Every year, on the day of atonement, the ancient Hebrews would take a goat, lay upon it all the guilt and misdeeds of the community, and cast it out into the wilderness alone, blameless, and burdened with sins that were not its own. Isabel Wilkerson, in the book Caste, traces how this ritual is ever present and evolving. The scapegoat transformed from a sacrificial animal into a people, designated, generation after generation, to absorb the anxieties, failures, and moral debts of a dominant culture so that everyone else could move forward feeling clean. The scapegoat doesn’t create the community’s sins but simply carries them. And crucially, it gets blamed for the suffering that follows. In Palestinian culture, the goat, or the maeaza, is a living, breathing part of daily life. Foundational to traditional livelihoods across the region, the maeaza provides milk, meat, and wool. It represents adaptability, deep rootedness, and survival against difficult terrain. It is one of the oldest symbols of Palestinian pastoral existence, of a people concretely, intimately connected to their land and to each other across generations. What does it cost to produce the feeling of cleanliness? And what does that mean that so many of us, right now, are paying that cost without knowing it? The mechanism Wilkerson describes requires above all, one thing. It isn’t hatred, although hatred definitely helps. It’s not even ignorance, though ignorance is an undoubtedly useful security blanket. It requires that the community be able, at the end, to feel clean. To disperse from the ritual lighter than they arrived. To return to their lives with the quiet, unexamined sense that the world is, despite everything, more or less as it should be. What the scapegoating ritual offers is a resolution to a question that every hierarchical society must answer, again and again, in order to hold itself together: is the order of things just? The suffering of the designated group, when the ritual is working, answers: yes. The suffering is over there. It belongs to people who are, in some manner the community has agreed, quietly and collectively, different enough to have deserved it. It is a belief that operates below articulation, in the register of feeling. Clean is a feeling, something that cannot be replicated or articulated universally. I’m sure you have seen the devastating video accounts of the genocide occuring in the West Bank, but to truly witness what is happening is not simply to feel sad. It is to have that feeling dissolve and to be left standing in what remains. What remains, for a Western spectator who allows the full weight of Gaza to land, is not comfortable nor will it ever be. It is the recognition that the civilization which produced you, whose values you were raised to inherit, whose institutions you were taught to trust, whose moral vocabulary you use to navigate the world itself is providing the weapons, the diplomatic protection, and the cultivated silence for something its own courts have found plausible grounds to call a genocide. It is an identity crisis of the first order. And most people, when faced with an identity crisis of the first order, look away. This is understandable. The looking away is not always passive. At this moment, it has been structured. The algorithmic suppression of Palestinian voices on media platforms at precisely the moments when documentation was most urgent. The professional and social penalties for naming, plainly, what is being seen. The reclassification of grief as propaganda, of a child’s name spoken aloud as some kind of threat. These are the reproduction, in modern institutional form, of an ancient communal agreement: we do not follow the goat into the wilderness. In the original ritual, the wilderness was the place where the suffering went so the community would not have to see it. What our platforms and our newsrooms have been quietly building for two years now is a wilderness of a different kind, a perceptual wilderness with a purposeful managed distance. It has a set of conditions under which a person can know, in some general abstract sense, what is happening, and still, at the end of the day, feel clean. The cost of producing that feeling is borne, as it has always been, by the people in the wilderness. But there is also another less visible cost paid by everyone who accepts the arrangement. It is the cost of what you must close in yourself to sustain it. The questions you learn not to ask. The images you learn to scroll past. The names you allow to remain nameless. This is not nothing. This is, in fact, everything; what you close in yourself in order to look away is precisely the capacity that would allow you to look clearly at anything at all. The maeaza, in Palestinian pastoral tradition, is known for something the original ritual’s architects did not anticipate: it comes back. It knows the terrain. It survives the difficult land. It finds water where other animals cannot. It returns. James Baldwin wrote in 1979 that the Palestinians had been paying for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. He wrote it as though it were already too long. It has now been more than seventy years and over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. This moment requires the willingness to feel what feeling clean has been costing us, and to decide whether we are willing to keep paying it, regardless of the security and inherent comfort it provides. Not for the sake of politics, but because the part of yourself you close to avoid feeling is not a part you get back easily. The world you will be left with, when the wilderness has swallowed everything it was asked to swallow, will be one you built by looking away. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole
By Meena Ford
After watching news coverage around Chikei Rick Chow’s acquittal from murder charges, after wrongfully shooting 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, I am disheartened by the antonym within Parole Board malpractice. In films that depict the plight of black males in America within our Criminal Justice System, like The Kalief Browder Story and When They See Us, how are there still consistent failures within the correctional facility release process, that only result in wrongful imprisonment and unjust release. Korey Wise, from the exonerated five, was repeatedly denied parole because he maintained his innocence. In the New York state prison system, inmates are generally expected to admit guilt and show remorse in front of the parole board to be granted early release. A Mandatory Remorse statement is required by inmates to acknowledge responsibility for their actions and participate in rehabilitation programs while admitting guilt. Wise adamantly refused to do this. The board reported inconsistencies in statements during his parole hearings, he struggled to walk the line between stating his innocence and showing remorse for simply being at the scene. His rambling answers ultimately hurt his chances. The aftermath of not accepting a plea deal or admit to the crime, Wise ultimately served nearly 13 years in adult prison. After losing multiple hearings and repeatedly facing denial because he wouldn’t admit guilt, Wise stopped attending his parole hearings entirely. The constitution promotes Habeas Corpus as a right to a judge’s review and prohibits indefinite imprisonment. The constitution requires a trial to declare guilt and establish punishment. The Bill of Rights: Fifth Amendment requires a