Social death is related to physical death in that the former puts one at greater risk for the latter, but social death also concerns a broader phenomenon of “death.” The border between living and dead, for instance, becomes fuzzier when “some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the ‘living.’ ” The socially dead take on a taboo quality that is at one with the American inability to think or talk about death, generally, or to reckon with its historical past.
