This talk, and the larger project it represents, grow out of a conversation Professor Julia Robinson Moore had with Rene Girard in 2008 about applying his concepts to the systematic study of racial issues. Girard makes only the occasional scattered remark about race or slavery in relation to scapegoating, but he frequently uses the imagery of lynching. Moore decided to look at the practices and rhetoric of real lynchings in American history (primarily of Black men) through the lens of Girard’s concepts of rivalry and scapegoating. She recalls in her 2021 Contagion article on “The Frontiers of Race in Mimetic Theory: American Lynchings and Racial Violence”--upon which this talk is based--how excited Girard was when she told him she was going to take up and develop this project. He said he had always wanted to see this done, even if he himself had not done it at any length. In her article, she calls for this type of analysis to be incorporated and brought fully to fruition within the world of Girardian scholarship and practice.

Professor Julia Robinson Moore will be one of the Plenary speakers at the annual Theology and Peace conference this year from June 10-13 in Chicago, IL. An ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a scholar of African-American Religion at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she will speak in June about the practical applications of Girardian thought she and her husband Ricky have developed in the racial reconciliation work they do between Black and white churches in the city of Charlotte. Their work focuses on trauma, remembrance, and mutual storytelling by the descendants of both those who enslaved and those who endured enslavement, in the process of repatriating forgotten historically Black cemeteries. This healing work, making use of mimetic theory (including Rebecca Adams’s concept of loving mimesis), neuroscience and prayer, has been widely recognized and now serves as a model for other similar projects.