Appunti relativi alle lezioni riguardanti argomento di sociology, articolo consigliato: “Race as stigma''

Caroline Howarth: Race as stigma

This paper explores the insights gained from conceptualising race as stigma. The assessment of the embodiment of stigma, the ideological construction of stigma within particular histories, the impact of stigma on identity, and the ways in which we collectively contest and resist stigma.

While acknowledging how stigma, particularly the stigma of race, acts to deny humanity, agency and liberty, I illustrate how stigma is collectively constructed, institutionalised and resisted in social and political relations. A crucial part of the psychology of stigma must be a focus on the possibilities for communities to contest and transform representations and practices that stigmatise; that is, we need to explore the possibilities and conditions for stigmatised communities as agents as not (only) as objects or victims of stigma.

Key concepts

• Stigma
• Racism
• Social structures
• Social representations
• Embodiment
• Ideology
• Identity
• Resistance
• Community
• Agency

The critical social psychology of stigma

Promotes a critical social psychology of stigma that highlights the ways in which stigma operates to produce and defend structural inequalities.

Embodiment of race

First, it highlights the embodiment of race: race is seen in or on the body; while race may inform social spaces, linguistic styles and fashion, it is primarily linked to the body, or more particularly the skin. In ancient Greece, a stigma was a mark - burnt or cut into the skin to symbolise the threat or danger of the so-stigmatised person.

Race as a dehumanising discourse

Secondly, conceptualising race as stigma underlines the dehumanising nature of discourses and practices that ‘race’. Stigma reduced the person “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”. Those with black and brown skin are seen as less than, different from, unequal to the racialising, normatively white, others. In this way, race invades the self as racialised expectations and stereotypes mark one’s sense of self, one’s own expectations, ambitions and fears.

Material contexts of race

Thirdly, the operation of race can only be understood in relation to its material contexts of unequal relations of power. Like the stigmas of mental illness, HIV/AIDS and disability, race is something that produces and sustains material inequalities and is anchored in histories of prejudice, exclusion and poverty. Race generates its significance and its power from its particular histories of domination, colonisation and global economics. Race is constituted in and through structural relations of power and oppression, and can only be made sense of with reference to these very material histories.

Race in the eye of the beholder

Fourthly, race exists as a stigma in the eye of the beholder; it is something that is imposed on others and so it often jars with their claimed identity.