Label Awareness: The Good, The Bad, and The Misunderstood

By: Candice Crutchfield

            As humans, the consistent need to name the world around us has been a strong desire since gestures and symbols from caveman times. This system of naming creates an identity within ourselves and the world or people around us. In fact, a synonym for the word label is “identify.”

According to Oxford English Dictionary’s online database, the first definition of the word “label” is “to affix a label to, mark with a label,” dating back to a1616. Perhaps the most interesting finding, the dictionary only presents the word “label” in this instance as a verb. “Label” as a noun doesn’t come about until 1871. A label is clearly a noun, too. It can be a person, a place, or a thing, but should it be?

Dr. Tiffany Wang is a professor of communication and the basic course coordinator for the college of Fine Arts at UM, and she helps answer this question. “I think labels are powerful. You can choose them to define yourself, which I think can be very empowering if you embrace the label, or label yourself in a particular way; however, labels can also be very harmful.”

Wang discusses how labeling others in a negative light with titles and descriptive names that may be assumptions in turn builds a bridge or gap between the labeled and labeler. Labels are used to understand people, places, and things, and when people label others in this way, the labeler is misunderstanding instead of comprehending.

Dr. Jennifer Rickel, an English professor at UM, describes language as “something that is always dynamic.” Rickel explains that labels are important in terms of identity:

“They can provide people with validation for who they are as an individual and as part of a group, and that is important when it comes to recognition, having political access to things and being respected. It can become problematic of course when that label becomes not just something that is affirming, but something that is either used in a derogatory way toward them or it is kind of limiting them or ‘pigeonholing’ them. For other people they only become that one label.”

This touches base on the importance of remembering that before all other labels “human” came first. Identity is an important aspect for everyone. Understanding one’s self is not easy. So, understanding others is even more mind-boggling. Rickel explains, “We are not, as people so simple, as one singular label. So, I think that is one of the limitations of labels. If we don’t look at the way different identification categories can intersect and in real life allow us to be the complex people we are.”

Dr. Virginia Bare, a psychology professor at UM, says, “labels are a way to make sense of the world around us. I think they have always been sort of positive and negative and continue to be so.”

Bare talks about how labels can also be positive in the sense that people who identify with the same labels can more readily understand each other. “Labels can also help us sort of see how other people are similar to us. If we identify with a certain label then we have other people that are like us and fit in the same kind of group or concept.”

This act of identifying with labels is “a relatively recent phenomenon,” according to Bare. “There seems to be more discussion of labels and what they mean. I mean, even just in the work that I do, like with mental disorders, they really only kind of recently got actual names as opposed to just these sort of vague hysteria and these weird phenomenon that we were trying to understand.”

As humans, when we are trying to understand these mental disorders placeholder words are used to describe these people with mental disorders. A study by BMC Health Services Research titled “250 labels used to stigmatise people with mental illness” indicates that the stigmas associated with mental disorders can barricade people from seeking help. Some of the most used words to describe mental illnesses are crazy, disturbed, psycho, spastic and confused. All of these phrases represent misunderstandings of mental illness, and all of these words are labels used everyday.

            Dr. Mike Hardig is a biology professor at UM. He says labels are “handy for reference, so we can have a conversation about something if we both know the term, we know were talking about the same thing. Labels are handy for correspondence and communication.”

But why does this human need to name objects and situations exist? Hardig says, “We all desire order, we want to order the objects in our world. Like classification, we want to identify the good things, the bad things, the good people, the bad people with labels we can use those to organize our classification scheme. We refer to objects by definitive labels and then we can place them in our scheme or our organization.”

On the negative side of our labeling madness Hardig says, “A label tells you nothing about that which is labeled.” Hardig compares a label to a dewy decimal in the library. The dewy-decimal directs the person to the book or to the knowledge, but the knowledge is not obtained by just knowing the label.

 Another example is when you are a child and first learning to speak. According to popsugar.com “ball”, “bye”, “cat” and “uh oh” are some of the first words babies say. In turn, just because a child can say a word does not mean a child understands all the bridges and terms associated and defining that word.
People are going to say what they want, when they want with no regards to other people’s feelings. Some people think society has become “too sensitive,” but perhaps those people are just making an excuse for their own negative associations or misunderstandings of certain labels or concepts. The only solution is to be aware. Be aware of the labels and personal identification system that is self-made, and be aware of what others may identify with or label themselves as. Ask one’s self, “is this derogatory” before speaking. Labels will always be good and bad, and so will people.