No, see, I knew that; if I’d thought they were both white, I would’ve just said they were two white guys who get mistaken for each other. What makes it interesting is that, even with Kingsley’s background, he and one of the whitest white guys ever to white often get mistaken for each other, which prompted my last line.
The “we don’t all look alike!” trope has become such a thing that no is allowed just to make this mistake any more.
When out and about, I like to joke with people about how they look like celebrities. I am often told I look like Matt Damon (I really do, actually). But I hesitate to do so with black people, lest I trigger this meme. I.e., even if I’m right in my mind, the person can disagree and say, “We don’t all look alike!” and be offended. This would be the same with Asians, but, sadly, there are so few Asians in Hollywood that I would rarely get to make such a comparison.
If that new show Dr Ken manages to stay on you got some traction coming…AND Fresh off the Boat…
My view is… it depends. I’m a white male, but I’m muscular and have long hair, and I often get confused with or told I look like random celebrities, always muscular white with long hair, other than that, sometimes we look nothing alike. Hell, I’ve even had people insist I was lying when I insisted I wasn’t the random celebrity they thought I was. Twice I’ve even been unable to extract exactly who I was and just to shut them up scribbled an autograph for them.
For me, it’s a bit annoying, but I’m not offended by it other than the couple times I was told I was lying. The thing is, for many people, they’ll key in on key features. Oh, Triple H or Shawn Michaels or Edge or whoever, they just know them as that wrestler with the long hair, or Clay Mathews, they just know him as that football player with long hair, many people probably couldn’t pick them up out of a line-up because their idea of what they look like is nothing more than that. Is it inherently discriminatory for them to be unable to distinguish someone that, to them, they’re only vaguely aware of in the first place? That overwhelmingly people who have insisted I was one of these people wasn’t actually white, does that mean they’re necessarily racist against white people? I don’t think so.
Yeah, I find it kind of unbelievable to mix up, say, Samuel L Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne because I’m quite familiar with both of them and am fan of several of their movies. What if I was only mostly familiar with one and largely unfamiliar with the other, or maybe unfamiliar with both? Is it inherently racist to just remember Samuel L Jackson as the famous bald black actor? Again, I think it just depends on whether they SHOULD know the difference.
Another thing to consider here is that the features that differentiate people vary, and various ones or more or less alike based upon race. For example, white people are more likely to have different colored hair. Based on that, I’ve confused white people I’ve even known fairly well when they’ve made significant changes in their hair, dying and/or cutting a lot off. Hell, sometimes people I am really used to seeing with a hat I sometimes take a few seconds to recognize when they’re not wearing one. For races with less variation in hair, they may have more variation in jaw lines, brow, skin tone, etc. and especially for people who don’t know them well or don’t have to differentiate a lot of people of a particular race, they may have more difficulty picking up on what features are the best to differentiate on. I live in a fairly diverse area, but I could imagine someone that grew up in, say, the Midwest might struggle more.
That all said, as in the case with mixing up Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg given by the OP, that’s a lot harder to understand. Part of that is because Oprah has been SO famous for SO long, it’s hard to imagine anyone would mistake her with someone else that, other than being fat and black, doesn’t look like her at all, who also happens to be fairly famous in her own right. Beyond that, that she has tattoos and it even states that Oprah doesn’t, should have drawn pause and rethought. But ultimately, if it’s coming from Variety, a source whose JOB it is to know celebrities, especially two as well known as them, just makes them look thoroughly incompetent. Frankly, I’d think with how many of these slips get through from these sources and how quickly they spread, they might have a couple sets of eyes on them before posting them to social media, just to be sure.
I’m not sold that it’s racist, though, especially given the high profile of race at the Oscars this year. If anything, I’d have expected anyone covering it to have gone to the opposite extreme of being too unafraid to say anything negative about a non-white celebrity out of fear of looking racist. Now, I could see an argument that it’s racist in the sense that, as Chris Rock put it last night, “we like you, you’re just not a kappa” kind of way, which is still any issue, but even that, I think still has some underlying motivation of seeing people that are different as being different rather than white might just be someone being incompetent or otherwise just bad at recognizing people or in the wrong career.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek, I didn’t think was any racism inherent in your post
I once worked with a white woman who insisted that two of our co-workers looked so much alike that no one could fault her for constantly mixing up their names.
They looked absolutely nothing alike–truly–except that they were both light-skinned blacks. Nothing. It’s like she just couldn’t see past the black to the individuals. And didn’t feel as if there were any reason to bother.
In this case: stupid and racist.
In Oprah v. Whoopi: stupid.
Denis Leary has said that he thanks everyone who praises his fine performance in Platoon but if they bring up Operation Dumbo Drop he says “No, that wasn’t me. That was Willem Dafoe.”
Well, I saw something, pre-Oscars, that said it was a picture of Jennifer Lawrence. I thought, “Hm, she looks less distinctive than she used to…” and then I saw in the comments below that it was in fact some other Jennifer. (Jason Leigh? Aniston? No, I’m pretty sure I would have recognized Jennifer Anniston, although there was somebody I used to get her confused with.)
Some people just look alike, some people have similar names, and nobody gets real upset if you mistake one blonde for another.
Except me. I once told a black guy I worked with that I thought he looked like a male Gilda Radner, and he got really, uh, I guess mad wasn’t the word. Every time I saw him for the next year he had some other famous blonde that he said I looked like. Okay, it was kind of annoying. (I do not look like Meryl Streep, Jessica Savitch, or what’s her name, as if.)
I did say a MALE Gilda Radner. He actually did.
