One of our fondest hopes is to feel a sense of belonging, to feel that we are accepted by a larger social group, that we are normal just like everyone else, and that we are okay just the way we are.

In contrast, one of our greatest fears is that we would be a social outcast, unaccepted, cast out from the group, and stigmatized.

In today's post, I want to talk more about sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of stigma. 

I made a video about sociologist Erving Goffman's thin little book called Stigma. This is a book that's very important to me and I think is full of interesting ideas. But to be honest, the ideas are a little bit esoteric, abstract, and academic, so I was surprised but extremely pleased that thousands of people wanted to watch the video.

I was so encouraged that I made another video about Erving Goffman's book Stigma. In the first video, I mostly just talked about chapter two, which is about information control and social identity. In today's video, I want to talk more about chapter one, which is called Stigma and Personal Identity.

If you didn't get a chance to watch the previous video, you might want to do that now. It gives a bunch of basic definitions, which might be helpful before you read this, though this post will stand on its own. I'll refer to some of the basic ideas as we go through.

 

Stigma Vocabulary

For a brief refresher, stigma according to Goffman is about spoiled identity. It's about something that's wrong with us physically or a mark on our character metaphorically that makes us less than normal, that spoils our identity, and that causes us to be cast out, in one way or another, from the larger social group, which he calls normals. Normals are the people who don't have this stigmatizing feature or this mark on their identity, and others who do have this mark are the stigmatized.

Throughout the video I'll talk about stigmatized people who do carry this stain on their identity and normals. Now, I'm not making a moral judgment about people. This is just the vocabulary. I'm not saying normal people are really normal in any perfect way or they are better than stigmatized people.

This is just the vocabulary for thinking about stigmatized people and normal people. If you look at the previous video, you'll see that all of us are stigmatized under certain circumstances, and all of us are normal under certain circumstances. So there's some basic vocabulary.

 

Elements of Stigma

Discrimination

When most of us think of the term stigma, we think of being discriminated against. That is one important essence of this idea of stigma.

From the point of view of normal people, stigmatized people are seen as not quite human. One of the things they'll do is make up a stigma theory that is a theory of the stigmatized person to justify the discrimination against them, to justify that the way that they're being treated, the way they're being cast out from normal society, the way that opportunities are not given to them, and so on.

For whatever the stigmatized group is based on – ethnicity, religion, gender identity, physical marks, contagious disease – normals will make up a stigma theory about the stigmatized people to justify the overt discrimination.

Far-Reaching Spread

One really interesting characteristic of a stigma that Goffman observes is that it tends to spread from one aspect of our body or our character to our entire body or our entire character.

A classic example of this is when a person in a wheelchair is approached by a normal person, someone who's not in a wheelchair. The normal person will speak to the person in the wheelchair in a loud voice or in a slow voice, as if being in a wheelchair also makes you deaf, hard of hearing, or as if being in a wheelchair makes you stupid.

This is very frequently observed by people who are in wheelchairs. Blind people will often observe that people speak to them slowly, as if being blind means that they're also slow, or they'll speak to them loudly, as if being blind means they're also hard of hearing.

These are examples of how stigma spreads from one aspect of our character, in the eyes of normal people, to cover all of our characters.

We may have one aspect of our character that's stigmatized, either because of our behavior, appearance, or something about our past, that discredits us, and people will tend to think we're fully discredited because of that one mark or stain on our character.

Mixed Contact Interaction

Goffman is primarily interested in how stigma affects ordinary interaction. Goffman was a student of ordinary face-to-face human interaction, and so a lot of this chapter is about how stigmatized people interact with normals, what he calls mixed contacts.

A mixed contact is just a contact between a stigmatized person and a normal person, and he talks about all the dilemmas that arise when a mixed contact occurs. The first dilemma that he talks about is the kind of trap that stigmatized people are in.

If they're discriminated against, and they become defensive, or they become angry, or they become upset, then their reaction is actually used against them by the normal person to say, "Oh, look at how defensive they've become" or "Look at how upset they've become" or "Look at how out of control their emotions are."

Any reaction the stigmatized person has, which may be a totally normal reaction under the circumstances, is used by the normal person as more evidence of the stigmatized person's defectiveness.

Internalization

One of the bitterest ironies of being a stigmatized person is that stigmatized people internalize the standards of normality of the wider culture, and then they apply those standards to themselves, even though they know they can't measure up to those standards.

So, what does this mean? Someone with a facial scar, or a deformity, or who's blind, or who's deaf, or who's a member of a minority group, or whatever the stigma is, has internalized the standards of normality that most normal people don't have facial scars, for example.

