Woke Tactics Pt 8: Normalize/Destigmatize

If you have been paying attention to the culture for the past couple of years you have no doubt seen calls to “normalize” and “destigmatize” anything and everything. There are even calls to normalize and destigmatize things which we might think are unhealthy or not good. Everything from mental illness, to obesity, to abortion have been the subject of calls to “normalize” and to “destigmatize.”

So, what do woke activists mean when they say they want to normalize and destigmatize things?

In her book “is everyone really equal” Robin DiAngelo defines the term normalize as “Normalized (norm, normative): Taken for granted and seen as normal, natural, unremarkable, and universal.”¹ So, to normalize something is to take something that might be seen as odd, strange, weird, different, interesting, or “sticks out like a sore thumb,” and to make it so that thing is no longer seen as even the slightest bit out of place.

Merriam Websters defines “destigmatize” as follows: “To remove associations of guilt or shame from.”² This is similar to normalizing, but rather then taking something odd or weird and making it normal, we are taking something that is shameful, taboo, or looked down on, and making it morally neutral.

So, when those definitions are taken together we can say the goal of normalizing and destigmatizing is to take something might be thought of as wrong, bad, shameful, abnormal, disgusting, and to make that thing an everyday part of society. In other words, to normalize and destigmatize is to take something that is noticeable, conspicuous, obtrusive, obvious, and attention grabbing because that thing is bad, wrong, shameful, gross, or weird, and to make that thing so that it is just an unnoticeable, unremarkable, regular part of everyday society.

So why do woke people want to take things that might be thought of as wrong, bad, or shameful, and make them a part of everyday society?

Let’s talk about that.

In Critical Social Justice (AKA wokeness) there is an emphasis on two things which we need to understand what is going on here.

1.      Discourses

2.      Systemic power.

I’ll explain both of these so you can understand why the woke are pushing to “normalize” and “destigmatize” anything and everything they can find.

First we need to ask, what's "discourse?"

Discourse is the discussion that occurs around a topic or idea. It includes the words used, how the ideas are conveyed, and the ways various points of view gain traction in the conversation and become the "dominant" or "default" view. We might think of discourse as "the way we talk about things.

How do we talk about things? We use art, words, language, poetry, signs, symbols, pictures, gestures, texts, songs, and so on. All of this is "discourse."

"The discourse" then, is the society wide conversation that we have about various things that we have through all our various ways of communicating. Everything from religion, to sports, to the constitution has a "discourse," a way in which people talk, discuss, converse, and exchange ideas about that topic. "The discourse" is where all of our societies narratives are created. All the stories that our society tells about itself and about the world are forged in the fire of "the discourse."

The narrative of Americas founding? Forged in the discourse of American history.

The legend of Michael Jordan’s greatness? Forged in the fire of NBA basketball discourse on espn and TNT.

All the narratives that exist in our society, every narrative about everything, is created via discourse. As such, the woke attribute a tremendous amount of power to the way we talk about things. In fact, in it's most extreme form the woke think that the discourse has to power to determine what can happen in a society.

Now that we know what discourse is, we need to talk about our second point “systemic power.” The woke are obsessed with power. In fact, power, and in particular all forms of political and social power, are the foremost concern of wokeness.

James Lindsay describes systemic power in the following way:
“Critical Social Justice believes power to be an intrinsic part of society and its operation, and it considers power to be at the root of all interactions between individuals in groups in society. Moreover, power is not to be thought of in the sense of the way one individual might attempt to control another individual, or even in the sense of politics, so much as it is a complicated set of social forces generated and transmitted by all of us at once that controls how people think, vote, believe, act, identify, and so on…

“Systemic power” is understood on a variety of levels, including ideological, political, institutional, discursive, epistemic, and social, and it is viewed as working through a process called “socialization,” wherein society’s rules and expectations, including routine social interactions, teach people to be certain ways and not others and to accept certain things and not others. This process creates “hegemony,” which in turn is effective because systemic power is, as observed above, “historical, automatic, and normalized”. The point of Social Justice is, ultimately, to use critical methods to study systemic power, usually in terms of dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and to generate radical activists who will challenge, disrupt, dismantle, subvert, and/or seek to overthrow it by remaking the system itself.”³

That underlined sentence is worth reading again. It is the various discourses in society which, as they are used and participated in by various individual which do the heavy lifting of socializing individuals to accept the rules and expectations which determine which beliefs, ideas, paradigms, expectations, and behaviors are allowed in a society.

Wokeness views all socialization as a sort of ideological brainwashing where everyone is brainwashed into just accepting the ideology of the dominant culture which set the rules for all of society.