I think it can just be a mistake, without it being either racist or stupid. And even if people of one race or another all look vaguely alike to you, how is that either racist or stupid? Some people just aren’t really good at facial recognition and make other connections, like “black woman who has been famous for many years” (Whoopi/Oprah confusion).
It is unquestionably stupid, for someone whose job it is to keep tabs on famous people.
That is the racism, seems to me. You’re not seeing the individuals, only marking the color (or other features that flag race to you).
And in cases like this, not bothering to remember anything about the people that’s more important.
Exactly.
How is thinking of someone foremost by their race, as you described, not racism?
It might in practice be a soft form, unintentional, not overtly malicious. But it is racism.
I’ve been wanting to throw this out for either confirmation or dismissal:
I seem to recall one of those “Scientists Have Discovered” things in which varioous people were wired for EEG (or something close) and seated in front of a screen.
On the screen, various faces were displayed in rapid succession.
One of the variables was “race”*.
It seems that, when the viewer was shown a face of her/his own race, a distinct part of the brain was engaged. This section did not engage when other races were displayed.
The section was one associated with math and logic.
IOW: We look “closer” at our own group than at others. Which would explain the “They all look alike” phenomena. Which is reported across all groups in relation to every other group.
Has anyone else heard of this study? It was right on the cusp of the internet - it may have been on the 'net or on paper.
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- NO. I am NOT going into “Is ‘race’ real?”.
A dumb mistake is taken to be a racist action. This is a long-term trend, I’m afraid.
And during the Academy Awards, the music that was played when Whoopi Goldberg was onstage was “What’s Love Got To Do With It”, Tina Turner’s big hit. The irony burns.
And sometimes what appears to be a racist action really is a racist action. Denying this is also a long-term trend.
Ignorance and stupidity perhaps. And not so much subconscious as casual/lazy racism - that particular kind of racism seems common in the US. Maybe that’s the Oscars kind of racism.
It’s not racism or callousness or anything else, really. It is a common scientific effect. It’s a result of your experience with diversity of faces and not any inherent difference between races, however. You’re not (necessarily) racially insensitive if you accidentally call someone by the wrong name, but if your job is to know actors’ names, better rehearse that.
For example, for me it’s Chris Evans and Chris Pine. They look nothing alike, and if I met Evans I know he’s Captain America and not Kirk, but I always have to pause and consider which name is which. It’s not the faces, but the rather generic names. Jackson and Fishburne are both “famous black guys who are often in science fiction movies,” and I could imagine calling them the wrong name. But if I’m sitting with SLJ and his face is right in front of me, I’ll never misremember him as Morpheus or Cowboy Curtis.
Some old black and white movies are difficult for me. White guy with combed brown hair #1 is similar to white guy with combed brown hair #2.
Well of course I’m not seeing the individuals. If they don’t mean something to me, why should I? I mean, I had the worst time differentiating Sarah Jessica Parker from Jennifer Anniston, but I’ve got them now (or at least, I’ve seen JA enough that I probably wouldn’t mistake her for some other actress with a similar hairstyle). There were a couple of other pairs I had similar problems with (and I don’t even remember their names now). So what? None of these people is anything to me. So if I got two similarly styled black people confused that way it’s casual racism, or two Asian people, then it’s racism, but if it’s my own race it’s not? Is that how that works? Usually I don’t even pay attention to “features that flag race to me” because most people mean nothing to me so I couldn’t tell you, for instance, that I encountered 7 white people and 2 black people and one Hispanic person when I went to lunch today. I encounter people in my neighborhood and can’t even recall if I’ve seen them before–I don’t recognize them if they don’t have their dog with them. If it’s a golden retriever I won’t recognize the dog either there are so many of them. It took me two years to realize that a person in my tap class was the same person who worked in the coffee shop in my office building because in class she had on a leotard and her hair tied back.
Now I do think that if it’s your job to put captions on pictures like this then it ought to matter to you and you should pay attention. And if you fail, it’s a stupid mistake, but even that doesn’t make you a stupid person. Or a racist. It’s just a mistake.
Here, was this racist? We used to have a mayor in Denver, Wellington Webb. I knew him, not awfully well but a little bit, as I worked on his campaign, the first one, where he didn’t win, not the one when he did win. So, I was in Chicago on business, going to lunch, walking down the street, and I saw him. I started to yell out, “Hi, Mayor Webb,” thinking it would really surprise him on the streets of Chicago. And then I stopped myself. I thought: You are an idiot, you see a tall black man and you think it’s the mayor of Denver, like every tall black man looks like Webb, you suck.
So. Back in Denver I learned that the mayor had in fact been in Chicago. That was him. So then I felt bad for not saying something, and I hoped he had not seen me and thought I was ignoring him. Because he’s a politician and even though I am a nobody he probably remembered me. Was that racist?
Hilarity N. Suze has put it perfectly for me.
I mentioned in a previous post
And I wonder if anyone would think I was racist with any of those mistakes…and if so …which ones and why?
And if I threw in two very obvious dark-skinned actors that I got mixed up, would that suddenly become racist? even though it is an error I make regularly across all ethnicities and races?
Cos it’s a nationality or accent confusion?
I think this is a perfect illustration. Confusing the names of two co-workers is understandable and not racist. It can be honestly difficult to remember co-workers names and to keep everyone straight. But insisting that they looked so much alike despite no one else thinking that, and continuing to constantly mix up the names makes it much more racist. If she had not been racist, she wouldn’t have protested so hard, and she would have tried to notice and learn things to tell them apart.