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July We know that how one labels ones enemies and opponents is often a conscious political strategy that is used to demean them. Political strategists, particularly in one party under the influence of someone like right-wing consultant Frank Luntz, intentionally impose negative labels on ones' political enemies. We also know from psychologists that when children are given a label in childhood or tracked in school through some such judgement, they eventually internalize the label and begin to live as if it has some influence on them. I remember a student in my campus office who was expending a lot of effort to explain why he was barely passing my "Living Religions of the East" introductory course. Anyone could have concluded as much from his constantly shifting posture and intense facial expressions. But as he explained his case, I didn't believe him. My instincts, or experience as a teacher - or something else I'm not sure of - convinced me that he was actually very bright. I've taught long enough to recognize it. Still, as he spoke, he described himself with a pattern of self-defeating words throughout his appeals. Basically, he said, he was a hard worker, but just not very smart. Falling back on my role as a historian, I asked him for proof. Did he have any objective data to support the conclusion that he was as naturally unintelligent as he said he was? "Just my past grades. My mom read to me when I was young and I really liked to read as a kid. My family thought I was 'the smart one.' My sisters teased me about it. And I started out really well in grade school." I decided to push a bit. "So, what's your earliest memory of someone important who told you that you weren't very smart?" He immediately remembered a third grade teacher. The man had seemed larger than life to the young boy. And to the third grader, the teacher seemed to add consistently an explanation to their conversations: "You're just one of those people who aren't very smart." I learned that the student's authoritative evaluator was a teacher in the small, rural community where he grew up. As an elementary and secondary student, he was from one of the few Hispanic families in a very white town. And he was the only Hispanic boy in his elementary school. I asked if he had ever considered that what the teacher told him was actually the result of the teacher's internal prejudices. Did the teacher just assume that Hispanic boys were intellectually inferior? And was that an absolutely false message the young boy had internalized, a message that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with systemic racial prejudice? For some reason, that was a new thought he'd never considered. A new way of understanding what had happened struck him, and his eyes deepened. All of a sudden, he was faced with considering the possibility that he was not the real problem. The problem was a system that didn't accept deviants from its ideal: an image of whiteness. He was actually okay but the system around him imposed a label on him that he internalized and self-enforced even as a university student. Of the groups that are victims of negative labeling, LGBTQ+ people have been fair game for centuries. One need not list them to recall all the "euphemisms" society has used, and still does, instead of those identities LGBTQ+ people choose for themselves. It's one thing for people to label themselves, but even those who do can disagree over how a group they identify with should be labelled. Whether to use the word "queer," has been just one example among many. And trying to label oneself can feel confusing, like the feelings of a teenager experimenting with their self-identity as they move toward adulthood. The first label they use might not ultimately feel right to them. So, the right to accept, reject, or change how one labels whatever identity they are, is there's - just as how they pronounce their name, or what name they want to be called by is. Plus, telling someone else what their label "really" means misses the point of the use of words and how language has been used to enforce the power dynamics in societies. One is reminded of an episode in Oxford mathematician/author Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice questions Humpty Dumpty's right to use of a word with his own definition, and he takes the stand with modern linguists that a word has no true, universally accepted, eternal, objective meaning inherent in itself but means what the person who is using it intends: "When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less. 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all." Carroll hereby reminds us that words, and hence labels, can either empower or limit someone. And a label imposed on someone can also prevent understanding of the reality of the human being behind it. Twentieth-century Swiss author, physician, and therapist Paul Tournier even warned his fellow therapists that when they have labeled a psychological disease they miss the person they are counseling. As the saying goes: "Treat the person, not the disease." So, for we who can easily label someone, even ourselves, let's start with the idea that it's better to listen to the person and learn what they mean by the label, or labels, they choose for themselves. Otherwise we promote only misunderstanding. © 2026 Robert N. Minor Other Issues, Books, Resources
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas, is author of When Religion Is an Addiction; Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human; and Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society. Contact him at www.FairnessProject.org 
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