Should We Be Defined by Labels? Politics, Race, Introversion, & More

Written By Caroline Smith

It’s no secret that American politics is as divisive and polarized as day and night. It seems like having a calm, thoughtful conversation about the current state of politics is impossible to have without it turning into a screaming match where people are just even more set in their ways than before. Can this wide of a gap ever be bridged? Join me in this discussion as I provide my own thoughts on the matter!

We’ll talk about all things labels, or those categories we often use to differentiate those who are different from and similar to our own identities and beliefs. We’re going to talk about the good, the bad, and of course, the straight up ugly aspects of labeling, including political labels, personality labels, racial labels, and more, and I’ll even tell you my own political journey from being obsessed with identity politics to being a little more in the middle on the political spectrum. Don’t listen to this discussion unless you’re willing to come with an open mind to think deeper than what’s on the surface. This will be fun!

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

I was going to introduce the topic of this episode as controversial especially following the most recent election, but I actually don’t want this conversation to be controversial at all so I’m not even going to start out with that energy; I figure I’m an introvert who enjoys deep, thoughtful conversations, and that’s the entire reason behind this podcast, so I’m just going to go for it.

All I’m going to say is that I want everyone to come into this discussion with an open mind, and I’m going to try and explain my thoughts on things as calmly and reasonably as possible, and I want you to feel like you can do the same in the comments of this episode as long as you’re commentary is not derogatory.

Today’s podcast episode is about all things labels, or those categories we often use to differentiate those who are different from and similar to our own identities and beliefs. We’re going to talk about the good, the bad, and of course, the straight up ugly aspects of labeling, including political labels, personality labels, racial labels, and more.

Plus, towards the end of this episode, I’m going to give you my best advice for not allowing any type of label completely take over your identity, and towards the end I’m going to explain how I think you can take back control over your own life despite the chaos of the external world, so make sure to stick around for that.

I’m not expecting this discussion to heal the political divide or anything major like that, but I hope it can give you a new perspective and some sense of peace in the midst of a storm.

I graduated from Auburn University, and for those of you who may or may not be football fans, one of the biggest rivalries in the SEC is Auburn University (AU) vs. the University of Alabama (UAB).

It’s a huge deal every year, and every one gets really excited about this one game called the Iron Bowl.

It is a pretty strong rivalry, but usually it’s all in good fun, although for the more serious football fans, it can get a little bit rambunctious with the name-calling and the cursing and whatnot.

But there have been a few times when things have really gotten out of control.

To my knowledge, there have been two incidents of people shooting fans of the opposing team because, one of which ended in a fatality.

And while I was still in school at Auburn High School right down the street from the university campus, a UA fan actually poisoned the iconic and historical oak trees on Toomer’s corner in downtown Auburn, which was a big deal because, you know, every college campus had its unique traditions and landmarks that they cherish.

So what does this have to do with today’s topic?

Well I was talking to my dad a few days after the 2024 election where Donald Trump won, and at the end of the discussion, he said, “I hate how politics has just become one big football game.”

And as I’m thinking about this football rivalry between AU and UA, I think what it demonstrated for me is the problem that occurs when people are strictly defined by labels that they refuse to come out of, whether it’s political labels (which is a big one in America), racial labels, personality labels, mental disorders, and really any type of label that sets you apart from others in a divisive way.

By the way, I’m not suggesting that labels are all bad, because I think they can be helpful in certain scenarios:

Labels make things very clear to us and others, especially in the world of dating and partnership;

Labels enable us to find community with individuals who have similar interests, values, and struggles.

However, just like in my football example, in certain contexts they can be very divisive to the point where they are unproductive or even dangerous, and they can also create what’s called limiting beliefs if you’re not careful.

I think those issues with extreme, unmovable labels are showing up a lot more in the increasingly more polarized political culture of America, especially in the last few elections.

I don’t think there’s one person I know who is not frustrated with the current state of politics right now, me included.

I mean, you could be having a calm, positive conversation about anything, and as soon as someone brings up politics, it’s like all hell breaks loose.

Or, you could just slightly disagree with someone’s opinion, and they automatically think that it’s a personal attack on them, and then comes the name-calling, the raised voices, and everything else.

