I’ve been thinking about labels. Here is my label for myself this week. Proud American. It’s been a long time since I would apply that label to myself. Maybe since I was a little girl in Ohio and used to cry at the Fourth of July parade.
It is a measure of this country’s racial history that Obama is consistently referred to as black rather than biracial. In the past, even the smallest percentage of African blood meant you were black. But we all have African blood. Africa is the land of our oldest ancestors.
I chose the Washington Post headline “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President” because this was once my hometown newspaper, and I know that over 90% of D.C. voters voted for Obama. For African-American people, black is a label of pride.
It is a blogging convention to label your posts. I’m having trouble narrowing it down. I already have a list of 20 labels and only 7 posts. Everything overlaps. Yet I like to read label-specific posts on blogs; they are helpful in narrowing the focus when there’s so much writing. So I’ll probably give it a whirl here soon.
It’s the same with listing blogs and websites I like in the sidebar. I can call the categories Book Arts, Calligraphy, Earthwise, but almost all of these sites will overlap across categories.
It’s convenient to have labels; it makes things faster. But what about labeling people? That makes things faster too: you are labeled thus and so, then it follows that I know all about you from that label. But do I? Of course not. People push out of the boxes we put them in and overlap categories too.