Stigmata and Marginalization Increasing in the Trumpian MAGA Era

Stigmata include symbols, piercings, or brands used throughout recorded history to mark an outsider, offender, outcast, enslaved, or an animal.

Stigmata in the Trumpian MAGA age, however, are not necessarily physical in nature but remain in the realm of the political, philosophical, and social against anyone and everyone whom the regime defines as “outgroups” (or as German fascists called them “Untermensch”: subhuman.)

Within postcolonial studies and in critical theory, they are referred to as “subalterns”: the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the ranks of power and privilege by an imperial colony and from the homeland of an empire.

In Trumpian U.S.-America, these outgroups include anyone who did not vote for Donald Trump at least in the 2024 elections, people of color, transgender people, lesbians, gay males, bisexuals, undocumented non-citizens (“aliens”), Muslims, increasingly Jews, actually all non-Protestant Christians, all government workers not hired by Donald Trump or Elon Musk, anyone who supports Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives in schools and businesses, anyone who is “Woke.”

If one thinks about it, Trump’s outgroups number approximately 90% of the United States population plus all of the residents of our country’s former international allies.

Many overt forms of oppression are obvious when dominant groups tyrannize minoritized communities. Prime examples include the horrific treatment of people of color under the system of apartheid in South Africa and Black Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the mass slaughter of Jews and other stigmatized and marginalized groups in Nazi Germany, and the merciless killing of Muslims during the Christian “Crusades.”

Many forms of oppression and enforced stigmata (as well as dominant group privileges), however, are not as apparent, especially to members of dominant groups. Oppression in its fullest sense also refers to the structural or systemic constraints imposed on groups even within constitutional democracies like the United States.

I have always been curious, however, how the idea of the physical branding of other human beings originated, expanded, and has been used through history.

Officials in 17th-century C.E. Puritan Boston coerced Hester Prynne into permanently affixing the stigma of the scarlet letter onto her garments to forever socially castigate her for her so-called “crime” of conceiving a daughter in an adulterous affair.

Though Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is a work of fiction, members of several minoritized communities continue to suffer the sting of metaphoric stigmata forced onto their skin, birth sex, sexual and gender identities and expressions, religious beliefs and affiliations, countries of origin and linguistic backgrounds, disabilities, ages, and many other areas of their identities.

Stigmatized groups live with the constant fear of random and unprovoked systematic violence directed against them simply because of their social identities. The intent of this xenophobic (fear and hatred of anyone of anything seeming “foreign”) violence is to harm, humiliate, and destroy the “other” for the purpose of maintaining hierarchical power dynamics and attendant privileges of the dominant group over minoritized groups

For example, on February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Florida, shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin was walking on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone to his girlfriend and carrying a can of iced tea and a small bag of Skittles when Zimmerman confronted and shot him, and then he claimed self-defense.

By most reports, Martin’s “crime” was walking while being black in a predominantly white gated community visiting family and friends. His stigmata included his black skin and his youth while wearing a “hoody.”

Black and brown parents from all walks of life throughout the country engage with their children in what they refer to as “the talk” once they reach the age of 13 or 14 instructing them how to respond with calm if ever confronted by police officers. Parents of these young people know full well the stigmata embedded into their children by a racist society marking them as the expression of criminality, which perennially consigns them to the endangered species list.

Every year trans people are killed in the United States with the vast majority being trans women of color. Murderers of trans people react in extreme and fanatical ways at the direction of the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgression in young and old alike in the maintenance of socially constructed gender norms, with stigmata imposed on all who transgress.

We are living in an environment in which property rights hold precedence over human rights. In this environment, the political, corporate, and theocratic right are waging a war to turn back all the gains progressive people have made over the years. One tactic they use is to inhibit the development of coalitions between marginalized groups.

A Condensed History of Stigmata

Jews:

Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644 C.E.), the Second Muslim Caliph (ruler), decreed that all Jews (non-Muslims were referred to as dhimmis) had to cut the forelocks on their heads, not to sit astride their mules, and bind distinctive yellow girdles around their waists to distinguish them from Muslims. If they refused, they were to be killed.