Systemic power them is the power that comes from both

1. Being in charge of the larger cultural and social mechanisms through which ideas, beliefs, expectations, and standards are created and transmitted.

and,

2. Being the beneficiary of the social systems and power structures which built our society and structure it

Now that we understand both systemic power and discourses, we can now understand what is going on what Critical Social Justice (wokeness) seeks to destigmatize and normalize things.

The woke are very concerned about power. They believe that if one group of people has “privilege” or systemic power that another group does not have that this is an egregious injustice. On this view, if the “discourse” sets up one group as being superior, better, or the standard by which other groups or people are judged, then that group is privileged and is in a situation which gives them benefits, power, clout and opportunities that other groups do not get. Groups which are not privileged, or which the discourse designates as bad, shameful, wrong, or weird are thus marginalized. As such, if a group is seen as stigmatized and abnormal that group is a marginalized group and are thus oppressed.

So, the woke want to normalize and destigmatize things because they believe that when we think of things as being “weird, abnormal, strange, bad, or shameful” we marginalize the people who engage in those activities, beliefs, and behaviors, or who have those feelings, thoughts, and experiences. The goal of normalization and destigmatization then is to make it so that those marginalized groups are no longer seen as bad, shameful, wrong, or weird.

What this means is that such things as sex work, mental illness, transgenderism, needing to make a mental health day, being fat, doing drugs, listing your pronouns in your bio, children changing their gender, dating trans people, having drag queens perform for Children, gender affirmation surgery, hedonism, and a host of other behavior which our society as deemed to be less than optimal.

Even things that are not good, things that are bad, or harmful, or counter-productive, must be "normalized" and "destigmatized." Why? because according to wokeness unless a thing directly oppresses another person or group, then creating social incentives which punish people by saying "this is not good," or that "this should not be a normal part of how people live," or "this way of living usually ends up in tears so let’s not live this way" is just a way to oppress lifestyles that the powerful people don't like.

The way that social justice operates is to think that anyone and everyone should be entitled to whatever beliefs, actions, behaviors, or experiences that they want, and that so long as those behaviors do not oppress anyone else they should be free of stigma and derision. Creating any social incentives that encourage some behavior and discourage other behavior amounts to the creation of “systemic power.” EMploying that systemic power to privilege some ways of living over other ways of living amounts to a type of oppression.

To cash this out with a simple example, Critical Social Justice would say that being fat is only stigmatized and seen as unhealthy and abnormal because straight white males have set up a standard of beauty which privileges thinness. This standard was set up to privilege the tastes of straight white males and to privilege  women who meet that that standard while oppressing and marginalizing those women that don’t meet the standard. On this view, the idea that being fat is unhealthy is just another way in which health discourse is used to privilege thinness over fatness. It is not that being fat is less healthy than being thin,  it is that the discourse of health has been constructed to privilege thinness over fatness, and as such that discourse must be deconstructed so that thinness is no longer the standard of health. This is where the term “healthy at any size” comes from. The objective truth about what is healthy s not relevant. All that matters is that there is no standard set up which privileges one group of people instead of another.

So, being fat is not bad wrong, or less healthy than being thin. Being thin and being fat are just two different ways that a person can be, and neither of them is any better than the other one.

Obviously the problem here is that, as any doctor will tell you, obesity clearly comes with a set of health challenges ranging from diabetes to heart problems which are not good. However critical social justice does not buy this little story, and does not care what the system of western medicine ways. The only thing critical social justice cares about is ensuring that thinness is not seen to be greater, more beautiful, or better than being fat. As such, anything that might stigmatize being fat must be deconstructed, and this includes the idea that being thing is healthier then being fat.

So, what should we do about this?

The first thing we need to recognize is that there are a whole host of things which we ought not to normalize, and which ought to remain stigmatized. Such things as crime, violence, childhood gender changes, obesity, laziness, and refusal to work ought not to be normalized and destigmatized. But in the rush to make everything equal, Critical Social Justice is tearing down all the social guardrails we use to warn people away from such behavior. This is not good. Some things ought not to be normalized, and some stigmas are good. To say other wise is nihilism.

Finally, there are likely some things which ought not to be stigmatized. For example, getting checked for breast or prostate cancer ought not to carry a stigma with it. However, we should not look at this through the lens that the woke do. When we decide to remove a stigma, or to normalize something, what we ought to be asking is “is this a good thing to normalize?” Whatever we normalize and destigmatize we will get more of, so we need to be careful about what we normalize, and what we destigmatize.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1. Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, (Teachers College Press, 2017) P.240

2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/destigmatize

3. https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-power-systemic/