By: Gina Salazar

1
LABELS

• By Gina Salazar
• Stefany Radeleff

2
LABELS

• Labels are essential for communication. Labels
  make it possible for us to communicate a
  complicated situation one piece at a time. The
  use of labels help us react specifically to some
  part of the environment and help us to deal with
  new and unfamiliar environments by picking out
  familiar features. But as useful as labels are,
  they can be blocks to thinking. First, by
  lumping things into categories, labels ignore
  individual differences.

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Examples

• Back in high school, there were and still are
  many labels used for people and the people they
  hang out with. The labels that we all know well
  and have experienced in high school are the
  jocks, the cheerleaders, the punkers, the trouble
  makers, the gangsters, etc. Because a person
  dresses in a certain way or does certain extra
  curricular activities, they are automatically
  placed in certain groups. Labeling these groups
  doesnt show what a person is really about, it
  just categorizes them and thats what people know
  of them and look at them.

• A couple familiar labels that will stick out
  about people are, republican, democrat,
  teenager and/or handicap. Ex. A democrat
  will only see a republican as just that and vice
  versa with a republican. There is much more to
  each of these people individually besides these
  two labels and we need to overlook that and do
  our own thinking.

4
Media

• Here is an article on Political Labeling
• Political Labels Whats in a Name?
• Liberal, conservative, reactionary,
  leftist politicians are constantly pinning
  labels on each other. But what do they really
  mean?
• By William McGowan
•   Nerd. Jock. Preppie. Freak. If you think that
  labels are thrown around in the typical American
  high school, just take a look at how they're
  hurled around at a typical session of the U.S.
  Congress.Left-winger. Conservative. Liberal.
  Reactionary. As legislators toil at the
  cumbersome process of making the nation's laws,
  such labels are tossed around like hand grenades,
  crucial weapons in the political warfare that has
  come to dominate life on Capitol Hill. But what
  do these political labels actually mean? And do
  they mean the same thing that they used to?The
  fact is, the labels slapped on politicians and
  public figures are far from exact. In the rough
  political climate of Washington, opponents use
  labels that distort and deliberately oversimplify
  each other's beliefs. The media join in the
  labeling game as well, relying on such terms as a
  kind of shorthand in the same way that record
  companies segment music into such inexact
  categories as "RB," "fusion," or
  "alternative."Not too long ago, however, terms
  such as "liberal" and "conservative" served as
  neat, precise pigeonholes.
• As we see in this article, Labels are given
  to everyone. Even politicians throw these names
  around to try and make one another look bad. Its
  all about making others look bad so they can be
  on top. If we think like this in our everyday
  lives, we dont really see a person for who they
  really are, we just see what's on the outside and
  what we have heard others calling them. How does
  one really, truly know a person by labeling? They
  dont, they assume, and they never really think
  beyond that. This way of thinking is really
  flawed because it encourages us to put people
  into groups, and by doing that, we tend to like
  or dislike someone or something, just by the
  labels we throw on them.

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Analysis

• When one uses labels, we tend to overlook a
  person as an individual. Labels encourage
  division. They persuade us to view things as
  grouped in opposing factions. As you will see on
  the next slide, Labels are everywhere from
  Capital Hill to high school. The only way to
  divert us from grouping one another is to
  challenge ourselves to do with out them and get
  to know someone with out the Label factor. In
  removing labeling, we can really view what the
  label may block us from and really evaluate
  things. By doing this, it lets us start thinking
  effectively as well as thinking critically.