So, this podcast episode is essentially going to explore what happens when sometimes well-intentioned labels end up being counterproductive.

I’m going to kick off this conversation by discussing politics because that’s a hot button issue right now after the election of Trump into office, but I’m also going to talk about some other, less heavy topics towards the end, so it won’t all be so dreary.

I want to start with my own political journey throughout the years, which used to be largely shaped by my racial identity, also known as identity politics, but even before that I need to lay down the groundwork by briefly explaining the tribal nature of humans and our affinity for familiarity.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading the book, “Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril,” by Margaret Hefferman, and in it, Hefferman explains how it’s wired within us to find familiarity in a multitude of things including our long-term relationships, the neighborhoods we live in, the types of charities and relief efforts we donate to, and yes, who we align with politically, so much so that we can sometimes create defense mechanisms where we ignore contradictory information and seek out confirmation of our beliefs.

In chapter three, Hefferman includes a study conducted by Drew Westen at Emory University about what psychologists call motivated reasoning.

And I’m just going to read the relevant paragraphs from chapter three now:

In 2004, … Drew Westen at Emory University was interested in what psychologists call “motivated reasoning” and what Freud called defense mechanisms: the processes by which people adjust what they know to avoid bad feelings such as anxiety and guilt. He theorized that the brain’s neural networks would try to satisfy two kinds of constraints: cognitive constraints — we want to put information together in a way that feels rational — and emotional restraints — meaning we want to feel good about the information we take in.

To test his theories, Westen and his team recruited fifteen committed Democrats and fifteen committed Republicans to submit to fMRI scans of their brains while reading political material. As they lay in the scanner, they read pairs of quotes attributed either to President George W. Bush or to presidential candidate John Kerry. In each pair, one statement was contradictory. Westen wanted find out whether the brain would treat the contradictions of the preferred candidate in the same way as it would treat the contradictions of the disliked candidate.

The experiment found that the partisan participants gave a far rougher ride to the contradictions that came from the candidate they opposed.

“They had no trouble seeing the contradictions for the opposition candidate,” Westen wrote. “But when confronted with potentially troubling political information, a network of neurons becomes active that produces distress. Not only did the brain manage to shut down distress through faulty reasoning — but it did so quickly. The neural circuits charged with refulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflicts.”

“But,” said Westen, “the brain didn’t stop at eliminating the uncomfortable contradictions. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased ‘reasoning.’”

In Westen’s experiment, the reward circuits the brain was using were the same that are activated when a junkie gets a fix.

In simpler terms, when we find thoughts we agree with, or if we can get rid of the thoughts that make us uncomfortable by contradicting our beliefs, we feel the same kind of feel-good emotions that a drug addict feels when reunited with his or her drug of choice.

So that’s the basic neuroscience behind why our brains prefer familiar thoughts and beliefs over information that challenges them, and now, keeping that information in mind, I’m going to tell you about my own political journey.

As of where I stand right now, I wouldn’t call myself strictly a Democrat or Republican, although I will say I have always voted Democratic, including in this last election.

I know I have to be somewhere in the middle, because on a basic level, I believe in the free market, but I believe that we need some level of federal government to implement important regulations and restrictions on major corporations so that they can’t do things that endanger us and our environment, but I am more socially conservative in that I believe in the importance of having stable family structures that prioritize and promote healthy, happy children — emotionally, mentally, and physically.

But I did not feel this way in my high school and college days, mostly because during the time I was in school, from about 2016-2022, college campuses were perfect environments for more liberal ideas to flourish, and I had even noticed a lot of these extremely liberal ideas coming from the top down when I was in my last 2 years of college.

I actually had an English Literature class where I kid you not, every single assignment we did that semester was strictly related to racial tensions in America because that was the time all of the protesting and outrage at police brutality was going on.

It was starting to get really awkward for me because I was the only black kid in class and it was so obvious that everyone else in the class was really annoyed with everything being about race.

So during that period of my life, my racial identity as an African American woman was completely controlling my political affiliation which eventually began to cause some cognitive dissonance whenever someone or some information challenged my beliefs.

I was so obsessed with making everything about my racial identity that I literally would not hear anything else that might’ve challenged my thoughts.

