This article was originally published in Ellemeno on Medium.com on 4/18/23 under the title A Response to Everyone Gets a Label.
Some labels are deserved more than others
There is a pervasive tendency to label people we don’t like for some reason that offends us. Many labels are pejorative, meant not just to describe, but to tar. But even the neutral ones, like Democrat, Republican and Libertarian can, in the minds and mouths of those of a different political stripe, take on pejorative connotations. Welcome to polarization.
And labeling itself is pervasive. Everyone does it and almost everyone gets assigned at least one. We even label ourselves. The why we do it is tied to the human need to encapsulate characteristics and behaviors. To be concise. Without the labels, we would have to go to long explanations of why people do what they do.
You could spend a paragraph or more, as novelists will, to detail the circumstances — birth, upbringing, education, fate — behind someone’s actions, such that they lead inevitably to your listener or reader encapsulating your subject as a particular exemplar of something. That’s the purpose of descriptors.
Charles Osgood, an early pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics, devised an experimental procedure called the “semantic differential” to reveal these hidden associations to words. It turns out that you’ll get reliable cultural consensus on how words evoke a graph line along a series of polar opposite notions. A series of Likert scales. Subjects mark along each scale where they feel a particular word evokes the right level of subjectiveness. You see in the following figure that the words education and learning evoke similar attitudes on 10 different scales, but entertainment maps a very different curve. The results should look plausible to the average American.
But when your time is limited, you don’t have the opportunity to do a semantic differential test with your readers or listeners. So, as a for instance, does the concept of “racist” fit the pattern for the concept of “Bull Connor?” What we do, instead, is apply the label to Bull Connor based on what we witnessed from his overt behavior. Water cannons and attack dogs at the Black Children’s March in Birmingham. Police beatings of the Freedom Riders. The shoe fits.
The issue, of course, is that humans can lie, deny, exaggerate, and misinterpret, but they can also differ on how they might graph out complex concepts such as racism. You might get different curves from Blacks than from whites, for example. But it’s likely that you’ll see strong correlations between all Black respondents.
But in any event, labeling is akin to pithicizing, that is creating or applying some word to summarize a constellation of characteristics. It’s a convenience. I did as much right here by coining a new word that’s driving my spell checker crazy.
Recently, David Todd McCarty wrote an article about labels, Everyone Gets A Label In The 21st Century. McCarty, someone who almost always sparks something positive in me, was remarking on how we Americans tend to create labels for ourselves and others and apply them way too liberally. He cites particularly the tendency for us to create and ascribe labels that our ancestors didn’t have need of.
If you’re not ADHD, you’re on the spectrum. If you’re not suffering from celiac disease, you’re lactose intolerant. Even if you’re not otherwise disabled in some way, you’re surely suffering from some disorder or another.
That may be why our supermarket shelves are so complicated anymore, because we have to cater to all these new labels. It likely also helps marketers to target us more narrowly and precisely. And finding all the stuff the ad world wants us to buy creates opportunities (adspeak) to be healthier, more beautiful and longer lived. At the least it allows us to get our daily requisite of exercise trotting from one end to the other in the supermarket. Costco!
McCarty takes serious aim at the term “ableist,” which he feels has been created to demean people, like himself, who believe Americans have been overly exuberant in assigning labels to disorders more inconvenient than consequential. He says:
It’s a pitiful term, in a long line of pathetic labels designed to separate the world into oppressors and victims.
In that chain of –ists which have set us on this course, he mentions ageist, racist, and sexist. He doesn’t brand them explicitly as pathetic, though they’re right in the previous sentence. In fact, on a semantic differential of admirable to pathetic, I’m positive he would mark them to the far right; ableist farther to the left.
But this is where I got sparked, because I believe these are terms we do need. The behaviors making them necessary have been embedded in our history and there are efforts afoot in Republican dominated states to neutralize them and whitewash our history. Ableists may come across as annoying in their scope, but racists, ageists, and sexists are dangerous. (I’d also add homophobes.) We need to know who they are and where they are.
I do understand McCarty’s larger point that we can’t all be victims and we can’t all deserve a victim label to attach to ourselves. It weakens and even neuters the notion of a victim and sends a minor victory to the –ists. They will and do take on the victim label themselves. They’ve gone so far as to label heterosexual, white, young males as victims. So McCarty’s conclusion:
The problem is that if everyone is a bigot, then the real bigots are off the hook.
He attributes much of the problem of overapplication to rampant individualism, a force destructive of our social fabric. There’s an air of doom in his correct reading of American problems past and present, but he is cautiously(?) optimistic about the future. He states:
I still have faith that America remains full of possibilities and capable of endless potential.
He believes that the youth of the country are the ones willing to undo the micro-labeling of everything and restore some faith that society and social cohesion are more important than individualism and complaining.
I see signs of young people I know, engaging usefully on gun control, gender equity, and climate threat especially. I participate in a class at my local university on the psychology of aging and see young students willing to explore issues of aging, as older folks interact with and influence their lives.
But…I was once a social activist student myself in the 60’s and 70’s, radicalized at Berkeley, and as such I had no hesitation in labeling Bull Connor a flaming racist and Strom Thurmond a homophobe. (I might have also added the racist label to Thurmond, although he was not so much a one that he couldn’t father and support a Black child. Hypocrite maybe.)
I justified the labels I gave to these people based on the need we all have to concisely describe someone on the more generalized scales of good or bad, strong or weak, active or passive. Racism and homophobia to me are bad, strong, and active — dangerous, in other words. The labels serve as convenient shibboleths to identify our comrades and separate us from those who would disappear us.
The inclination to project labels dwindles with age. Many of yesterday’s social activists are today’s conservatives, though I still count myself among the unredeemed. I do have some nostalgia for the past, but I don’t believe that it was better than now, and wouldn’t want to see the country return to the Ozzie and Harriet ideologies of those days.
I haven’t changed too much. I’m generally more subdued, but I can still talk heatedly with my one trumplicon friend. I’m her favorite demidiocrat. Our labels aren’t meant to be hurtful, as much as they’re signals for us to avoid our extremes. To come out of our conversations believing that we’re more than what our political persuasions paint us as.
If and when I label someone as sexist, racist, or homophobic, I base it on behavior I’ve seen or have solid evidence for. I’ve never labeled anyone ableist or ageist. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in that regard, but I do see Baby Boomer resentment looming.
But labels can be removed as well as applied. For example, Obama was homophobic (moderately) until he wasn’t. South Africa was a virulently racist country, until it wasn’t. (I don’t know where I’d place it now.) Bull Connor, long dead, is still a racist, I’m sure, wherever he might have ended up.
And America is still racist and homophobic. Many deny it, but you don’t have to scratch too deep to see the truth. Unless you don’t want to see it. And so it will be till the young people save us, unless they succumb to conservatism too. Until then the labels work for me.