WP1 Revised: The Glorified Labelmaker

We are designed to wonder what things are. As children, we all are plagued with the contagious illness of questioning, an ailment whose only medication is answers that lead to even more questions. For our world to make any sort of sense to us, we need the context behind what is and what is not. However, it is that very context that poses a serious threat to how we see and behave toward one another. This context and the labels that come from it, build upon each other to differentiate you and me. To differentiate, the poor from the rich, the intelligent from the psychologically disabled, and the powerful from the oppressed.

These labels aren’t human though, they are not living and breathing, and they are not built on a continuum. At their core, they mean one thing and whatever that thing is imposes its baggage or blessings upon the source that it has been bequeathed. I believe that it behooves us all to pay attention to the values and meaning we are placing behind the labels that we have given to people, places, and things because they will ultimately have a larger effect than we could ever imagine.

There are a lot of aspects of my life, that I never got to have a say in. My name for instance, or my physical features like my height and my natural hair color, but all those things still give meaning to who I am, and I am proud of them. Yet there is another type of pride that stems from all the facets of my life that are in my control; how I dress, how I talk, what I do, and what I don’t. I have taken the so-called “cards I was dealt” and made the most of how I choose to play them.

I am a human. Therefore I can feel. I am Male. Thus I am emotionless. I don a beautiful coat of skin blessed with melanin. So I am an athlete. I am 21. Consequently, I am naive and inexperienced. I am American. Hence, I bleed red, white, and blue. With each new piece of information, a new label has arisen putting me in my place before I even get to have a say.

But everything has a label, and if we can’t think of that “thing’s” label then to our brain that is what we label it, a thing. A building with many books in it becomes a library, an assortment of empty cylinders becomes a drum set, and an animal that wears clothes, shoes, and talks becomes a human being.

As human beings, the giant file cabinet that is our brain needs to associate a name with a person, object, place, etc. in order to comprehend it, or else that thing becomes unfathomable. Labels are knowledge, the more things that your brain can attach a label to the more it can understand. Having the faculty to understand, to label, empowers us all, but it can also consume us. There always has to be a way to categorize, for good or for bad.

Take a group of people for instance, tens of thousands large. You’d call it a mob. Give them all signs and place them marching down the streets of a big city and you’d call it a strike. Give them a social justice cause and tell them to come back day after day, some may call it a movement, giving those protestors a cause to be proud of, but some may call it a riot, dealing irrevocable damage to the voices that were only seeking acknowledgement and change.

In 2020 there was a national movement against police brutality of people of color called the Black Lives Matter movement, naturally leading the country to fracture into factions of those in support of the movement and those who objected. However, the voice that seemed to shine through to both sides was the national media coverage of the events, and although it may have seemed unbiased I would argue that the coverage of the BLM protests was much different from the coverage of other protests we have seen before.

In their article about the coverage of this event, Assistant Professors, Miltonette Craig and Jonathan C. Reid found three main themes, the most important being that the articles that tracked these events “included language that framed protesters as part of a group that threatens the public interests in safety and property — one that primarily employs looting, destruction, and disruption in the embodiment of their “untenable” message” (Reid and Craig). Language like this, labeling the protests as riots, and labeling protestors as violent sucked a lot of the air out of a message that should have been universally supported, that black lives do indeed matter. Language is important, it serves many things, but among those one of the most important is its purpose as a historian. Remembering the majority of people who participated in these protests as rioters or agitators changes how history views them. They were simply fighting for their rights to life and when those who were being called out got tired of it they immediately placed the target right back on the protestors, once again silencing them and their efforts.

The way society interacts with a protestor is completely different from how they may act with a rioter and those who chose to oppress the message of the BLM movement were well aware of that. Along with the coverage of the protests themselves, was nationwide questioning of the Black Lives Matter organization. The label was no longer an innocent phrase in need of vindication, but it had become politicized, allowing capitalism and selfishness to take it for their own. The meaning of the phrase had changed, and suddenly it didn’t even belong to the people anymore. They had taken it and rubbed it in dirt changing the way everyone thought about it.

If you were to take a doll and accessorize it over the course of 20 years, it would become something completely different than what was when it left the factory doors two decades earlier. However, it is still the same doll, and if I were to strip off all the glasses, and watches, and jackets, and clothes, I would get right back to where I started. That is what certain labels are to me. An undressing of all the work I have put into myself to be more than what left the hospital 20 years ago, more than what I was never able to control.