Then, they'll apply those standards to themselves and say, "Well, I have a facial scar, so I'm less than normal, so I'm no good." Not only do people have to face the overt discrimination of normal people in the wider culture but they actually impose some of this on themselves. That is, they have a kind of self hatred in the worst case, and at best a disdain or critical judgment of themselves for not holding up to the standards of the wider society.

All of these problems, especially the comparison between one's real self as one knows it is, and one's ideal self as one wishes it would be, this sense of discrepancy between real self and ideal self is painful at all times but even worse when the stigmatized person is around normals.

We'll talk about why stigmatized people sometimes isolate themselves or only hanging around people who share the same stigma later on.

Emotional Suffering

The central dilemma for the stigmatized person is acceptance. Because they're a person like anyone else, they feel like they deserve acceptance. They feel like whatever is stigmatized about them is only a tiny part of them, and yet when they come into mixed context with normals, they often do not get the acceptance which they crave.

The experience of being a stigmatized person is often experience of pain, loss, and a feeling of not being accepted. So, being a stigmatized person is almost always accompanied by a deep feeling of insecurity and an emotional suffering, which comes along with having to feel that way all the time.

Performance

In addition to this, when stigmatized people encounter normals, they feel like they have to perform. There's a lot of anxiety in a mixed contact between stigmatized and normal people, as the stigmatized person tries to pretend that they're normal, while the normal person tries to pretend that the other person isn't stigmatized or that they don't notice the stigma.

As a result, you often get very awkward and anxious interactions in mixed contexts. The normal person looks away, avoids saying certain words, makes uncomfortable jokes, and there are long silences or too much of a solemn attitude during the encounter.

The Own and the Wise

Goffman also observes a peculiar thing that happens to stigmatized people. Again, you can think of a person in a wheelchair, or a person with an obvious physical deformity or limitation.

Normal people for some reason feel free to approach stigmatized people in public and talk to them about their stigmatizing characteristic. This is something that two otherwise normal strangers would never do with one another, but somehow the stigmatized person is seeing less than normal and having lower boundaries socially than a normal person.

The normal person could just approach them and start to ask them about their amputation, about their scars, or whatever it is. One understandable reaction on the part of stigmatized people to all of this anxiety in mixed context is, frankly, just to avoid mixed contacts.

Goffman talks about these two ideas, the own and the wise. What he means is that stigmatized people can hang around their own kind. If the stigma is a tribal stigma, like religion, skin color, or ethnic identity, people could just hang around people of their own kind who share the same stigmatized religious, ethnic, or cultural background, and avoid these mixed contacts and all the anxiety and discrimination that comes along with them.

He also talks about the wise. What he means is that people who don't exactly share the stigma, but by virtue of some personal experience, they are wise to the experience of the stigmatized group.

Criminals might be able to hang around with the police. The police don't share the stigma of criminals, but criminals and police are familiar with one another. Believe it or not, criminals don't feel quite as stigmatized around the police as they might around ordinary people who aren't accustomed to be around criminals at all.

Or people with HIV, which is a stigmatized illness, might be comfortable around certain kinds of doctors who are wise to their condition and not as disturbed by it. They could feel less stigmatized in that kind of company.

The own and the wise are two groups into which stigmatized people can retreat to avoid the anxiety of mixed contacts.

Contagiousness

Another really interesting thing about stigma is that it's contagious to a certain extent. I've already talked about how the stigma in one part of our body can spread across our whole character. Well, stigma is contagious in another sense.

Let's say one person in a family has been convicted of a crime, is a drug addict, has a mental illness or infectious disease which is stigmatized, or a bodily deformity that's stigmatized. This stigma, in some ways, rubs off on or is contagious to the other family members, so whatever discrimination is focused on the stigmatized individual tends to spread to and be experienced by the other members of their immediate family.

This is why stigmatized people are sometimes left isolated and alone, because people are intuitively aware that one person's stigma can rub off on them as a kind of guilt by association. This is one of the reasons that isolation and loneliness is one of the consequences of a serious stigma.

Moral Careers

The final concept that Goffman introduces in chapter one of the book, Stigma, is this idea of the moral career of the stigmatized person.

Now, I'll be honest with you. This is a concept that, for a long time, confused me, and maybe until I made this video I wasn't absolutely clear in my own mind of exactly what it meant.

Let's first talk about the idea of a career. We all know what a career is in the occupational sense. It's a series of academic experiences, like in college and getting degrees, and then maybe a series of occupational experiences. It’s a list of our jobs. Our resume is the description of our occupational career, so a career is just like a sequence of events. But when he says a moral career, what does that mean?

