Would you be willing to expand? Every meaning I’ve been able to extract from that paragraph is either trivial (“identifying with a label does not imbue you with the qualities associated with that label”) or untrue (“people who identify with labels lose the ability to behave non-stereotypically”).
I’ve had no better luck with the article as a whole. The most charitable interpretation I’ve come up with for the whole piece is “if you identify yourself to us with a label of any sort, you have identity issues and must fix them before you can help us”, which...isn’t very charitable at all, actually. But how else can one explain, say, the first paragraph? Or the one that starts “If you’re looking for a cause...”? The article isn’t just dismissive of our hypothetical volunteer, it’s abusive toward him, and from very little evidence. I think that by itself explains a lot of the backlash.
One suspects that there’s a lot of missing context, that these prototypical volunteers are saying a bunch of other things that make the conclusions in the article less egregious (e.g. “I think they sort-of do [believe these stupid straw-man beliefs]”). One fix would be to rewrite the piece in positive terms, disposing very briefly of the bad framing in “how can an artist help?” and suggesting a replacement. The last paragraph is a fairly good prototype for the sort of piece I’m imagining.
Would you be willing to expand? Every meaning I’ve been able to extract from that paragraph is either trivial (“identifying with a label does not imbue you with the qualities associated with that label”) or untrue (“people who identify with labels lose the ability to behave non-stereotypically”).
I’ve had no better luck with the article as a whole. The most charitable interpretation I’ve come up with for the whole piece is “if you identify yourself to us with a label of any sort, you have identity issues and must fix them before you can help us”, which...isn’t very charitable at all, actually. But how else can one explain, say, the first paragraph? Or the one that starts “If you’re looking for a cause...”? The article isn’t just dismissive of our hypothetical volunteer, it’s abusive toward him, and from very little evidence. I think that by itself explains a lot of the backlash.
One suspects that there’s a lot of missing context, that these prototypical volunteers are saying a bunch of other things that make the conclusions in the article less egregious (e.g. “I think they sort-of do [believe these stupid straw-man beliefs]”). One fix would be to rewrite the piece in positive terms, disposing very briefly of the bad framing in “how can an artist help?” and suggesting a replacement. The last paragraph is a fairly good prototype for the sort of piece I’m imagining.
I recommend the background reading for the kind of thing that Vassar was talking about in the paragraph in question.