People of color commonly misidentified by co-workers
It happened again. Nicholas Pilapil got an email clearly meant for his co-worker, Jonathan Castanien. Previously, Pilapil had missed a meeting invitation because their white co-workers couldn’t tell them apart.
Sotheycameupwithacheeky way to address the problem. Between their desks, Pilapil and Castanien hung a sign that read, “This company has worked __ days without an incident. Incorrect names are avoidable.”
Whenever a co-worker called one by the other’s name, they would reset the count to zero. During the six months or so that the sign was up, the count never exceeded 14 days, Pilapil said. In total, they were misidentified about 50 times.
“It kind of makes you feel invisible, because they don’t know who you are even though you are putting in this hard work,” Pilapil said. “It was very shocking.”
Pilapil called Castanien his “work twin” — sarcastically, because they bear only a passing resemblance to each other. Aside from being in their 20s, they don’t share many characteristics: Pilapil is Filipino, has fuller lips, a squarer jaw and a darker complexion than Castanien, who is Vietnamese, Chinese and German.
While their cubicles were next to each other, Pilapil worked in communications and Castanien worked in public relations. The only thing that could have prompted their colleagues’ confusion, Pilapil says, was that they both had Asian heritage.
Pilapil and Castanien’s experience is common.
When we asked people of color on Twitter for stories about being misidentified in predominantly white places, more than 400 people replied, including a digital marketing consultant whose client
kept calling him by his gardener’s name and a professor whose student turned in a paper with the wrong professor’s name.
The implication is that, while white people are seen as individuals, other groups are often viewed as a monolith, with their race or ethnicity becoming the defining characteristic of who they are.
“If we just identify someone as a ‘black person,’ then that is how we are going to see them,” said Kareem Johnson, an associate professor of psychology at Temple University.
While many on the receiving end of this phenomenon say it’s another example of everyday racism, it does not necessarily indicate negative racial attitudes, Johnson said. Rather, it’s part of a larger cognitive problem called the cross-race effect — essentially, the impression that people of a race other than your own “all look the same.”
“We have much more difficulty recognizing people of a different racial group than we do our own,” he said.
The problem can also occur when a person’s name reflects their heritage. Johnson, who is one of a handful of African American professors in his department, says he is mistakenly called Hakeem or other names of similar ethnic origin.
White people also can be subjected to the cross-race effect in workplaces where they are in the minority.
That happened to Bill Watkins, a white man who taught English at a medical school in China in the early 1980s. When he returned to visit the school years later, a man he didn’t know approached him like a close friend.
“Bill, why didn’t you tell me you would be back?” Watkins recalled the man asking. “I would have come to meet you at the train station!”
After pretending to recognize him for a moment, Watkins realized he was being mistaken for another white teacher who also happened to be named Bill.
“I was amused that this would-be best friend would be confused for so long,” Watkins said.
But the racial demographics of the United States make that far less likely, given 65 percent of U.S. workers are white. And white people are far more visible in U.S. media, making all Americans more attuned to their physical differences.
While #Representationmatters has become a cultural force in demanding visibility for people of color in film and television in recent years, generations of Americans have grown up watching mostly white faces on screen and in speaking roles where they are given more depth and humanity.
“As a minority in America, you’re much more likely to get practice differentiating between white faces due to more exposure,” Johnson said.
While there are cognitive explanations for the “work twin” problem, these kinds of common, subtle slights, known as microaggressions, cause undue stress over time. Microaggressions — such as asking Asian Americans where they’re from or repeatedly mispronouncing a person’s name — make people of color permanent outsiders and create constant discomfort in offices, schools and other places.
“Study after study shows that there are negative compromises to well-being when people experience microaggressions,” said David Rivera, an associate professor at Queens College, City University of New York, who has studied microaggressions for more than a decade. “It’s the accumulation of microaggressions over the months and days and years that creates these compromises.”
This can lead to mental health issues such as depression, traumatic stress symptoms and suicidal ideation. It’s a particular problem in workplace hierarchies, which make it difficult to raise grievances over these slights, Rivera said.
“If you receive a microaggression from someone who is higher status, you likely have more to risk,” he said. “People tend to keep those microaggressions to themselves because they don’t want to be labeled as the troublemaker.”
Workplace microaggressions can have a ripple effect, too, endangering people beyond the direct target.
An Indian American doctor working at a Minneapolis hospital described a situation when a nurse mistook her identity while asking about a patient’s status. The nurse wanted to know whether it was OK for the patient who had liver disease to eat that day. Since the patient had no medical procedures scheduled, the doctor replied, “Yes, of course it is.”
But the nurse was asking about a different patient.
“Another woman who had liver disease was being taken care of by one of my colleagues, who I think looks nothing like me, but she’s Indian,” said the doctor, who requested anonymity to avoid violating patient privacy laws. “And she came in the workroom and said, ‘My patient couldn’t go down to biopsy because someone let her eat.’ ”
For those who experience cross-race effect frequently, psychological explanations can feel like a cold comfort.
Mandeep Singh, a 25-year-old Sikh man, is frequently confused for colleagues at the San Francisco tech company where he works, and he has made a point to call out anyone who confuses him for another brown-skinned co-worker, even when the vice president of his company made the error.
Singh said that he would like to see the company have a more open conversation with white co-workers about such microaggressions and the harm they cause to employees of color and the general office culture.
“I don’t think it needs to be a dramatic and controversial conversation, but I think that individuals need to understand why this happens and where it is coming from,” Singh said. “If an organization wants to be respectful, this is part of the conversation that people need to have.”