Examine the individual, not the label
Brené Brown is one of my favorite authors.
She has a way of putting into words the deep knowings of my heart.
Her book, Braving the Wilderness, is one of my all-time go-tos for expressing what I’m feeling. And recently, I cracked open this book once again seeking the right words.
In Braving the Wilderness, Brown writes:
“The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is, at best, unintentional and reflexive. At worst, it is stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready-made filing system, so handy when we want to quickly characterize people, but we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.”
When I published episode 31 of The Follow-Up Question with former QAnon believer Ashley Vanderbilt, I knew how some people would react. And Ashley even acknowledged it during the episode.
Some people despise her for what she formerly believed.
Some people don’t believe her.
Others look to her as a beacon of truth.
And as expected, some see her experience as an indictment for an entire swath of people.
One tweet I received said:
#ashleyvanderbilt and her likes need to deal with the gap in their soul that they have managed throughout their developmental years to fill with indifference - so #QAnons came knocking and because they looked like them - They’ve opened the doors and served them a buffet.
Do you see it?
The implication is that an entire collection of people is a band of indifferent, lost souls ripe for the plucking.
Sort. File. Stereotype. Condemn.
As Brené Brown puts it, “Some people will continue to believe that fighting for what they need means denying the humanity of others.”
We've been here before
In 2016, we saw it play out when then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
And earlier in 2021, President Joe Biden called the decision by Texas and Mississippi’s governors to lift mask mandates in their states “Neanderthal thinking.”
When the response to an idea you disagree with is to take aim at an entire group of people with broad-sweeping strokes that stain them with the funk of dehumanization, it is unfair to the people — the individual human beings — who absorb our mass judgment.
And we know it’s unfair because we all know how it feels to be the target of such stereotyping.
It sucks.
It sucks because when we are sorted and stereotyped, we never get to explain the context and the intricacies of our thoughts and decisions.
What do you expect to happen when an entire swath of people are called deplorable and Neanderthals and soul-less and indifferent for years and years?
What would your response be?
Let's go back to Ashley Vanderbilt. She connected with QAnon ideas because, as she explained in our conversation, she is deeply afraid of death. And as a mother to a little girl, she feared for her family’s safety in very real ways. And QAnon gave her a target for her fears.
Misguided? Yes. Soul-less? It hardly sounds like it.
What do we fear?
Fear shows up in so many ways.
Fear of our livelihood. Fear of being truly seen. Fear of getting hurt — emotionally or physically. Fear of change. Fear of conflict. Fear of failure. Fear of loneliness.
We are each incredibly deep, complicated creatures. Our thoughts and emotions rarely ever manifest themselves in a linear path to our actions and spoken words.
This is why sorting and labeling are so destructive to discourse and to finding common ground.
It provides us a way to lump our fears and emotions into one category, give it a name, assign it characteristics, and then wholeheartedly discard it or blindly identify with it.
What’s more, it does nothing to advance reconciliation. It only widens the gaps.
I implore you to resist this. I myself have to work to resist it each and every day.
But the more we work to examine the individual and not the label, the more we can see the humanity — the broken humanity — we all carry around inside of us.
And the more we see each other’s humanity, the more we find common ground that solves real issues.