Muslim rulers introduced the concept of forcing Jews into separate living spaces called melah in 807 C.E. and wearing distinctive yellow badges first introduced by Umayyad Caliph Umar II. This continued under the rule of Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (847-861 C.E.), and remained in force for centuries.

A document from 1121 describes a decree issued in Baghdad:

“Two yellow badges [are to be displayed], one on the headgear and one on the neck. Furthermore, each Jew must hang round his neck a piece of lead with the word Dhimmi on it. He also has to wear a belt round his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks or shoes.”

In some Muslim-controlled areas, 1184-1198 C.E., Jews are forced to wear distinctive clothing to keep track of them: Dark blue cloths with sleeves down to their feet, and a hat in the shape of a saddle (the origin of the distinctive “Jewish Hat, which appears later in the Middle Ages in Europe).

In Germany in the Middle Ages, Jews were forced to wear a pointed hat to distinguish them from Christians. The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215 C.E., ordered Jews to wear distinctive yellow badges. The Council chose yellow because it symbolized “racial disgrace.”

The Pope and Bishops forced Jews to wear what they referred to as a “Jew Badge” on their clothing to identify them as Jews. They ordered that Jewish clothing must be different from Christian clothing so that Christians would avoid having any sexual relations with Jews out of ignorance. Jews could escape these humiliating regulations only by converting to Christianity.

Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria in Spain introduced the Laws of Valladolid in 1412 where he decreed that Jewish districts were to be enclosed and placed under strict control. Jews had to wear badges, and Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat Christians.

In the 1920s through the 1940s, German Nazis asserted that Jews polluted the “Aryan race.” By the late 1930s they forced Jews to wear yellow Star of David patches, a sign of “race pollution.”

The Nazis devised an elaborate coding system for concentration camp prisoners. They classified inmates by patches of different colors corresponding to their alleged “crimes.”

• Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David
• gay men a pink triangle placed point down on both the left shirt sleeve and right pant leg
• political prisoners (liberals, socialists, Communists) a red triangle
• hard-core criminals a green triangle
• Jehovah’s Witnesses a purple triangle
• Roma and Sinti a brown triangle
• “Stateless” people a blue triangle
• “Anti-socials (people living on the streets, drunk people) a black triangle
• Since the German law forbidding homosexuality did not extend to females, a number of lesbians were sent to the camps under the black triangle accused of vagrancy or a red triangle of political prisoners.

Homosexuals

Though ancient Greece and later Rome were relatively tolerant of same-sex sexual practices between males, around the 4^th century C.E., attitudes changed as Roman civilization became increasingly deurbanized with greater totalitarian controls over personal life.

During the declining years of imperial Rome, philosophical, political, and social forces merged to establish a climate of intolerance. Christianity (with its strict pronouncements against same-sex sexuality), became the official state religion under the rule of Constantine I. In this climate, lawmakers enacted statutes that severely restricted same-sex activities.

The edicts of Constantine and Constans of 342 C.E., and later the law of 390 C.E. – sponsored under the tripartite rule of Theodosius, Valentinian II, and Arcadius – prescribed death to men engaging same-sex sexuality, especially in the case of prostitution:

All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s, to the sufferance of an alien sex (for they appear not to be different from women) shall expiate a crime of this kind by avenging flames in the sight of the people (Theodosian Code).

These laws, however, were rarely enforced, and male prostitution continued to be taxed into the 6^th century.

The Middle Ages

These laws are important because they were incorporated into the Corpus juris civilis – the extensive collection of Roman law instituted under the sponsorship of Emperor Justinian in the 6^th century, which later was used as the basis for canon and secular law in Europe, England, and what became the United States.

The Institutesis the name given to the section within the Corpus juris civilis that prescribes death for any person who is found guilty of adultery, or of engaging in “works of lewdness with their own sex.”