Labels are strong and as humans, they are one of the only things we can count on for our world to continue to make sense to us, however, these same heroes that make life easy for us on a day-to-day basis have the power to completely change the way we think about not only others, but change the way we think about ourselves also.

In the world that we live in today the hold that labels have on our lives has become clear, especially in American society. Within seconds your life can change for the better or the worse with a label. Social Media has handed the label a throne unlike any other. One post gets in the right hands and you are labeled as “unorthodoxly beautiful” by the masses and a modeling contract could be on your desk in days, however, if you make a rant and say all the wrong things you could be labeled as a sexist and racist and expelled from your college or fired from your job the very next day.

These words have the capability to transform the way that we think about things greatly, but the power doesn’t come from the words themselves, instead, it comes from the circumstances we have placed these words in over and over again stringing them together to mean something strong or something weak. We use this language as both a tool and weapon, both to heal and to hurt. “Language is really a reciprocal tool: It reveals and at the same time it is revealing” (Garber and Zuckerman). These titles and labels that we give transcend the physical realm. The things we can’t touch but we can feel, are the labels that are seriously powerful, and seriously dangerous, especially to ourselves.

“Everything in language is basically psychological, including its material and mechanical manifestations” (Saussure, Pg. 6). For example someone may have anxiety, but they are scared of going to get treated for it because when they are diagnosed as an anxious person it changes the way that society views them as well as the way they may view themselves. On the other hand, for some, having something to attach pain to can be a very helpful mental aid for humans. Someone who may have been mistreated as a child can understand that they are not alone when the label of abuse is presented to them. This can allow them to get the help that they truly need. They have taken that label of abuse and empowered themselves with it to live out their lives despite their abuser’s attempt to wrongly take from them.

My argument is not that labels are bad, in fact, they are extremely powerful and useful, however, I do believe that we need to be more conscious of the labels we give to ourselves as well as others. I am sad vs. I am depressed. I am excited vs. I have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. I am feeling bipolar vs. I am bipolar. These are not just words, but they are representations of mental illnesses that actually affect people’s lives and sometimes we use them in a flippant manner that not only disempowers someone with that disorder but also dehumanizes them.

These titles are ones that truly can change how we view ourselves and how we are viewed by others, and worst of all, a lot of the time they are imposed on us. There is some societal shame to being labeled a nerd/geek, or ugly/unattractive, or even poor/impoverished, but there is never any consent in these labels being placed upon us. We are labeled as such and forced to accept it. Because of that, amongst us, there is a fear of the stigma that is attached to a label because it is not an accessory that we have chosen for ourselves, but it is one that has been unjustly applied upon us by those who do not know us.

At the end of the day, a label is just a word. Right? Just a meaningless pairing of letters. However, the implications of that word are how we dehumanize each other. That pairing of letters, that you have given to me affects the way that everyone else views, thinks of, and categorizes me. Your label has stripped me of the power to determine who I am.

I think it is almost impossible and probably unfair to ask that we do not label anymore. In fact, I don’t think that would make any sense in the slightest. However, I think that the suggestion to look further into what we may be inferring when we label a rock as a pebble is not outrageous. What we call people especially matters, we cannot be categorized. We are so much more than what any label can communicate and so much more complex and powerful than what that label may imply. We can continue to use these tools as weapons and tear each other apart piece by piece, or we can start building each other up, creating a better life for us all. The choice is finally ours.

Works Cited

Reid, Jonathan C., and Miltonette O. Craig. “Is It a Rally or a Riot? Racialized Media Framing of 2020 Protests in the United States.” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, vol. 19, no. 3–4, 2021, pp. 291–310, https://doi.org/10.1080/15377938.2021.1973639.

Garber, Zev, and Bruce Zuckerman. “WHY DO WE CALL THE HOLOCAUST ‘THE HOLOCAUST ?’ AN INQUIRY INTO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LABELS.” Modern Judaism, vol. 9, no. 2, 1989, pp. 197–211, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/9.2.197.

Money, Leigh. “Labels and the Self: Identity Labels as Scaffold.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 68, no. 3, 2023, pp. 590–609, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12922.

Saussure, Ferdinand De, et al. Course in General Linguistics. Fontana, 1977.