I forget my homeroom teacher’s name from my first day of fourth grade, but I remember exactly what I was doing when the PA system blasted the morning rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.
I was humming another country’s anthem.
No, I wasn’t a junior secret Soviet plant. I was a new immigrant who, a week earlier, had never seen snow. I didn’t know the English words yet and wasn’t ready for new oaths, so in my head, I sang what I knew. I considered myself 100% Dominican.
Many years later, I sat in a different room, this one virtual. I listened to a group of NBC colleagues and fellow immigrants label themselves with a term I hadn’t heard before. They proudly called themselves "200 Percenters." They were 100% Hispanic and 100% American.
It sounded cool. It sounded bi-cultural. Did it sound like me? Not really, I didn’t feel like 200% of anything.
Maybe it’s because while I scored a perfect 5 on the AP Spanish exam decades ago, I now struggle to speak a complete Spanish sentence without reverting to inelegant Spanglish. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve always been deeply leery of letting other people label me.
As a marketer, I love labels. They are a convenient shortcut to understanding common properties. You walk down a grocery store aisle and encounter labels everywhere. At the top of each aisle: Baking, Ice Cream, International Foods. On a product box: Gluten-Free, 50g Protein, Organic. Labels have undeniable power. They organize chaos.
But that’s where things get sticky. Labels have too much power, especially when we apply them to people.
Think about it. Who do you know who is defined primarily as "ADHD"? Who do you know who is pigeonholed as "Vegan," "MAGA," or "Gen Z"? We treat human beings like grocery store aisles. The problem is that when we embrace a label, we don't just take on an identity, we accept the limitations and walls that come built right into it.
A few months ago, a former colleague reached out to me for career advice. Like me, he was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States. He asked me a question that left me completely stunned: "How does a Dominican man achieve success in an American corporate role?"
The question carried a heavy, unspoken assumption. It implied that our cultural background was an inherent barrier to entry, a box he had to figure out how to escape. I’ve never felt trapped in that box. Maybe that’s my secret super power.
I told him two things. First, excel at your job. Your knowledge and execution don't have an accent. Second, never internalize a demographic box. My Dominican roots inherently shape how I see the world, but they do not define my ceiling or limitations.
As a parent, this makes me incredibly protective. I actively fight the urge to label my daughter, even with positive words. I hesitate to constantly tell her she’s "smart" or "beautiful," because while I agree she is, I don't want her to spend her life performing to maintain a label.
I want her to find what is 100% her, entirely on her own, without the burden of external branding.
I know it’s an uphill battle against a world obsessed with categorization. But my hope is that when she stands up in her own life and hums a tune in her head, it is entirely her own melody, not a lyric imposed on her by someone else.
Which labels make you pause?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.