But Caucasian doesn’t signify a place or an actual origin—not only is the term inaccurate, it is directly descended from racist eugenics. To avoid using it, as I have learned to, is to understand where words and people actually come from.

The Satanic panic proved particularly American—a pseudospiritual crisis masking a sexist and classist one. By the end Beck’s assertion that the real culprit was a fear of women’s working outside the home—when in fact child sexual abuse mostly occurs at home—becomes hard to deny. But such mass panics frequently center on sex and sex roles: as a

In dissecting the various hysterias of the 1990s, from MPD to SRA, Elaine Showalter sees a recurrent millennialism: “Like the witch-hunts of the 1690s, the mesmerism craze of the 1790s, or the hypnotic cures of the 1890s, the hysterical syndromes of the 1990s clearly speak to the hidden needs and fears of a culture. We are still dealing with the

This intertwining of lies and hoaxing and “evidence” is the harm the hoax has wrought—it is ultimately a problem wherein, as Grabowski wrote once, “For myself, the Holocaust is about individual suffering.”22 Such a view is not just solipsistic, but marks an epidemic of a self that isn’t a self. Yet those who championed recovered memory and Satanic

In the Satanic panic of the 1980s, no case looms larger than that of the McMartin Preschool, a California day care center where accusations by one disgruntled (and unstable) parent ballooned into outrageous stories of children being forced to witness infanticide, ritual murders, cannibalism, and more. In his tremendous We Believe the Children,

Good nonfiction reveals what happened; fiction what might have: the hoax instead undermines both art and the self, oddly reducing each to autobiography even as it performs its fakery. It often does this through the exotic other, or a dark double, all of which only reinforces the self as superior to all others.

Sex or its deformation, rape, was the accusation; race the unavoidable fact; lynching too often the result. Together they added up to the “folk pornography”5 often carried in local newspapers, in which outrageous fictions often held violent sway over facts, much less the truth, in what must be the deadliest kind of hoax.

Extensions of these regressive views didn’t simply inform or express prejudices but led quite directly to eugenics, later sterilization efforts, and genocides, not to mention the Nazi views of “degenerate art and music”—whose emblem was part Jew, part Negro, part Gypsy, and all jazz.

These are all in a sense “psychographs,” as photos of occult phenomena made without a camera came to be called—the hoax is almost always a trick disguised as a wish.