Looking beyond labels

My Pink Floyd T-shirt, your Nike shoes, my university mug. These are things that let the world know our story. An artist, a football player, or a college graduate. We give ourselves labels because we want to be seen a certain way. That’s how we find friends and form relationships. They also help us to categorise people. We put them in neat little boxes without realising that people rarely fit into the boxes we assign them.

For one thing, humans are wired to find patterns. We love patterns so much that we see them even when they don’t exist and so naturally, we like drawing conclusions. I remember watching a comedienne on YouTube and the comment section was exploding with opinions about how she wasn’t funny and that women aren’t funny.

We’re always ready to generalise and that was apparent. A lot of these comments didn’t talk about why she wasn’t funny. It was just that she was a woman and that was reason enough for her lack of humour to be magically explained.

Labels can be even more dangerous. There have been studies to understand how groups of people perceive other groups and the results are horrifying. Researchers studied the brain activity of people who had encountered a homeless person and they found that their brain responded in a way that was similar to how it would respond to an object, like a table or a chair. That is just baffling, where we have completely dehumanised someone just because they don’t fit in with what we consider normal.

We don’t realise the impact labels have on our lives and this does have consequences. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the smartest people in class usually wear glasses. Studies show that it’s a little more complicated. Teachers and parents of students who wear glasses expect them to be smart, so these kids end up working harder and doing well in school because they’re perceived to be smarter and they don’t want to disappoint.

Labels do help you find where you belong and keep you comfortable, but they also constrict you and prevent you from truly understanding the world by oversimplifying. We need to remember that it’s easy to hate someone who is different and to hate something we don’t quite comprehend.

It’s easy to see people as a sum of adjectives and nothing more. But once we choose not to give those words power and consciously identify our prejudice, we’ll find ourselves come out as better people because we would have had our beliefs challenged and our experiences would be richer and more complex.

In some ways, we’re all battling the same demons. We all have horrible bosses, messy relationships, and bad hair days. So let’s focus on the important things for once, instead of concerning ourselves with mindless stereotypes and unnecessary biases. The only real label we need is human and that should take precedence over anything else.