Prejudice, Nuance, and Labeling

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

When I was very young and my brain half-formed and my skin so thin it was nearly transparent, I thought it apt to label not only things but people. I labeled my folders and notebooks, organizing each subject by color. Blue was science, green social studies, yellow math, red reading, orange spelling, etc. We teach and encourage our children to name and label items around them because that’s how we learn. That’s how we begin to understand the world and our place in it.

Labels become problematic though, when they start becoming applied to people. A folder is a folder is a folder. A human is not just a mother or accountant or dancer or female or white or brown. One day on a bus ride home, I was talking to a girl a grade above me, trying to find the right labels for people we both knew. “So and so is a jock,” I said, “and so and so is a nerd. But what are you?” Cringey, right? Granted, I was maybe 11 years old and my mushy frontal lobe was obviously confused. My friend looked me and just said, “I’m a person.” I sunk into the faux leather bus seat to chew on what she told me. I knew my friend well, and she was right, she wasn’t just a math wiz or an artist or a daughter or a sibling.

What I was probably trying to do, when asking my friend “what she was,” was trying to figure out what or who I…