I teach a class with 100 students, a handful of whom are “of color.” I’m not great with names – two months into the semester, I can confidently identify maybe 20 of them. This does include the “of color” individuals.
Just today I was handing back quizzes. I was about to proudly hand one of the “of color” students his test, without asking the name, but something made me hold back – I actually pretended to not be sure of his name! The reasons are discussed in this thread.
The point is, if you are constantly confusing people whose similarity is only in “racial” characteristics, it’s hard to know if you are aware of those people as anything else. Is that the impression you want to give?
I think the issue is not that people get names confused of people with “similar characteristics”, but rather that this highlights that the overriding characteristic in most people’s mind is “race”. As a teacher, kids often call me by the name of another teacher that is older, younger, fatter, skinnier, prettier, uglier, taller, shorter, blonder, darker, whatever, but almost never ever am I called by the name of a teacher that is of a different race than I. The only identifier less often confused is gender.
The reason it’s so bad to get the names of two students of the same race confused is not so much what it says about one person’s memory in that one moment, but rather what it reveals about so many of us–that when we put people into buckets in our mind, we sort them first by race ahead of anything else (except probably gender). In a class of all white kids, it’d be the two pretty blondes I couldn’t tell apart, or the two heavy dudes, or whatever. But no one ever gets the pretty, skinny, long-haired black girl with the great smile confused with the pretty, skinny, long-haired white girl because we see race before we see any of those things.
And this applies even when we are talking about, say, a light-skinned black person and a hispanic person of very similar coloring. The politcal/social identity is what sticks, not just the physical contrast.
I do this. I’m guilty of this. But I hate what it shows about how my mind works.
This was a way more efficient way to make the post I was composing for the last 20 minutes.
Yes, but it was interesting to hear your teacher’s POV. You see the risk of a scenario like I shared in the OP and would cite a teacher with a bit more than “a mistake” if it happened regularly. It would be “so bad.”
Too late to edit: IvoryTowerDenizen, you seem to have a similar POV as a teacher/prof, too.
If so my mom crossed the line for most of my youth by awkwardly persisting in calling me by my sisters’ names for most of my youth. I was quite a bit younger than both of them (“Oooops” :D) and male. It flowed both ways; they experienced it too. If she wasn’t actively paying attention a name from the generic child list in memory just got selected at random. More humorous was when she realized she got it wrong with the first attempt and still failed on the second attempt.
It’s tough in general to sort out things like listener confirmations bias, innocent pattern matching mistakes in haste, and actual bias.
There are two black gentlemen where I work that I have trouble telling apart when they are separated. I have no problem if they are together, but they are both tall, muscular, and they both wear their hair in dreadlocks. If I see one across the Hangar, and I cannot read the name on his uniform, I may get him confused for the other, although when they stand next to each other, the slight difference in shade and height are obvious. On the rare occasions that I work on the weekends, I have to directly supervise them. This led to an unfortunate incident where I called one by the other’s name.
The incident really got me thinking about how we identify people of different races and backgrounds. I wish that someone would do a study on this, although I think that in the current political climate, no one would touch the topic with a ten foot pole.
A white child, in a white neighborhood is exposed to many different people, with different hair color, eye color, hair texture, and skin tone, has an easier time distinguishing between people on these criteria than a black child growing up around mostly black people. For the most part, coloration of hair, skin and eyes will fall within a much narrower spectrum in a mostly black environment, and living in that environment will cause a black child to develop the skill of distinguishing minute differences in skin tone, hair color, or eye color to a greater extent. This different skill level can look like racism to a black person, since they can easily distinguish two black people apart, that a white person might have trouble distinguishing.
As another example, I can recount a conversation I had with my wife(who is black) that got her very upset at me. She was talking about how she could not join the same sorority as her mom due to her skin tone. When I gave her the confused white boy look, she asked if I ever noticed how much darker she was than her mother. Of course I could tell when they were standing next to each other that one was darker, but to look at my wife and then look at a picture of her mom in my mind’s eye, I wasn’t sure one way or the other.
I really wish someone could do a study on the difference in ability to distinguish skin tone between people who grew up in different environments. It may just bring about some semblance of understanding.
But that’s the thing. It makes sense that your mom (and my mom, and most moms) would have a “generic child list”. The issue here is that it reveals a “black student list” that is distinct from the “white student list” or the “Hispanic student list” and that that grouping seems to be the primary one in the instructor’s mind. It’s not making the mistake, it’s what the mistake reveals.
One of my jobs as prof is create an emotionally trusting classroom environment, so when I ask the students to challenge themselves (academically, socially, and personally) they can feel comfortable being vulnerable. It is my job to go above and beyond what is necessary or normal to do my best to set up that trust, which is required for them to stretch themselves in those ways.
My mom and friends don’t need to build trust with me, so when they make certain mistakes I already know that they value me. They also know what my sensitivities are and, hopefully, try to be nice about it.
My students don’t know that already and yet I demand a lot from them even before that trust is there. I don’t know them well yet either, so I don’t know what baggage they might be coming with. So yeah, I’ll go above and beyond to communicate to them that I don’t dismiss them or think they are simply stereotypes of people sitting in my class.
