By forming social categories, we impute to individuals certain characteristics
and attributes, which taken together constitute in Goffman’s terminology a
‘virtual social identity’ which may concur with or deviate from their ‘actual
social identity’, i.e. the ensemble of characteristics and attributes these
individuals actually possess. A wide discrepancy between virtual and actual
social identity amounts to a stigma.
Stigmatization reduces individuals with a multiplicity of characteristics to the
categories we have available for them: (just a) foreigner, homosexual, Black,
Jew, Muslim, illegal immigrant, beggar, etc. Stigmas are characteristics that are
socially devalued and used to ostracize, marginalize, and in the extreme case
dehumanize groups. They make for imputed, humiliating virtual social identities
that in the name of the presumed common good of the integrated identity of the
wider society often meet with grave intolerance. This is where the normative
expectation to integrate, to blend in, to defer to the identity of the majority
reveals its perils. Under the impression of the holocaust, the philosopher
Theodor W. Adorno accordingly argued that genocide is the absolute integration
legitimized by the ideology of identity.
Today, few social scientists would roundly condemn social identities or dispute
the necessity of integrating the various composite parts of a society to make
them identify with the whole (a political objective currently known as ‘diversity
management’). This, however, cannot distract from the fact that the
stigmatization of virtual social identities is a perennial danger threatening the
weak.
Stigmas are of two kinds, visible and invisible. Both have profound effects on
the lives of those concerned. Skin colour, physical disabilities, and age are
obvious examples of visible stigmas, which typically, much as they would like,
people cannot conceal. Invisible stigmas include mental illness, being LGBT,
and one’s family background. Because of socially indexed residential patterns of
segregation, people may also hesitate to tell others of where they live. Loïc
Wacquant, a specialist in urban sociology, therefore speaks of ‘territorial
stigmatization’. Living in the ghetto/shanty town/slum is doubly debilitating,
physically tough, and socially damaging.
Overgeneralization, reduction, and demonization are the hallmarks of
stigmatization. Visible stigmas make discrimination easy, and the affected