I’m sure everyone listening right now, no matter what race you are, is well aware of the current state of black America, but to summarize it for you, we have a lot of socioeconomic and cultural issues related to a history of systematic oppression and racism, policing issues in black communities, the ridiculous amounts of violent and non-violent crime that seem to be increasing everyday, the school-to-prison pipeline, all of those issues that disproportionately affect communities with low socioeconomic status, the majority of whom are black.

And there is this recurring argument about who or what is to blame for all of these issues that I just listed, and whether or not we should be continuously blaming the past for our situation today.

And of course, I would never try to minimize the centuries of racial and systematic oppression that has contributed to our current situations, including slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and everything else.

That obviously played a huge role in the state of our community today, even on an individual level, I think our past has a lot to do with how we are today.

However, I eventually found myself in a conundrum:

I was so fervently believing all of the more liberal ideologies of the Democratic party that tend to primarily place blame on systematic oppression and racism for the decrepit state of minorities in America, so much so that I found myself overlooking the responsibilities that individual people have in their own lives.

I would try to contort reality to confirm these beliefs that I held, but because I was trying to strictly fit inside the label of Democratic, I didn’t want to acknowledge the contradictions that I saw.

In a sense, I was trying to resolve the conflict between my liberal belief that yes, the history of systematic oppression did play a large role and the federal government could stand to fund some of the initiatives that would help us out, with my conservative belief that there are some things in your life that the federal government can’t fix and that you as an individual have control over, even though you may be coming from a more disenfranchised position.

I want to give you a more specific example here:

It’s no secret that for decades now, the black community has been mentally, emotionally, and economically stunted and destabilized by the persistent issue of single parent homes (fatherless, single-mother homes), unwed mothers, and a lack of the stable family structures that children thrive in.

I’ll include all of the relevant data on that in the description.

And the data suggests that — no matter what race you are — that kind of lack of stability in the home eventually shows up on a community-wide level in the form of all of those issues I already mentioned: drugs, violence, and a cycle of generational poverty and trauma that just keeps getting passed down.

And back then, when I was identifying as 100% Democratic and liberal-leaning, I kept being persuaded that systematic oppression and racism must be the sole cause of these issues today, which caused me to overlook or even justify the bad decisions that individual people were making.

So if I saw a fully grown black man who was intentionally creating children with different women with no intention of taking care of the children, or on the flip side if I saw a black woman who kept willingly having children with these type of men, I would try to convince myself that they were only doing that because they are victims of the system, as we call it.

They’re being oppressed, and that’s why they are making these decisions, because again, that’s the narrative that I kept hearing over and over again by popular liberal media, and I was willfully overlooking the level of individual responsibility that people have just so that I could uphold this idea that everything is the system’s fault, and we have no control over our own actions, even given our history of being systematically oppressed worldwide.

But when you’re obsessed with labels, this kind of nuance is sometimes dismissed because it’s not a black or white answer, no pun intended there.

And this is just one example. I can give you another quick example that flips the roles.

I live in the south — Alabama to be exact — which is obviously a red state.

And because liberals have the reputation of caring about environment, there’s this subculture of conservative Republicans who participate in what they call “rolling coal,” which is a form of anti-environmentalism where they modify the diesel truck engines to increase the fuel intake.

It’s basically trying to make a statement that just because Dems want to improve the environment, we’re going to do everything possible to hurt the environment, just to make a cheap point.

So the point I’m trying to make here is that we have really gotten so stuck in our labels that we just have lost all sense of logic and sound reasoning, which is completely counterproductive.

And the divisiveness is so deep now that a simple conversation about politics oftentimes turns into a yelling match where people just get more and more stuck in their ways and less willing to reach across the aisle.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason that someone like Trump was able to get into office twice now is because we’ve been so polarized and divided for such a long time now that we’ve gotten into this cat and mouse game where we are just willing to vote for anyone as long as they have the same label as us.

It doesn’t actually matter what the person’s qualifications or morals are, we just want them to win.

That’s all I have to say on the topic of politics, so let’s move onto something less heavy: the topic of introverts and extroverts, and mental health, which is much more on brand for this podcast.

I think sometimes people can use personality labels like being and introvert or an extrovert to justify why they can’t or won’t do something just because it’s temporarily uncomfortable.

