Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - The Scarlet Letter of the CPs: “You’re Guilty”

Yours truly is fortunate that his formative era was the Truman - Eisenhower - Kennedy years. At the time of its Army-McCarthy row, the left rejected:

• End justifies the means rationalization
• Groupthink
• Extrajudicial determination of guilt
• Guilt by association
• Conformism

Nearly a decade ago Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom proclaimed a “mission to civilize” in the face of social tendencies which make us “meaner and less civilized.” In an episode highly criticized by the left media, Thomas Sadoski’s character Don Keefer prevents the airing, by a student who has been raped, of a precursor of the Shitty Media Men phenomenon. Shitty Media Men was an online spreadsheet which allowed  public rape accusation without due process. A writer who objected was “excused from the room” by Sorkin. Sorkin/Keefer took the position that this sort of extrajudicial determination of guilt without due process could damage the reputations of innocent people.

This new righteous attack culture in the name of social justice makes this era worse for people having a spoiled identity because of birth defect stigma. Sorkin was socially punished for predicting that anonymous accusation having the ostensible purpose of countering rape could derail innocent people’s lives.(1) This same new climate of punishment, which rejects the law’s sacred presumption of innocence, means American culture has gotten worse for disabled people, particularly if they have stigmatizing afflictions. (“You’re guilty!” a City of Seattle co-worker once greeted me, apropos of nothing whatever.)

The new, righteous social justice presumption of guilt actually has an ancient pedigree. John 9:2 “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

A current The Atlantic article by Anne Applebaum says we have entered a new Scarlet Letter era. “The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her [Hester Prynne] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”” (Emphasis added)

“We live in a land governed by the rule of law,” she adds, “we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.”

And some Cerebral Palsy people, some Cleft Palate people, and others who look different, are “out of the ordinary relations with humanity” in an unrecognized shadow world. Where it is impossible to live a normal life. The Scarlet Letter of disability stigma means they lose everything — “jobs, money, friends, colleagues” — after violating no laws … 

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(1) Stephen Elliott: “How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed my Life”

“The Paris Review decided not to run an interview they had already completed with me for their web site. I was disinvited from several events, including a panel at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Someone even called a bookstore in New York where I was scheduled to do a reading and urged them to cancel their event. …

Then my television agent stopped returning my calls. Was this just business as usual, or had she found out about the list? I didn’t know. If she did know about the list, she certainly wouldn’t be sending me to any meetings. Hollywood doesn’t care if you’re innocent or guilty; they just don’t want to be anywhere near that kind of controversy. Friends who knew I had been named stopped inviting me out. I started to get depressed, because I was walking around with this awful secret. I’d look someone in the eye and I wouldn’t know what they knew about me. I couldn’t talk about what was happening without revealing that I had been accused of rape. …

Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused. We don’t talk to one another. We assume that if someone else has been accused, there must be a good reason. We’re afraid of guilt by association.”