To understand the character of the Roman system of values, it is useful to explore the context in which these anti-same-sex statements arise. Also found in the Institutes, under the title “The Rights of Persons,” are laws designed to regulate and advance the accepted Roman practice of slavery. It read in part:

…slavery is the constitution of the law of nations, by which the individual, contrary to nature, is subject to the mastery of another….For in almost all nations the power of life and death was exercised by the masters over their slaves, and whatsoever was acquired by the slave belonged to the master.

In addition to the Institutes in the Corpus juris civilis, Emperor Justinian issued two condemnations of his own against the practice of same-sex sexuality. His Novella 77 of 538 called on men engaging in same-sex sexuality to change their ways and singled them out as the cause of the evils of society:

For because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences; wherefore we admonish men to abstain from the aforesaid unlawful acts, that they may not lose their souls (Novella LXXVII).

Six years later, in 544, following a devastating plague in Constantinople, Justinian issued Novella 141, demanding his citizenry resist evil temptation. Same-sex sexuality in particular was:

…that abominable and impious conduct deservedly hated by God. We speak of the defilement of males which some men sacrilegiously and impiously dare to attempt, perpetrating vile acts upon other men…. If, with eyes as if were blinded, we overlook such impious and forbidden conduct, we may provide the good God to anger and bring ruin upon all – a fate which would be but deserved (Novella CXLI).

The fall of the Roman Empire signaled a change in the treatment of minoritized citizens. Though certainly not a golden age of pluralism, the 7^th to the middle of the 12^th centuries was an era (except in Spain) of relative calm for people who engaged in same-sex sexuality and other minoritized people.

In Spain, however, the Visigoths ruled around the year 650, and they passed stringent laws prescribing the stigmata of castration for men found engaging in sexuality with one another.

The latter part of the 12th Century, however, ushered in a sustained period of universal intolerance throughout Europe. Minoritized citizens lost ground with the rise of new secular states and their powerful central governments and with the standardization of Catholic Church dogma. Both Church and state supported Justinian’s laws as the basis for widespread legislation and codes dictating conformity.

The Camaldolese monk, Gratian, is generally considered the one who formulated and standardized Canon doctrine. In his Decretum of 1140, Gratian formalized the concept of “Natural Law,” and he quoted the Roman Augustine in his condemnation of same-sex sexuality:

Acts contrary to nature are in truth always illicit, and without doubt more shameful and foul, which use the Holy Apostle as condemned both in women and in men, meaning them to be understood as more damnable than if they sinned through the natural use by adultery or fornication (Corpus iuris canonici, 1144).

The Decretum of Gratian became the fundamental and most widely accepted work of Canon law until the early 20^th century, and it influenced many civil laws that were to come. One of the first of these laws to explicitly stigmatize same-sex sexuality in both males and females was included in the French code of 1270 in the section titled Li Livres di justice et de plet (The Book of Justice and of Pleas, in old French):

1. He who has been proved to be a sodomite must lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he must lose his member, and if he does it a third time, he must be burned.
2. A woman who does this shall lose her member each time and on the third must be burned.

In the original old French, perdre member in these passages have come to be interpreted as loss of the penis, clitoris, and/or arms and legs.

In 13^th century Spain, same-sex sexuality carried a penalty of castration and “lapidation” (execution by stoning). This was changed under the regime of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1479 to execution by burning at the stake.

Early Modern Era

The earliest civil law dealing specifically with same-sex sexuality in England dates from 1533 under the rule of King Henry VIII, who stated that “there is not yet sufficient and condign punishment” for this “detestable and abominable vice.” In that year, the English Parliament classified buggery (a term used to denote same-sex sexuality, bestiality, and specifically anal intercourse) as a felony crime. Penalties included loss of property and death.

Then, in 1564, Queen Elizabeth declared the law a permanent part of English statutes; the death penalty for same-sex sexuality between men was not repealed until 1861. The law was used as the basis for sending several men who frequented “Molly Houses” (residences in England where men met for companionship and sex) to their deaths as early as the 1700s.

This English statute, like similar ones in Scotland, on the European continent, and in some Latin American countries, was drafted by legislators who had backgrounds in both Roman law and Christian doctrine. Records from the times document the executions of large numbers of men and women.