We have to look at the definition of moral. I actually went to the dictionary to get a definition of moral to help with this video, and this is what it is. It says, "Moral is an adjective, meaning concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior in the goodness and badness of human character."

In the goodness and badness of human character, so we can see how this idea of moral applies to stigmatized people, because stigma is about the goodness or really the badness of our character as a function of this stigmatized characteristic that we bear.

A moral career then is a sequence of events having to do with the goodness or badness of our character. In other words, it's a sequence of events having to do with what we learn about the changes in our identity as we learn about our own stigma, as we learn whether we're normal or to what extent we fall short of being normal.

What Goffman observes is that people can acquire stigma at different stages of their life, and this corresponds to a different sequence of events in how we learn about who we are in the society, whether we're normal, whether we measure up, and if we are stigmatized, to what extent is that going to limit our life possibilities.

That's a moral career – a sequence of learnings about our own identity in relation to the larger culture of normals. Goffman says there are two basic phases in the moral career of a stigmatized person.

Phase 1: You learn what counts as normal and you internalize those societal standards of normality.

Phase 2: You learn what kind of person you are and the extent to which your body, tribal affiliations, ethnic background, etc makes you more or less stigmatized. You learn where you stand in relation to these standards of normality that you learned in the first phase of your moral career.

In the first phase, you learn what the standards are. In the second phase, you learn, where do you stand with respect to those standards?

Goffman observed four patterns of moral careers, and I'll go through each of them.

1. Inborn Stigma: This is something like a birth defect, being an orphan, or being adopted. Each of these carries more or less stigma at certain times and in certain places. So, in this pattern, you're born into this stigmatized condition. You learn the standards of normality and the regular culture, and then you learn that you don't quite fit. Then, eventually you learn how you might be able to adapt to those normal standards in your later life. The example he gives him the book is that of an orphan who learns eventually that most kids have parents, but that he or she doesn't have a parent, and that makes them stigmatized. Because they've internalized the standards of the wider culture, when they grow up, they're perfectly able to have children and be a parent, because they've learned what that means.

2. Safety Bubble: In the second pattern of a moral career, a child grows up in a kind of safe bubble of family and close friends, and doesn't even realize they have any kind of stigmatized condition, and doesn't even realize they're not normal, until they encounter the wider world. This normally happens upon entering school, upon entering the dating market, or the job market. Then, in a quite literal and metaphorical way, the bubble is burst, and they realize, "Oh, I'm not normal at all. Most people see me as less than normal. My life possibilities are going to be limited, and I'm going to face overt discrimination."

3. Late Stigma Acquisition: The third pattern is the one that's interested me most historically in my own work. It has to do with acquiring a stigma in mid or late life. The most common way that this happens is by virtue of an illness or an injury. We were a normal person in our childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and then sometime in middle age or late life, we get sick or we experienced an injury, and this stigmatizes us. The illness or injury stigmatizes us, makes us less than normal, and we have to learn what it's like to be a stigmatized person.

   The difficulty about this moral career is that we spent a very large part of our lives being normal, and so there's a great sense of biographical disruption. I talk about that in my videos about chronic illness, and a great sense of loss of self. There's a felt sense that, "The normal person I was before has been lost, and the stigmatized person that I am now is much worse than what I was before," so there's a deep sense of grieving and loss of identity and self.

4. Isolation & Exposure: The fourth and final pattern in a moral career of a stigmatized person is someone who's raised in a totally isolated household or community, and then later in life enters the wider world of normals. The best example of this I can think of is this woman, Tara Westover, who wrote the book Educated. Tara Westover was raised by an extremely devout Mormon family on an isolated mountain side. She was homeschooled.

   She had very little contact with the mass media and with the outside world until she was about 18, when she went to Brigham Young University and eventually got a scholarship to go to England for graduate study. It was only then that she realized, "Oh. What I thought was normal in my isolated mountainside life was totally different from what counts as normal in the wider world." She had to learn to be a different kind of person and learn to internalize the new standards of the wider world, whereas in her early life she had internalized a totally different set of standards.

 

Summary

Stigmatized people learn what their lot in life is likely to be like primarily by hanging around other people who share the same sort of stigma.

People with one disease hang around other people with the same disease, and they learn what is their life going to be like? In what ways is it going to be limited? In what ways are they going to be able to be like they were before?

Stigmatized people, a part of their moral careers, they often go through what Goffman calls affiliation cycles. That is, they get closely involved with people in their stigma group, and then they shy away and they want to only hang around people who don't share this stigma.

So, there you have it. That's about all there is to say about chapter one of Erving Goffman's book, Stigma.