Explain this to me.
We have the Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Arabics. People within the same racial group are more likely to have similar physical characteristics. Similar shapes, colors, and facial features.
Therefore, if you see two or more people from the same racial group, and if you don’t know them well…you would probably have difficulty in distinguishing them.
Why is this viewed as racist?
According to whom?
Lots of people look alike.
It might be considered racist if you were to say “all Japs look the same to me.”
Which is different from “Japanese people look similar to one another and I mistook Aki for Yoshi!”
I’m not sure that it is. It’s ignorant, of course, and indicative of a lack of exposure to that racial group, but ignorance really only becomes a problem when it’s willful.
Now, what is a bit racist is to just shrug your shoulders and say “Eh, all <members of race> look alike, how is anyone supposed to tell the difference?”, instead of trying to learn more. Still, even that, in the grand scheme of things, is not nearly as bad as many other common forms of racism.
Only if they actually look alike. Just because two people are lumped into the same racial or ethnic category doesn’t mean they actually resemble one another.
You’re bringing up two different situations here. Confusing any two Asian or Arab or black people for each other is not racist, or it’s only going to be racist if there are some unusual circumstances around it. If your attitude is “all those people look alike to me” is likely to be considered racist because you’re not just saying you can’t tell any two black/Arab/Asian/whatever people apart, you’re implying you don’t care enough to make an effort.
I submit that one of the downfalls of growing up in a multiethnic state such as America is that we don’t need to be able to differentiate people from the same ethnicity as much, so our brains don’t learn how. Even if we were entirely caucasian in America, we would still compartmentalize people into “oh, he’s the Italian-looking one, he’s the Celtic-looking one, he’s the Nordic-looking one,” whereas people who grow up in Italy or Germany would be more natually able to tell people apart of their own ethnicities since they needed to in order to tell people apart growing up.
So it is not always the lack of desire but also the lack of ability that causes us to think that. It’s only racist when you also have no desire to differentiate them.
I suppose if one has a hard time distinguishing people of the same race it shows he is subconsciously emphasizing race as a characteristic. You don’t usually hear, “Oh, all short people look alike,” or “All red-haired people look alike,” or “All blond men with beards look alike.”
Many years ago I read a study about how we distinguish one person from another…what facial features our brains key in on in recognizing people. It turns out that there is the most variability in those features (sorry, don’t remember which) in Caucasian faces, followed by Blacks and then Asians. “They all look alike” may be a racist attitude, but there’s some truth behind the statement.
It’s not racist. It’s just untrue. People of different ethnicities simply identify each other by different cues. You might not be able to tell two Korean people apart, because the distinguishing characteristics you normally look for are absent - but that doesn’t mean they objectively do look alike.
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Did you grow up in America?
I ask because this makes absolutely no sense.
Almost all the American-born and raised people I know have few problems differentiating between two people who are Blacks or of European descent, and even usually people descended from the Indian sub-continent.
I admit I’ve sometimes seen issues with facial recognition for East and Southeast Asians and often with any cultural groups that have lots of facial hair, but this is the first time I’ve heard Americans can’t tell apart “Italian-looking” types. That just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I used to work where there was a high percentage of people of various Asian ethnicities. One day an Asian fellow (I think he was Taiwanese, but not sure) asked where a particular woman sat. Her name was something like Bridget O’Shaughnessy. She had pale, slightly freckled skin and red hair. “Oh, she’s the Irish one – at the end of that row over there.” My questioner had no concept of “Irish looking,” and responded, a bit sheepishly, “You all look alike to us.” The various Asians could tell immediately that someone was from China, Viet Nam, or Japan, but could not distinguish and Irish person from an Italian. Was he racist? I don’t think so.
That’s not true at all. It’s not like people from all ethnic groups are equally distributed around the country - there are some areas where you’ll find a lot of people with Irish ancestry, other areas with lots of people whose families are from Italy, and on and on. Anyway let’s get real here: I have never heard anyone say all white people or Arabs (not Arabics) or Hispanic or Latin people look alike. In my experience this kind of comment is made almost exclusively about Asians. If you’re white, you’re probably used to using hair and eye color as ways to identify people, and obviously that’s not something that will work in a group of people that generally has the same hair and eye color. It’s just a question of recognizing people different ways.
Very much this. As a prime example, you might be able to differentiate two white people by their hair color, or eye color; there’s a lot less variation in those in other ethnicities. The features that differentiate within an ethnicity vary and so looking for the cues that you use to identify someone within an ethnicity with which you’re common may or may not work for someone of a different ethnicity.
I think a good analogy for this would be music. It’s not uncommon to hear people say that all the works within a particular genre sound the same but someone who is familiar with it can describe specific aspects that differentiate sub-genres or artists.
I don’t think it’s racist to be unable to effectively distinguish individuals of an ethnicity or to admit that they look the same to you. I would, however, argue that it is quite racist to assert that they objectively look the same.
“Look at him, he runs like a Welshman!”
That one’s true.
Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?
I think it has to with seeing someone only for their race.
So, saying: “They all look the same to me.” is racist while saying, “I just figured out that Joe and Jack are two different people.” is not.
TALTSTM is basically saying all you need to know about a person is their race, and if they’re a certain race, you won’t bother to learn more.
Really? My wife of a good many years (and many good years besides) is Chinese and I hang out at events with lots of Asian people. While some of them claim to be able to identify Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans from [Han] Chinese, my history of testing this shows otherwise.
This game for us started on our honeymoon in Jamaica. My wife was going on and on about how badly those Japanese women were behaving, just because they were temporarily removed from their society and its restrictive social morality. Sure enough when we got close enough, they were all speaking Mandarin. Couple of years later a similar issue in San Francisco, where my mother-in-law was sure some folks were Vietnamese, but they turned out to be Chinese too.
This is entirely unsruprising, there has been a huge amount of migration and inter-marriage between these four countries (and actually Mongolia too) over the centuries.
I once downloaded a bunch of pictures from [horrible stereotype warning] from the physics department website of graduate students who were Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (based on their names) and my wife and a couple of her classmates did no better than random chance on picking them out correctly. Apparently some of the characteristic facial features of the Koreans wern’t so characteristic after all. Because before we started, they were quite willing to concede that the Japanese might be hard, but insisted that the Koreans should be easy.
Just refrain whenever you feel it coming.
If you tell everyone from one ethnicity they all look identical and make a clown face of amusement (however innocently and unwittingly), it is not received favorably and know that you are being an ignorant imbecile: it is a perceptual phenomena called “cross-race effect”.
Who’s this we, kemosabe?
In other words, did the study look at the brain responses for a cross-section of humanity, or just for whites? It makes sense that whites would mostly key in on the features that vary most among whites, since white people mostly see other white people. Someone who’s lived long in China, though, would probably key in on those traits that vary the most among Chinese.
A Kenyan friend of mine said white people all look alike to her.
Given the large amount of mental hardware dedicated to facial recognition I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the dominant facial structures you’re exposed to when you’re a kid become optimized. You may become very good at telling minute differences between the facial structures of people from a handful of ethnicities, but have more trouble with those you’re less familiar with. A face is a face, to a certain extent, and it’s the fine details which make a face into a person. Why would we be at all surprised at experiencing difficulty when exposed to a ethnicity we don’t have much experience with? We’ve got to re-train our brains to handle the general case before we’re any good at sussing out the specific.
Enjoy,
Steven