On Being Labelled

People who keep on insisting that they're "tired of being labelled":

(Be honest, we all say it sometimes)

It's unfair. There. See? I agree with you. Simplifying someone until they're a two-dimension caricature isn't fair on that person, and in an ideal world everybody would treat everybody as a complete person.
But the sad fact is, that's not going to happen. It's physically impossible. Tomorrow morning, from the moment you wake up, treat everybody you meet as a whole and complete person. Extrapolate their background, their context, and their personality from what you can see of them - logically. Make no judgements you cannot substantiate with logical progression from readily available evidence. Let me know how long you last.

People who consciously "don't label people" have simply moved up to a higher, more equal level of labeling - not necessarily a bad thing, but nonetheless not an absolute lack of labels. The absolute best we can do (assuming absolute, blind equality to be "better") is leave everyone's labels blank, but that leaves us crippled in our interactions with everybody. Imagine introducing yourself to a white/European-looking man who can't speak English by running through every dialect of every South African language on the basis that they could be his home language, or introducing yourself to an African man by running through Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Russian first. It sounds absurd because it is. We need to make snap judgements about people based on information that doesn't completely logically lead to the conclusions we make.

We can't know every possible fact about a person before we interact with them, or do anything affecting them. We have to put people in boxes based on what we know about them. And no, it's not fair; racial and sexual stereotyping - and therefore racism/sexism - exist because race and sex are the two facts we can immediately and (almost always) unambiguously determine at a glance.

But it's the way the world works. We all do it, and we would go crazy otherwise. So you have a choice: You can play the game and make it easier for people to put you in the right box - how you dress, how you act, how you talk and what you talk about, and how you treat people around you are all things almost entirely under your control. Or, if you want to, you can continue to "refuse to be labelled" and have people carry on labeling you anyway. Because believe it or not, most people don't particularly care. Sad but true. Deal with it, or spend the rest of your life crying in the corner. It's really up to you.