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.)