The Social, and Disability Discrimination

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman

Last September, Amy Webb wrote about the danger of posting pictures of one's child on the internet (friends had posted many pictures of their daughter "Kate" on Facebook):

It’s inevitable that our daughter will become a public figure, because we’re all public figures in this new digital age. I adore Kate’s parents, and they’re raising her to be an amazing young woman. But they’re essentially robbing her of a digital adulthood that’s free of bias and presupposition.

What's striking about this is the situation where normal ordinary people assume being made public in the social realm constitutes exposure to "bias and presupposition." Four centuries ago the imprisoned protagonist of "King Lear" characterized the social realm in terms of "Who's in, who's out." The social is not a friendly circle where everybody is included; instead, it is characterized by inclusion and exclusion.

The great sociologist Erving Goffman, above, said that stigma—such as the various disabilities discussed in this blog—spoils the stigmatized's identity. This is not one's identity as a citizen, where equality is betokened by the lowliest and poorest having the same number of votes as the richest and most prominent. This is social identity, where a transition from able to disabled, as Ms. Ivins suggests above, would involve a profound loss of status.

There is reason to be skeptical, then, of the implied valorization in such terms as "social safety net," "social concern," even "Social Security." (The SSA is not a social agency like, for example, the Boy Scouts. It is a public or Federal agency and as such, subject to non-discrimination expectations which the social Boy Scouts do not have to meet).

One might even say "social considered harmful" (echoing program design theorist Edsger Dijkstra's letter Go To ... Considered Harmful, published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM). To be disabled is, in many ways, to be outside of society. This ought not to be so.