The Necessity of Labeling

Growing up is hard, and its made no easier for kids by the multitude of contradictions taught to them in, and even before, school. One of the biggest lessons teachers try to teach their students is to not label others. That boy you laughed at on your first day because he couldn't say "three" correctly, the one you thought was dumb? He turned out to be the best in class at math. And the quiet girl who didn't like to talk with other kids, the one you figured just didn't like anyone? She was the first one to come play with you after you spent the previous day crying about your runaway cat. (Or was that just me?) By listening to their teachers and trying to think of their peers as being the same as them, students can make friends they never would have had otherwise. And even if that's not the case, it at least makes the classroom an easier place to manage.

Outside of recess and lunch, however, labeling is one of the first things you are taught in class. "A" denotes the first sound heard in the word "apple". Apples are fruit, rather than a vegetable, like corn or carrots, or meat, like beef or pork. Cows and pigs are farm animals, unlike monkeys and jaguars, which live in the jungle. We live in a farm town rather than the jungle or a city. St. Paul is the capital city of Minnesota, the state we live in. Minnesota is in the northern part of the United States. Every subject, from English (which is the name of the language we speak) to science begin by teaching kids what's what and how it differs from everything else, the fundamentals of Cartesian-ism.

So are we just not supposed to people? If so, why did my teacher spend our entire geography class teaching us about people in Mexico and the rest of Latin America and how they aren't like Americans? Does that mean I can put labels on the Mendez family who lives across the street from me? Or should I consider them different from me and my classmates because their kids go the public school across the street from my private Catholic school? And why do I have to wear a dress and get a white rosary for my First Holy Communion, while all the boys get to wear pants and get black rosaries? And why did the school have to call his parents when one boy said he'd rather wear the dress?

So which is it? Am I really all that different from the other kids or aren't I? How do we kids learn what is acceptable behavior without labeling ourselves and others? Why can't someone just be whoever they want to be without having to conform to the ways society expects them to be?

Many scientists believe the answer lies in our genes. In 2004 a researcher at the University of Exeter in the UK found evidence that even newborns label people. The scientist, Alan Slater, showed a number infants, some as young as one day and none older than one week, a pair of images, one "attractive" and one "ugly" female face (as rated by a selection of adult subjects), and found that, when presented with both pictures at once, the babies spent significantly longer looking at the more "attractive" face. Another study by Olivier Pascalis and Dave Kelly at the University of Sheffield demonstrated that within the first the first several months of life an infant can tell the difference between individuals of different ethnicities, as well as monkeys, equally well. This ability was greatly reduced after about one year, when they could only distinguish the differences between those people of their own race or races they encountered regularily.

So does this means that we're all vain, racist creatures from the get-go and trying to get along is futile? Hardly. What it does mean is that as we evolved it made sense for us to be more interested in the "attractive" members of our community, as they were typically the most healthy. And as long as a child could distinguish between its own tribe and another, it didn't really matter if they could tell the difference between the individuals in the other group. Without labeling, we wouldn't even able to talk about the other community or our own, or anything else, really.

So it is not Cartesian-ism itself that is to blame for the harm that comes from putting labels on things. What is at fault is our discomfort with anything or anyone who does not fit easily into any label, such as intersexed or interracial individuals, or when we place unwarranted attributes on other groups. Now that we've moved beyond societies based on small groups of individuals and have the ability to go anywhere in the world within, at most, a matter of days we've got to be willing to reform the way we look at the world and how we categorize people.