Love Does Have Labels: We Need to Acknowledge Them

Lauded broadly as a triumph for love conquering all, the Ad Council’s viral PSA “Love Has No Labels”  is an attempt to spread the message that, as its mission states, “before anything else, we are all human. It’s time to embrace diversity. Let’s put aside labels in the name of love.” You can watch the video below.

My first reaction was: Yes! Because love does have the tremendous capacity to be stronger than hatred or apathy–even persisting in the face of institutionalized violence and microaggressions.

So, sure, yes. But also, no. No, no. No!

Because, contrary to what the video states, love does have race; it does have gender; it does have dis/ability; it does have age; it does have religion.

When we put aside labels or dismiss them as individualized bias, when we do what this PSA and its attendant website implore us to do, we proclaim ourselves “colorblind” and ignore what created these labels: systemic oppression.

Oppression is institutional, not only interpersonal. We cannot dismantle violent oppressions like racism and ableism by kissing and hugging behind an x-ray screen and then using the shock value of emerging from behind the screen, smiling, to rid the world of the white supremacy that shapes racist institutions and the environmental racism that shapes ableism.

“Putting aside” these labels–proclaiming yourself “colorblind”–will only ever benefit people who are on the more privileged ends of the labels at hand.

You cannot “put aside” race if you are a person of color. You cannot “put aside” dis/ability if you have disabilities. You cannot “put aside” sexuality if you are queer.You cannot “put aside” age if you are subject to ageist discrimination.

Interlocking systems of oppression that define our society–and, of course, our labels–will not allow it.

These labels–race, dis/ability, age, body type, sexuality–that Love Has No Labels wants to dismiss outright are vital to our existence. For better and for worse, they intimately shape all of our lives. So, they do matter.

Labels do affect love. Labels affect love because I need my girlfriend to understand that because of my mental dis/abilities, my day-to-day is quite different from hers. Similarly, she needs me to understand the endless ways that as a white woman, I walk through the world with privileges that she has never had. And we both need to accept that while we can never truly understand each other’s respective experiences of oppression, that’s okay, as long as we’re always working to do the best we can.

Which, I guess, is what this “Love Has No Labels” thing is trying to do to begin with. But still, it bothers me. More than that, it enrages me. Because the problem is not “bias,” as the PSA’s website would have you believe. The problem is not individualized bias that can be dissolved by a touching video. The problem is the institutionalized forms of violence that create and perpetuate bias.

Ultimately, it’s all in the label itself. This PSA campaign says we should “embrace diversity” immediately before it says we should “put aside labels.” So we’re embracing difference by putting difference aside? How about we try embracing difference by actually acknowledging it, not erasing it?

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.