Reflecting on the Purposes of this Blog

A revision of a post from September, 2013:

One purpose is to give a report from inside on one of the fronts in the battle against prejudicial discrimination.

Another purpose is a sociological perspective. Social identity is what makes ordinary human life work. For a person to have what Erving Goffman called a "spoiled identity"* may be to "reduce his life chances."**

A third purpose is to argue that all prejudice is the same prejudice and all discrimination is the same discrimination. The enormous harm of prejudicial discrimination throughout the ages is the history of man's inhumanity to man. Prejudice is too monstrous to be a tool for any honorable purpose.

A fourth purpose is to argue that middle-class values were favorable to the stigmatized. These include:

• The idea of a common humanity.
• The idea of a connection with the past and the future and of a responsibility to our ancestors and our descendants.
• The idea of civility and of respect, so far as possible, for all people regardless of what group they are thought to belong to.
• The belief in uplift.
• The idea that political freedom comes when "we the people," all of us with one spirit work together for the public good.

The contrary values of the counterculture, in particular the tendency to frame solutions in terms of group identity, have been harmful to those with a spoiled identity.

A fifth purpose is to draw attention to a pervasive double standard in discrimination. For example, the term "harelip" is as ugly and defamatory as the n-word, yet even when it clearly is being used to marginalize and disenfranchise those with cleft lips and palates, as in the phrase "if it harelips the governor,"*** progressives stand calmly silent.

A sixth purpose is to argue that "harelip" is the symbolic birth defect, the one which William Shakespeare**** and Mark Twain***** cite, and that those so stigmatized have a corresponding classic symbolic role, the scapegoat, the "sin eater," as Patrick O'Brien says in Master and Commander: in Wikipedia, "one who is blamed for misfortunes, often as a way of distracting attention from the real causes."

A seventh purpose is to draw attention to widespread prejudices, some with impressive scholarly pedigrees, which could contribute to the double standard mentioned above, which serve as the unspoken and unexamined rationale for targeting the stigmatized: "In a certain state it is indecent to go on living," the influential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. "To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society."(#)

An eighth purpose is to ask you to imagine the life of the stigmatized. Would a complete stranger attack you as soon as he sees you? What would be the cumulative effect, if you went through each day never knowing who would turn on you? If you came to realize that in many cases where for others the answer is "yes," for you it is "no," would you have the same hopes, the same aspirations, the same goals, the same confidence as you do now? Imagine an existence characterized by reduced life chances.

A ninth purpose is to draw attention to the dual nature of identity. There is the identity we have by ascription, which Goffman describes as spoiled. But other sociologists, such as John Murray Cuddihy, have argued that a feature of liberal modernity is that individuals have their character by achievement and not by ascription.(##) Randall Kennedy, in "My Race Problem -- And Ours," argued that "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it." For the stigmatized, there are terrible consequences attendant on accepting the way many persons see them. A difficult choice is forced on them: To accept the "profound contempt" as their due; or to reject it at the possible cost of being accused of failing to know their place. When a disabled person was asked, "As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" he answered, "It gives me a valuable perspective."

/**************************************/

(*) In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

(**) The sociologist notes that the effect is reduced "life chances"

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

(****) This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth. - Lear, Act III, Scene iv
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, Nor mark prodigious such as are, Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be. - A Midsummer-Night's Dream. Act V, Scene ii

(*****) Mary Jane's nineteen, Susan's fifteen, and Joanna's about fourteen -­ that's the one that gives herself to good works and has a hare-lip. - Huckleberry Finn

(#) “The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society.” - Nietzsche
 
(##) from particularism to universalism, from ascription to achievement, ... - The Ordeal of Civility

Is Stigma Just Prejudice Given the Imprimatur of Social Necessity?

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

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

An entry by Deborah Fallows in James Fallows' column three years ago illustrates this:

The real story here is about the situation of dwarves in China. Airen, 矮人, or small people. When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm. (Emphasis added)

The rules of behavior in middle class America tend to prevent such openly discriminatory behavior on the street.* But as many of the previous posts on this weblog demonstrate, disability discrimination—a violation of our own professed values—is prevalent throughout our society. The sociologist notes that the effect is reduced "life chances": 

Goffman [says] “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to ... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). [1] Observing that “the person with stigma is not quite human” (3), Goffman explains that the our unconscious assumptions lead us to “exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.”

Goffman's work, dating from 1963, lists "racial ... minority" as a stigmatizing abnormality. In the last half century, our civil society, in a historic political, legal, and social effort, achieved a moral revolution which rendered the great sociologist's conclusion no longer correct. (See Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King, Selma, etc.)

At a party for state government employees in the sixties, an accountant apologized for driving a Falcon. "[N-word's] car," he said. He wouldn't say that today, because the underlying attitude is no longer socially acceptable.

Stigma is not fate. Nor is disability stigma "the way things are." As Imagine That America Had Its Consciousness Raised argued, such public measures as "A civil rights act for the disabled, since the disabled were omitted from the Civil Rights Act" could do for the stigmatized disabled what the Civil Rights Act did for racial minorities.

Consider stigma to be nothing more or less than prejudice dressed up in academic jargon.


(*) To violate cultural values of equality and tolerance is the sign of a bigoted individual, as in the "case law" epigraph above, or of a subculture which does not share mainstream values concerning civility. (A person with a cleft palate reports that, while waiting for a bus, he noticed a group of minority youth pointing and snickering, giving each other high fives, etc.)