“In all of these various cases of stigma…the same sociological characteristics are found: an individual who could be easily accommodated in normal social relationships possesses a trait that can command attention and alienate those he encounters, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. It possesses a stigma, an unwanted diversity from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not deviate negatively from the particular expectations in question will call the normal. The attitude we normals have toward a person with a stigma and the actions we take toward him or her are well known, for these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe that the stigmatized person is not fully human. Based on this assumption, we exercise various forms of discrimination, through which we effectively, if unwittingly, reduce his or her life chances. We construct a theory of stigma, an ideology to explain its inferiority and the danger it poses, sometimes rationalizing animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class.”
(Goffman, 2003)
Marginalization and discrimination are, even today, scourges that accompany the lives of people with disabilities. The society in which they, too, are embedded suffers and falls prey to a culture that for centuries has nurtured prejudice and hatred against them.
During the Nazi regime, for example, more specifically in 1933, a law was enacted forcing people with disabilities to undergo sterilization surgery; the goal was to eliminate any diversity or “defect” that weakened the Aryan “race.”
This dramatic event, not the only one witnessed by human beings, but epochal in terms of the number of victims and its magnitude, left many questions to emerge in the years that followed as to why the fear of “different” was triggered in humans.
It turns out that education for the purpose of epochal change[1] is crucial to remedy this. In fact, an adult person is unlikely to feel empathy for another person who is phylogenetically distant, is afraid and tends to give way to his or her ancient instinct of self-preservation. Three-year-olds, on the other hand, seem to focus in a social context on the individual characteristics of other children without sorting them into cultural, religious and so on groups.
Finally, shifting the focus to the stigmatized (e.g., people with disabilities), it can be seen that they, too, may tend to indulge in discrimination. For example, Goffman talks about the phenomenon of passing, that is, trying to disguise certain moods such as disapproval or anger in order to feel included within society.
Such as at a job interview when they are rejected for the reason of having a disability or at gym class at school when they are not included within the group by their teachers or in the city when they are denied access to museums, theaters or other public and private buildings because the right equipment is not present or architectural barriers have not yet been removed.
[1]. By epochal change we mean not so much the growth of associations and initiatives that support the cause of the rights and freedom of people with disabilities but, above all, the achievement of a global awareness that despite the diversity, which characterizes every individual, respect must be guaranteed a priori.