Labels, Boxes and Identities

Several years ago, I was leading a workshop on True Colors (TM) for a group of faculty and staff as part of the Leadership UTSA program. One of the participants told me she generally didn’t like such things because she didn’t like putting people in boxes. A few months later, as we had used the language and lessons of True Colors in various ways, she came up to me and told me her understanding had changed. The program didn’t put people in boxes, it was really about “peeling the layers of the onion.”

I’ve always appreciated so much about that conversation – her ability to learn and change her perspective, her willingness to share her learning, and her language for reframing the purpose of the workshop. I have shared her words in numerous workshops since then.

I thought about that conversation on Monday reading Paul Wessleman’s “Ripples” newsletter and it sparked my thinking for this week’s newsletter. (See more about Paul’s newsletter below.) The theme of his newsletter was “Defining Labels.” As I looked for quotes about labels while thinking about today’s newsletter, I found mostly negative ones, including the ones from recording artists about record labels. None of us like to be labeled, and yet we do like to be recognized for who we are.

I’m old enough that when I was growing up, the goal in race relations was to be ‘colorblind’. But that’s not really how humans work. We notice people and their characteristics and we notice them in relation to ourselves, how they are similar or different. While I was working in the Office of the Dean of Students at UT Austin, we participated in a workshop led by two staff members from the Anti-Defamation League. They said something that changed my perspective about the idea of being colorblind. Their point was simple. If I walked away from our interaction without acknowledging that one was a Black, Christian man and the other was a White, Jewish woman, I was ignoring, or pretending to ignore characteristics that were important to them. Characteristics that were important to knowing them as unique human beings with their own combination of life experiences some of which were based on these, and other, characteristics. There are many such characteristics that have legal components to them now – age, religion, gender, race, disability. There are many that have no legal components but are also important to who we are and how we see the world from our level of education to the region we call home, from physical size and shape to the languages we speak or don’t.

And our language for expressing those characteristics changes as we explore those complexities. Now I suspect those facilitators would include the descriptor cis-gender and might include a reference to their preferred pronouns. The word cis-gender wasn’t common parlance then (I don’t know if it existed yet) and we certainly didn’t have a practice of talking about pronouns. And often, when I was able to travel to campuses, students often taught me new ways of talking about and understanding their varied identities and experiences. And the ways we describe our identities and experiences are nearly endless. One of the exercises in that workshop was to pick four identifiers for ourselves. Try it. It’s hard to limit yourself to four, isn’t it? And it’s often contextual and certainly changes over time. I haven’t always been a wife or step-mother, nor have I always identified myself as a writer or teacher but I do now. I grew into my identity as a feminist and others have to tell me whether or not I’m truly a leader or an ally because those identities come from my relationships and my behaviors, not my beliefs about myself.

Is our recognition and acknowledgement of such characteristics labeling? Is it putting people in separate little groups or boxes? Is it appreciating their humanity and the fullness of their experience? Ultimately, of course, it can be all of these things. How we respond to each other is based in our own experiences and how we choose to understand the world around us. Like my UTSA colleague, I can understand these characteristics as boxes that define me and others or as layers of an onion, as ways of appreciating the multitudes of ways we each see ourselves. What words do you use to describe yourself? What about others? How have your understanding of identity and the ways we talk about it changed over time? I’d love to hear your answers to these questions because I know you’ll teach me something new.

Take care,

Gage

 

P.S.

Paul’s newsletter was introduced to me by a graduate student staff member while I was at SMU. At the time it was a not-very-fancy email listserv. He’s been throwing positive stones in the world’s ponds to send out ripples of positive energy for more than twenty years now. And I’ve been one of his loyal subscribers for almost as long as he’s been writing.