligence. But I would never make the mistake of saying or believing that very intelligent people don’t become criminals.
How did I manage to not become a criminal? No matter what I was accused of, no matter how often I was used as a scapegoat by certain members of my family and others, I remained true to my own boundaries. Mistakes I have made, but criminal intent was not involved.
In essence, how people become criminals can be a very complex issue and can never be fully based on class, intelligence, upbringing or genetics. But because not all minds are analytical, it becomes easier for some, to dilute the truth with simplicity. In other words, for some, it is much easier to believe that Joe Blow became a criminal because he grew up poor and black. Or Jane Doe became a criminal because she grew up in “white trash”.
Then comes Jeffery Dahmer, O.J. Simpson, Bernie Madoff and many others. But that’s different.