right to due process and protection against self-incrimination.The Sixth Amendment requires a right to a speedy, public, and fair trial “to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor”. The Eighth Amendment requires the right to protection against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments… (and generations of codifications by all levels of the judicial branch expand on these inalienable rights. If all of this is true, then how can a privatized system – which is only an extension of our government – legally be allowed to review if an inmate can be released? FACT: In order to proceed with release, Parole boards heavily favor inmates who take responsibility for their crimes. Owning up to the offense demonstrates that the individual understands the magnitude of their actions and “supposed lack of insight or remorse, or failure to take responsibility for the commitment offense, or disciplinary violations – or any combination of these as evidence of present dangerousness” (Hammond, 2016). [there are inconsistent statutes across the nation, so this was quoted from a google search] Texas is an example of a median, harsh punishment, red state: Eligibility Requirements: Time Served: Most inmates are eligible for parole after serving 1/4th of their sentence, Parole Guidelines Score: The Board uses a matrix that merges ‘Risk Assessment’ (likelihood of reoffending) and ‘Offense Severity’. The Parole Board Procedures: Automatic Review: The review process begins automatically 6 months before an inmate’s initial eligibility date (or 4 months before subsequent reviews), Voting Panels: Files are reviewed by a 3-member panel (usually 1 board member and 2 parole commissioners), Victim Involvement: Victims have the right to request interviews with the lead panel voter and can submit confidential protest letters. Despite inconsistencies, most prisons require inmates to provide a.) A sworn statement of guilt admitting to the crime to establish conviction and secure penalties, frequently resulting in a reduced sentence or b.) A remorse statement (allocution): it is unsworn and occurs post-conviction; it serves to humanize the defendant and request leniency, but it does not determine guilt. There are often further processes without the inmate nor their attorney present. Again, Article I and Article III of the constitution in addition to the explicit codification in the Bill of Rights establish parole boards are not only illegal, but proof of generationally systemic complex unconstitutional behaviors. How then, when up for parole as ruled by a judge, not limiting a jury’s verdict of guilt, attorneys specialized-laymen arguments backed by the evidence, does a “board” get the deciding vote? If our judicial branch distributes authority to judges, then only a judge can rule guilt and establish appropriate punishment. If a judge’s ruling -the final confirmation of all criminal court trial proceedings- establishes a minimum time required of an inmate until ‘Sentence Termination Release’, then why don’t we argue to reform components of government sanctioned institutions that are in contempt of court through the ability to challenge an inmate’s fate? What I’m trying to argue is that an inmate is only required to respond to a judge’s authority. Yes, our government’s actions are based upon actions of the court that are handed down to bureaus — however, allowing this to impede on an American’s right to parole, set by a constitutional authority, is illegal. No matter how a parole board’s reviews process around court ruling, a high authority declared termination of sentence at a minimum and maximum. Therefore, a board has no constitutional authority to deny an inmate release. The requirement for all actions in deciding the fate of an inmate must abide by the rights under the constitution, therefore Bill of Rights, and all relevant Statutory Laws. If there must be a review or Parole Trial, it must be reviewed by a jury of their peers, original attorneys (in the event that this is appealed some type of designated survivor order), and without appeal, a randomly assigned impartial judge. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole. BibliographyHammond, D. (2019, October 5). CDCR parole suitability factors. Criminal Defense Heroes P.C. California DUI Defense. https://www.donhammondlaw.com/blog/post-conviction-relief-cdcr-parole-suitability-article/
By Raven W. M.
The murder of Henry Nowak, accompanied by the heinous response of the police officers at the scene, has received little attention from media outlets and left-wing activists in the past week, despite being a horrific instance of actual police brutality. Nowak, an 18 year old Polish man living in the United Kingdom, was brutally stabbed with a dagger by an older Sikh Indian man in Southampton on December 3rd, 2025. The attacker’s brother then called the police to falsely report Nowak had racially abused him, and when the police showed up, they were quick to take the side of the perpetrator. Even when Nowak showed them his wounds, the police refused to believe that he had been stabbed and kept him handcuffed; his death occurred moments later. The details of the stabber’s sentencing was completed and made public in May, but the response from the British government has been notably mild in comparison to its reaction to the murder of George Floyd. This is despite the fact that Floyd’s murder occurred thousands of miles away in Minnesota and he had multiple criminal convictions before May 2020, in contrast to Nowak, who lived a life of only good behavior. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has insisted that Nowak’s murder should not be exploited for political gain, while six years ago, weaponized Floyd’s murder in order to villanize Trump and American conservatives. Starmer’s Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, also fired back at Vice President J.D. Vance’s assertion that Nowak’s murder should be linked to mass migration. Elites in academia constantly assert that there is widespread white privilege and systemic racism against non-whites in Western countries, but Nowak’s murder proves otherwise. This is nowhere close to the first time that the United Kingdom has been more concerned about being labelled as racist for tackling non-White criminals than protecting its innocent civilians, nor is it the last. The murderer’s Indian family members, such as his father and aforementioned brother, have been arrested for illegal possession of a wide range of weapons, and his mother is currently awaiting sentencing for providing the knife used to slaughter Nowak. Much of the other crime amongst immigrant communities in the United Kingdom have also been horrifically ignored or covered up for years. The Pakistani grooming gangs, that caused the mass rape of many young British women in the 21st century have been enabled by the Labour Party’s Mayor Andy Burnham and other councils. Analyses repeatedly show that migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia are astronomically more likely to commit violent crimes than native Brits, yet the British government refuses to halt immigration from those countries. And given the hordes of illegal migrants, mainly young and fighting-aged men, flooding into Britain each week from across the English channel with the goal of claiming asylum, these crises will only get worse. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole
By Edward Kim
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