For example, the Spanish inquisition executed several dozen men by fire, 14 men were put to the torch in Mexico City in 1658, 60 men were executed in Holland in 1730-31, 60 were hanged in the British navy from 1703-1829, and 77 were sentenced to death in France between 1565-1640.

Change was stirring in the air in the 18^th century. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” became the battle cry of those attempting to overturn the ruling French aristocracy, which would carry over into the sexual realm as well. Following the revolution of 1789, the death penalty was removed from all French laws dealing with sexuality.

In 1810, after completion of a new criminal system called the Napoleonic Code, all penalties for consensual adult sexual activities were eliminated. Though the expression of same-sex sexuality remained subject to social disapproval, the new French code was a watershed that was to have the effect of liberalizing legislation in other countries under French influence.

This was particularly true in Belgium, much of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania, and Russia, as well as several Latin American countries.

This did not, however, extend to countries outside the French sphere, including Prussia, the Scandinavian states, and after 1871, to Germany, which united under the Prussian realm.

Russia, however, reinstituted laws punishing people engaging in same-sex sexuality with imprisonment for terms up to five years. After 1866, when Denmark abolished the death penalty for same-sex sexuality, Germany and the English-speaking common-law countries remained virtually alone in retaining harsh penalties well into the 20^th century.

Though England abolished the death penalty for same-sex sexuality in 1861, under the reign of Queen Victoria in 1885, the Labouchere Amendment was instituted by Parliament. It created a new crime of “gross indecency with males in public or private,” which carried the punishment of imprisonment for up to two years. This law remained in effect until it was eliminated on July 27, 1967.

In Germany, Paragraph 175 from 1871 of the German Penal Code was the law Adolf Hitler and his Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler cited in the plan for the “relocation” and eventual extermination of thousands of suspected homosexuals.

The United States inherited much from England, including many of its laws, particularly those concerning homosexuality and sodomy. Richard Cornish, a ship’s master, was the first man to be executed in the British colony of Virginia in 1624 for alleged same-sex sexuality with one of his stewards.

Another case involved John Alexander and Thomas Roberts of Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1637. They were found “guilty of lude behavior and uncleane (sic) carriage one with another by often spendinge (sic) their seed one upon another.”

Sarah White Norman and Mary Vincent Hammon in 1649 in Plymouth, Massachusetts were the first women prosecuted for same-sex sexuality in the English American colonies. They were convicted of “lewd behavior with each other upon a bed.” Mary was merely reprimanded since she was younger than 16 years of age. Sarah was ordered by the court to publicly confess her “unchaste behavior” with Mary, and she was warned against future transgressions.

The earliest known case of a person put to death for same-sex sexuality in a territory that would become part of the United States was a Frenchman who was executed in St. Augustine, Florida by Spanish military authorities in 1566.

Penalties were not restricted to same-sex sexuality, but also applied to bestiality. For instance, one of the first of these cases dealt with William Hackett, an 18-year-old servant who was found copulating with a cow. After Hackett confessed, the cow was burned, and Hackett was hanged.

Another case involved Thomas Granger, aged 16 or 17, who confessed and was convicted of having sex with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. The animals were burned, and on September 8, 1642, Granger was executed.

“Liberal” reformer, Thomas Jefferson advocated for the elimination of the death penalty for perpetrators of sexual crimes, and proposed stigmata, instead, in 1779:

Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman (or beast) shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one-half inch at the least.

After the American Revolutionary War, all states passed anti-sodomy laws carrying various penalties with most prescribing imprisonment: for example, Pennsylvania 5-10 years, New York 10 years, and Massachusetts 20 years.

Since that time, individual states created their own laws, until the Supreme Court decision in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, which outlawed all remaining state so-called “sodomy” laws.

Approximately 61 countries around the globe still have laws criminalizing same-sex sexuality. May we continue to stand on the shoulders of all the proud activists, the known and unknown, who have come before who have created a path for us to walk the walk.

And the stigma continues.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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