And this can sometimes cause us to completely shut ourselves off from certain opportunities just because you aren’t willing to get out of your comfort zone.

I’m honestly preaching to my former self when I say this, because I used to be one of those introverts who refused to come out of my bubble of solitude, but in my case, it wasn’t necessarily because of my introverted personality — it was because of my social anxiety and my struggles with socializing and communicating due to having Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Because of my struggles with being social, I found myself using my introverted personality as a shield to avoid any and all social events and interactions, when in reality, introversion is not at all the same thing as being shy or socially awkward.

They are completely different, but I didn’t come to accept that until I was able to become a more socially confident version of myself by overcoming my social anxiety, even while being autistic.

Extroverts can be guilt of the same thing, by the way.

I’ve noticed that certain extremely extroverted people will sometimes avoid importance activites like self-reflection, thinking deeply about important topics that require it, because they try to fill up that type of alone time with the distractions of constantly being surrounded by people.

And of course nothing I’m saying is 100% true for everyone because introverts and extroverts exist on a spectrum and we are so much more than being introverts and extroverts, but just take my thoughts for what they’re worth.

My point is that all of us are constantly trying to find the right balance both intrapersonally and interpersonally about the various aspects of ourselves, and if we’re not careful, we can get so stuck in being one way that we can’t adapt to other situations when the time calls for it.

In the spirit of finding balance, I want to move onto the segment of this episode where I share with you my advice for how you can prevent labels of any kind from controlling your every move and thought.

I have two key points: Catch yourself in delusional thought patterns if you can, and stop avoiding challenging conversations with people who have different perspectives.

  1. Catch yourself in delusional thought patterns if you can.

    This point only works if you are not so deep in your cognitive dissonance that you can’t see things for what they really are.

    As soon as you begin to see that something is clearly going against what you believe, even if it’s uncomfortable, you have to be willing to question it and see it from a different perspective.

    And in my experience, you never know what might happen — you might come out on the other side believing what you previously believe even stronger, but at least you’ll have a new perspective and a deeper understanding of the topic, which can be very powerful.

    My story about leaving my religion behind kind of fits that narrative, because I left the church to go on my own journey of questioning things, only then to come back to the church when I realized the other side wasn’t as pretty as I thought it was.

    I might tell that story in a future podcast episode, maybe a Christmas bonus episode or something.

  2. Stop avoiding challenging conversations with people who have different perspectives.

    Like I said in point number one, it’s not always possible to catch yourself in delusional thought patterns because we can’t see ourselves from other people’s perspectives.

    That’s why it’s important to have a strong social network around you that isn’t afraid to challenge your thoughts and beliefs when they witness that your actions don’t match up with your words, or when they can see that you are contradicting yourself.

    And that’s how I think we can bridge the gap between all of the divisiveness.

And now, as this episode comes to end, here is that bonus point that I promised about how you can take control over your own lives in the face of external chaos:

Control the things in your life that you have control over.

I don’t know if you have ever heard of the serenity prayer, but whether you are religious or not, I think the message can be used by just about anyone:

And it goes like this:

The Serenity Prayer

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference…”

-Psalm 91

You have control over how much social media you decide to consume, which we all know is contributing to our declining mental health day by day.

You have control over the attitude you bring into a situation or an environment that makes you unhappy.

You have control over how you show up in your relationships every day, in your personal life, at work, or even just greeting people who you see walking around the neighborhood.

Just focus on the things in your life that you can control, and it will make your life so much better.

Speaking of that last point showing up in your relationships, if you’re anything like me, that’s one area of my life that I needed lots of help and practice in because of my social anxiety and social awkwardness. If you’re an introverted woman who is perfectly happy being an introvert, but needs some extra coaching on how you can become more socially confident in general and more confident in your relationships, make sure to check the description to find out how you can work with me 1-on-1 so that I can assist you on your journey to becoming a confident introvert!

That includes my single power hour coaching sessions if you just need a quick hour to talk with me about something specific, and my signature 12-week program, Communicate with Quiet Confidence.

Again you can find all of that information using the links in the description of this episode or by going to theintrovertedmisfit.com.

That’s all for today’s episode.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend.

Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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