Mr. and Mrs. Label

My grandfather always told me that a polite person is one that closes the door softly even when one knows nobody is home. I’m not sure if this is a notion created by him or if it was inspired by something he read, but it highlights an idea that I’ve always been quite fond of: a man is what he is in himself. Unfortunately, that’s not what I see in the world. I see the constant need of people for approval. And that’s normal, because of our social nature. Nonetheless, it can be a dangerous exercise and it usually leads to something else. Since we have the need to be labelled in order to discover who we are supposed to be, we also tend to label other people. That limits us, our judgement and our behaviour.

I remember perfectly a video I was shown in an English class. It was pitch-dark and there was a young woman in her car, sleeping. She was peacefully resting on the driver’s seat, cosily snuggled under a blanket when, all of a sudden, a black man with a very long beard, dirty appearance and ripped clothes appeared from nothing and started trying to open her car. She started screaming and quickly tried to start the car’s ignition, but it wouldn’t start. The man wouldn’t stop trying to open the car, she wouldn’t stop crying and screaming. The noise was unsettling. I wanted to go in there and save the woman, but I was on this side, limited by the screen. In a desperate attempt to get in the car, the man jumped onto the hood and started breaking the glass. One punch, two punches, three punches. The windshield shattering more and more. Until it broke. The man grabbed the bleeding woman and pulled her off the car. His hands were bleeding as well, but he managed to drag her onto the sidewalk. When everyone watching the video was expecting the man to rape the woman, we heard the sound of a train approaching and smashing the car the woman was in. It turns out she had parked her car or it had broken down on a railway, but she didn’t notice. And the man, the dangerously looking man with a terrible look was actually trying to save her.

Since the day I watched that video, I was never able to find it again, but I remember every detail of it like I had watched it yesterday. If it hadn’t been for the homeless man, the woman would have died. But did the thought that he was trying to help her ever run across my mind while watching it? No. Because he had a terrible aspect. Because he wasn’t gentle in his approach. And probably because he was black. My mind automatically put so many labels on top of the man that I didn’t, for one second, think logically and rationally about what might have been happening. Or at least give him the benefit of the doubt. That wouldn’t have happened if he was a sharply dressed man with very gracious manners.

Of course this is a very extreme example and it doesn’t necessarily accurately recreate reality because it was dramatized to have a stronger impact on the audience. But are we that different in our daily lives? Think about your circle of friends. I bet you don’t take more than 5 seconds to name the funny one, the dumb one, the nice one, the smart one, the arrogant one, the annoying one, the tall one, the fat one… There is virtually no limit for the number of labels we put on our acquaintances. Why? What purpose does this serve? I believe it’s due to two factors. Firstly, as I’ve mentioned before, we are fundamentally insecure about ourselves and it makes it easier if we can fit or make other fit into predetermined categories that have been previously defined by society. Then, and as a consequence from the first factor, getting to know one another and understanding someone as a whole and not as a static entity takes time, requires empathy and, above all, implies exposition from the other and also from ourselves. And everyone is too scared to open themselves up and expose what they are. To others and, above all, to themselves.

So we implicitly approve this order of things because it’s the path of least resistance, the easiest way. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we start from an early stage to learn the value of the uniqueness that each person symbolizes and if we understand the complexity that is involved in existing and that nothing is black or white, but some shade of grey in between, maybe, just maybe, we can start to see people from what they are and not what’s easy for us to consider they are. As Martina Navratilova, former tennis icon, put it, “Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.”