By Annika Wolanczyk '23
As a racially ambiguous person, my physical appearance has always been a source of queries from others. I am constantly bombarded with questions regarding my race, ethnicity, and nationality. For the longest time, people's interest in me felt quite enticing, even exciting. That is, before I started to beg the question: why are they so curious? How will their perception of me morph when I unveil my racial identity?
Society has a fixation with identity labels. Collectively, we have drawn lines on fluid spectrums—such as race, gender, and age—assigned stereotypes to those labels. This habit of labeling and stereotyping develops into a pressure to know where we fit within those lines and be unwavering from the moment of identification. For teens, this labeling poses a serious problem. Adolescence is meant to be an age of exploration, and the confining pressures of labels can hinder self-exploration and development by defining one's identity as fixed and unchanging.
To understand where identity labeling is harmful, we must first acknowledge the natural human inclination to label. Humans use categorical labeling to navigate complex situations and environments. Adam Alter, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, argues that humans use categorical labeling to resolve the impossible complexity of the environments they grapple to perceive. He writes that, like so many human faculties, categorical labeling is ever-changing and adaptive but contributes to some of the deepest problems that we face.
To this point, many labels have a subliminal effect on us; take, for example, red roses. Red roses symbolize romance, but why don't white roses? Aren’t they the same flower? It is because we assign notions to something based on a label.
Although this labeling is harmless, the core problem occurs when we apply this categorical labeling to stereotype marginalized communities. Stanford University’s Psychology Department performed a study showing white college students a photo of a racially ambiguous person and asking them to draw him. The class was divided into two; half were told he was a white man, and half were told he was Black. The drawings of the man are starkly different based on the race students perceived him as, internalizing the stereotypical physical features assigned to different races. This study emphasizes the point that when we perceive people one way, it is almost impossible to change our perception. This is problematic as many of our perceptions are prejudiced.
Perhaps more importantly than how labels affect our perception of others, we should ask: how does it affect our perception of ourselves? Specifically, how do they affect the developing self-image of teens? In the article "The Development of Ethnic Identity During Adolescence," professor Sabine Elizabeth French writes, "Ego and ethnic identity development models suggest that to have an achieved identity, one must go through a process of exploration...it may be that although our society is quite diverse, early adolescents who live in racial and ethnic enclaves may not interpret race or ethnicity as salient in their everyday lives, thus not worthy of exploration." Unfortunately, Americans self-segregate based on race and class. Because of this, many adolescents do not have the opportunity for self-exploration among diverse social groups to explore not only their ethnic identity but other aspects of identity such as hobbies and interests.
An example of the determinants of this segregation can be seen in an article published in the Atlantic titled "The Origins of the 'Acting White' Charge." Author John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University, writes that "teens of all stripes seek ways of defining their subgroup, fostering a sense of group membership, and even of acting out. In black-teen culture, one way of doing this is to embrace the idea that studying is 'white.'" Focusing solely on race as the central part of adolescent identity limits the perception of yourself and your abilities; because of systemic racism and Jim Crow's persistence in the educational system, Black students are not offered as many opportunities compared to their white counterparts. This is an issue in itself. However, it becomes further problematic when this oppression is ingrained and internalized in children. They begin to believe that they are less likely to succeed because of their skin color and class. By not imposing strict racial labels and societal stereotypes on adolescents, we take a step forward in eliminating the educational and wealth discrepancies that exist between white people and POC.
I dentity is fluid; it is constantly evolving and altering through our experiences. The most straightforward example to understand this concept is sexuality, a widely recognized fluid construct. As Julia Sadusky, psychologist and author of research book Emerging Gender Identities, puts it, "Experiences of attraction and the strength and influence of such attraction on behavior tend to vary over the course of the adolescent years, lending the notion that labels may not be helpful in capturing individual experiences of sexuality. To place someone in a "box" based on current sexual attractions ignores the migration that is a part of attraction for many youth." Sadusky backs this argument with data from the Adolescent Health Study, which showed a migration between exclusively heterosexual to homosexual relations and vise versa between the ages sixteen to twenty-two. Teens who are navigating their sexual and gender identity find themselves caught in the midst of a culture war over identity politics. On the one hand, homophobia found more predominantly in conservative households restricts teens from exploring their sexualities. On the other hand, liberal-leaning culture embraces the LBGTQIA+ community; however, there exists a pressure to label one's sexuality while still exploring. After all, LBGTQIA+ is a collection of labels displayed as an acronym.
It is worth acknowledging that there is a sense of security, cultural affiliation, and community found within labeling. Additionally, it would be difficult to live in a label-free society. So the matter is not if we label but how we label. The question is not if we should focus on race, sexuality, and gender issues, but rather how we have those discussions constructively, especially discussions with adolescents. It is imperative we teach identity as fluid. Teens are at a continuous crossroads searching for who they are; labeling offers security and a predetermined sense of purpose that comes with that label's role and social circle. If children and teens view their identity as fixed and are encouraged to find and secure a label, they may rashly place a label on themselves that doesn't quite fit while they are still exploring. In popular culture, there does not exist an attitude saying, "I don't know what I am yet, I am still finding out." Instead, people switch from one claim of identity to another. This creates a sense of pressure to stick with the identity they initially chose because there is guilt around leaving that label and the community behind.
Labels, of course, are significant. They help us understand society; that is why the whole idea of not seeing color is ridiculous and disregards a history of inequality in our country. The concern is the labels that we choose to emphasize. Why do labels like “Asian” and “female” carry more weight than “funny, charming, and sister” in discussions of identity? Identity is a continuously evolving collection of experiences that shapes oneself.
The strict confinement of these popular labels emphasizes attributes that, for the most part, we cannot control, like our age and race. This puts our character traits and interests, who we are, on the back burner. Labeling neutrally without assumption is impossible because the reason we label is to categorize differences between "us" and "them." Therefore, much of the media's obsession with identity politics and labeling is counterproductive in fighting for gender, race, age, and sexual equality. Furthermore, teaching the youth to assign themselves these strict labels during a crucial period of social exploration creates another generation whose focus is more directed towards our differences than our similarities, leading to deepened self segregation, hence we repeat history and the cycle of oppression.
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