Labels are the Root of all Conflict
The School of Thought, a nonprofit “dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason, and understanding.” They offer a lot of free resources as well as products such as cards and posters based on these free resources. This blog post relies heavily on content they created and provide under Creative Commons licenses and made available at https://yourbias.is/.
In-Group Bias is when we “automatically favor those who are most like us, or belong to our groups.” (https://yourbias.is/in-group-bias)
Psychology and sociology will tell you that this bias is a product of both nature and nurture. As mammals we are preprogrammed to seek out those others most like ourselves. Safety in numbers, hunting in packs, herd mentality, etc. In addition we are raised within a community where we are taught, deliberately and unconsciously, that it is better to “stick with our own kind” because different can mean dangerous. We start life seeing the world in terms of “black or white” and “us or them,” and by the time our brains can handle the concept of a continuum without any real threshold between one label and another, we’ve already internalized the idea that some things are either/or.
I am fond of going to Merriam Webster to find definitions, so that in the context of a piece of writing, I can ensure that the reader has a fairly good understanding of what I mean when I use key words. I work to make sure the label has the same meaning for me as it does for you the reader. In fact, my first draft of this piece included a long list of definitions for words like “discrimination,” “prejudice,” “hostile,” “conflict,” etc. But focusing on picking a term and forcing a shared usage of that term is exactly what I am trying to argue against.
Instead, I am going to talk about gender as an example of the problems with labels and how we might want to work a little harder to get away from them.
I remember when we talked about gay versus straight. Then we talked about LGBT. Then we talked about LGBTQ. Then we talked about LGBTQIA. There are other variations, but essentially we have been trying to create a label for all those individuals who are “outside the norm” when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.
The problem is that no individual reflects exactly what any of those labels imply. That is why it seems like there are always new categories emerging. “Male or Female” changed to “Male, Female, or Other,” and then we became more nuanced and talked about gender fluid, bigendered, asexual, and so on.
And still there are not enough labels to cover all the individual experiences out there. Take me for example; I was assigned male at birth, and still identify as male. But does that mean everything about me aligns with the traditional concepts of “male” and “masculine”? Absolutely not.
I am much more likely than my wife to ask for directions when driving, and I always use the directions to put things together. I would rather watch a Broadway musical than a football game. Most of my friends over the years have been women instead of men. And so on. I would not want anyone to assume they know who I am just because I check the “M” box on a form.
So maybe the problem is the labels themselves. Maybe if we could get away from needing to identify ourselves as belonging to a particular group and can instead describe who we are as individuals, we’d be in a better place to interact with each other without fear of being classified as outside of someone else’s group.
And yes, I know how terribly simplistic and naive this may sound. But just bear with me for a minute.
Pronouns are one of the areas where I have thought about this a lot lately. As a young adult I taught myself to call people “sir” or “ma’am” by default when interacting with people I didn’t know well. I liked the idea of assuming people deserved my respect until they gave me reason not to respect them. Thirty years later I have found myself on more than one occasion calling someone “sir” or “ma’am” only to realize afterwards that I had assumed I knew the person’s gender when I could have been mistaken, and feeling terrible that I might have inadvertently offended them.
So now I am working re-train myself not to utter the almost automatic “thank you sir,” or “I appreciate it ma’am” and instead just say “thank you,” or look for a nametag so I can use people’s chosen names and make no assumptions. I would love for us to come to agreement on gender-neutral pronouns appropriate to use in all situations. Using “they/them” seems like a safe bet, but it isn’t if someone feels strongly about being referred to as “he/him” or “she/her.” And even when I know a person’s preferred pronouns, I can make mistakes, and these little slips can equate to big hurt feelings for others.
The problem is the labels.
I can tell you that in those moments where I am trying to say thank you, I really don’t care what gender the person is or what they were assigned as birth or how they came to identify as they do now. It’s none of my business. All I really want to do is offer everyone the same level of respect and appreciation. Because at the end of the day that’s really all we all want, isn’t it? To be respected and to be able to offer others that same respect?
I once read or heard someone assert that the only way to eliminate racism is to eliminate races. They argued that continuing to blur the lines between the races through interracial relationships would make it much harder to determine what race any individual was just by looking at them, and therefore discrimination based on race would be less common. I believe there is some truth to this, but in practice what we see is that the individuals who show outward signs of belonging to a particular race continue to experience the same amount of discrimination as always, while those who are less easy to categorize are likely to experience less. And to be completely honest, this really means that the more white you look, the less likely it is that you will have issues.
Nonetheless the idea behind the theory above is sound. The more we see that each person has their own unique story, the less we will worry about labels and the less likely it is that we will enact that in-group bias towards others.
Of course, we still have that instinct to classify, and some of us have years and years of practice making those judgements and placing people into groups based on what we see.
So how do we fix it?
If I had that answer I wouldn’t be writing articles on Medium for free. But I do have some ideas.
- Be honest. Admit when you are not sure what to say or how to interact.
- Be open. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
- Be respectful. You don’t have to agree with how someone sees themselves or the world to respect these things and acknowledge them when you interact.
- Take responsibility. Don’t blame others for your lack of experience or awareness and don’t expect others to educate you if they are not willing to do so.
- Apologize. If you make an assumption or a mistake, own it and apologize for it.
- Avoid labels. When speaking to or about people, try to use their names and avoid pronouns or terms that place them in a group they may or may not feel they belong to. Even if there are labels they do identify with, try to use them sparingly.
There is no simple solution. But I believe if we all try a little harder and remember that none of us wants to be seen as only the sum of our labels, things might get a little better for us all.
