I’m talking to my Asian friend (originally from Asia) and ask her if she finds this Caucasian male attractive. She replies with “I dunno, they all look the same to me!”
I’ve heard of this phenomenon before, is it just because teach race is not used to looking for differences in other races other than their own, or is there something deeper?..
Maybe she was making a joke, although I also find it can be tough to tell white folks apart, and I am supposedly part of that group.
You’re pretty much right. For instance, among white people, they have large variations in features such as hair color, eye color, but less variation in other facial features; in blacks, or asians, they have very little variation in the hair and eye color, but higher variation in other facial features like cheek bones, jaw shape, nasal structure, etc. I would equate this to the difficulty in differentiating brothers/sister/twins that look almost identical, but anyone familiar with them has no trouble at all. We grow accustomed to differentiating members of our own race, I would presume because we spend more time among them than other races. In my own experience, when I was growing up, I had difficulty differentiating races with which I had little contact such as asians, but as I got more contact (at school, university, work, etc.), I find I now have no difficulty.
Now, of course, if you were to actually ask me which features I key on to recognize different people… I have no idea.
As I’ve said on the board before, I was raised in a nearly all white environment so I had trouble distinguishing Asian features. I remembered watching some movies shortly after moving out here to SoCal where I could not tell the difference between some of the male characters because they looked so alike to me. After living here for a while and asking my Asian friends for help, I’ve learned what to look for when examining Asian faces. When I look at white faces, I mostly focus on hair/eye color and the shape of the jaw followed by the shape of the nose. With Asian faces, I focus on eyebrows and the shape of the cheekbones. With these two features alone, I can easily distinguish most Asian faces. It’s very useful when reading Manga. There were two characters I originally couldn’t tell apart but after learning that technique, I instantly saw the difference between them that I didn’t see before. I rewatched a movie that I saw after first moving out here and I couldn’t believe that I thought the two men looked identical.
On the other hand, my Korean/Japanese roomie has trouble distinguishing between Europeans since she wasn’t exposed to many white people. To me, the difference between Russians, Germans, French, Italians, Irish, etc is very pronounced. To her, they mostly look alike with different hair/eye colors.