The blackness that incriminated me’: Stigma and Normalization among Brothers and Keepers

This research situates John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers within the tradition of Black sociology, politicizing Erving Goffman’s Stigma and grounding his theories in the lived experience of being Black in the United States. Goffman facilitates a reading of Wideman’s work as an attempt to surrender the mask of “the exceptional black man” among elite “whites” and reconcile his stellar accomplishments with his stigmatized beginnings as well as his brother’s incarceration. With this, Wideman begins to normalize himself, his family and community in a shift from tacit complicity with racial stigmatization to active resistance against it. Our goal in this project is to use Goffman’s concepts stigma and moral career to explain Wideman’s growth and in turn, add the sort of depth and breadth to notions of own and wise that was lacking in their original formulation.