The thing is, skin tone is super, super convenient to use as an identifying category when you’re trying to remember someone’s name - it is right out in the open all the time (unlike, say, most tattoos or most scars) and it’s highly unlikely to change much (unlike hair color or hair style or jewelry or clothing or even facial hair). It’s actually one of the very few personal physical characteristics that’s unlikely to change appreciably in an adult. The only other one that’s especially relevant for associating people with their name is height - and height is miserably hard to judge with any accuracy except for the outliers (realistically, most people judge height by “lots shorter than me”, “about my height” and “lots taller than me”). Plus it’s the next thing to worthless for women - heel height can and often does change with some regularity.
I’ve had more than one really embarrassing conversation with someone who I totally failed to recognize (even though I should have) when they, for example, had a radically different hairstyle or hair color than the last time I saw them - or shaved off their facial hair. Nobody’s skin tone ever changes enough to screw with my already-tenuous ability to remember their freaking name. Even if someone gets a really, really deep tan - somehow that particular change in tone (which might be dramatic) is a whole lot easier for my brain to filter out than a drastic change in hair color or style.
I don’t think it’s just about skin tone, though. In my experience, people confuse light and dark skinned black people with each other and they almost never confuse Hispanic and Black people even when the coloring is quite close. Nor are Hispanic people often confused with people who identify as primarily white even when, again, the coloring is quite close.
Obviously, there are times when two people are mistaken for each other because they really, honestly look a lot alike, and while having the same racial background is part of that, it’s significant only because it leads to the physically similarity. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that race–not skin color, but race–is a big part of what most people remember about people they meet, and is often at the core of these confusions. And so yeah, if I were black and had a lifetime of non-black people mixing me up with other black people who looked less like me than many other non-black people in the same group, I’d find it really annoying at best, and, at worst, a sinister reminder that they saw me as fundamentally “other”.
Yes, that kind of mixup tells me something about the person who makes it.
I’m usually the only black woman in the office (or team or class) so it isn’t usually an issue. But for a few years, in a company about 60 people, there were two black women. We looked totally different. I was about 10 years older, 5 inches taller, and 50+ pounds heavier than she was. We had different hairstyles. We dressed differently. We had completely different personalities. On top of it all, we had different skin tones. And certain people who had worked with us for significant amounts of time would get us mixed up. They were not people who were generally bad at names and they didn’t seem to make similar mistakes with other people in the office who had features in common.
I think one thing that is important is whether you treat it like a big deal. When people tell you it bothers them, do you make a point to try not to do that? Or do you act like it’s no big deal and never attempt to fix the issue?
The biggest problem today in minority relations seems to be non-minorities thinking they get to decide what is and isn’t important. I hate the word privilege, but no one seems to have come up with a better way to describe the issue.
Christ alive, what a fucking crybaby. Here’s a thought, lady. Maybe you’re an asshole? Maybe people just don’t like you enough to care to remember your name?
And I’m sure confirmation bias isn’t playing any part in this at all. No, no, no. Perish the thought. I’m sure this woman keeps a constant running tally of the number of people who do remember her name and the number of people who don’t, and she never forgets a single instance of the former and never blows a single instance of the latter out of proportion.
Some people just live to complain. Unfortunately, they tend to be the loudest fucking people on God’s Earth. Idiots.
This has happened to me too. I remember it happening all the time in undergrad as well. It takes awhile getting used to.
I want to cosign everything that Manda said. Mixing up people who belong to the same race is not a sign of racism, but it is an indicator that people think racially, even when they don’t believe they do. It’s hard to take people seriously when they say “I don’t see color!” and then they mix me up with a black woman who looks nothing like me. Obviously it is an innocent mistake. But it does indicate how important race really is.
There are two Asian women who work in my building. Their offices are right across from each other. They work in the same department. But they look nothing alike. Their names are nothing alike. Alas, I’m always confusing their names, at least mentally. And I’m guessing they have the same difficulty distinguishing me and the other black chick. And that’s okay.
But folks need remember that something doesn’t have been done out of maliciousness to be annoying or exasperating. A member of a minority isn’t just dealing with people occasionally fucking up their name. They deal with a bunch of other stuff in addition to this. That’s why it can be considered a microaggression. A person who flips out over someone confusing them with some other X person isn’t necessarily hypersensitive. They may just be very very tired.
For the record, Cecil discusses: “Own-race bias” revisited: Do other races really look more alike? May 23, 2003.
TL;DR: White people learn to focus on certain facial characteristics, in which white people vary the most, to distinguish one person from another. These may not be the best facial characteristics by which to distinguish black people from one another, hence the notion that “those black people all look alike”. Black people learn to focus on certain facial characteristics, in which black people vary the most, to distinguish one person from another. These may not be the best facial characteristics by which to distinguish white people from one another, hence the notion that “those white people all look alike”.
But that’s irrelevant to situations like a semester long class, or years of working together. If the professor knows everyone else but the two black women by name, it’s not the same as not recognizing a salesperson from your last visit.
Like I said in the OP, some folks come down on the “too much butthurt” side of things.
So - that’s it? Butthurt folks get butthurt - end of story? How do you look at the situations we’ve heard described by folks in this thread where, after a semester in class or years at work, it is clearly something more? Or where teachers and professors discuss their own concerns about coming across that way, because it is easy to lose students if they think you don’t see them as individuals?
Hey, it becomes an issue when “the other one” gets credit for your good work or you get blame for his screw-ups.