I feel ashamed of myself. I know that ‘they all look the same to me’ is a horrible form of racism
Dear Ms Understanding,
I’m a white European woman in my late 70s who was brought up to know that racism was wrong. This was pretty theoretical, because I never came across any black people till I was in my30s. Now I live in a thoroughly multiracial, multicultural city, and in the last 20 years or so of my working life worked with many black colleagues whom I liked and are esteemed. There were some outside work social contacts, but all of my lasting friendships have been with white people.
I have been aware for some time that I very often don’t recognise nonEuropean acquaintances when I meet them out of context. For example, I have a black neighbour who is very friendly (he works and I’m retired, so we don’t bump into each other that often) and we have chatted in the street several times. A few months ago, I ran into him in a cafe in town and he greeted me, and I didn’t know who he was. I have Chinese neighbours too, and we are on friendly terms, but when I met them in a supermarket I didn’t recognise them. Recently I went to a social gathering of a few retired female colleagues, and one of them was Mary, a black colleague who was my first trainee. She is a lovely person, who did really well in our profession, and there has always been real warmth between us. I DID recognise her, and we had a good hug when she came into the room. She was accompanied by another black woman, whom I assumed was also a retired colleague, and I greeted her enthusiastically too. It turned I didn’t know her at all.
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These are only examples – I know I do this a lot. I feel really ashamed of myself. I know that “they all look the same to me” is a horrible form of racism. I know that growing up in my generation, in a wholly white family and society, I have absorbed forms of racism, but in my conscious awareness I have welcomed the development of our multiracial, multicultural society and valued the contacts I’ve have with people from other races.
Dear Embarrassed,
I have to admit I giggled nervously
as I read your letter, and I thought of my dear late mother who had real trouble keeping white people’s faces straight in her head. It was especially acute when we were watching movies. She couldn’t tell the good guy from the bad guy and had no idea which white woman was the romantic lead, and which one was the awkward sister. Every time there was a new scene, she’d be asking, “Now which one is that?”
My mother didn’t grow up around a whole lot of white people, so different colour eyes and hair colour weren’t really a point of reference. She had no problem recognising her white friends – people she had worked with and visited and so on. However, like you, she was never very good at out-of-context encounters.
Your (and my mother’s) experiences are referred to in social science research as the own race bias (ORB) or the “cross race effect”. It’s been studied, it’s real; and yes, I can imagine it is very embarrassing for you and extremely irritating for the Black and Asian people you are encountering and repeatedly misrecognising, especially your neighbours.
Cognitive studies show that people who belong to a particular ethnic group tend to recognise one another more easily than people who aren’t in their group. Multiple experiments have shown that “ORB is a reliable phenomenon across cultural and racial groups where unfamiliar faces from other races are usually remembered more poorly than own-race faces.” Of course, the other race effect isn’t so much racial as it is about habituation. So, for example, studies of Korean children adopted by white American parents during early childhood show that they recognise white faces more easily than Korean faces. In other words, once they are surrounded by white faces, they learn quickly to recognise those faces and see them as their “own race.” The same holds true for people from ethnic minority groups, who typically are better at recognising the faces of people in dominant groups. However, in very diverse societies such as Malaysia and Singapore, there are high degrees of facial recognition across ethnic groups because of daily exposure.
The preponderance of evidence, then, shows that the more exposed we are to different faces from a range of ethnic groups, the more easily we will recognise people and differentiate between people who are of the same race. In other words, the cross-race effect seems to be both a function of in-group familiarity and cross-group power.
The problem with all this misrecognition of course is that it isn’t always benign, and is often intertwined with racial animosity. Sometimes the inability to differentiate other faces is an indicator of racist views. At a more systemic level the mistakes made by people from dominant groups often result in significant problems for ethnic minorities. In the workplace, for example, it’s hard to climb the corporate ladder if you are constantly being called by someone else’s name. And even more profoundly, the stakes get very high when victims of crimes who are from a dominant group accuse innocent people from a minority ethnic group because they have trouble keeping the faces of people from “another race” clear.
Now, let’s focus on what you can do at an individual level. You can’t help your upbringing but, as one researcher has noted, “race biases in perception are malleable and subject to individual motivations and goals”. Remember, having a race bias in perception doesn’t make you racist, but it can certainly have highly problematic effects. The good news is that you can work on learning to individuate the faces of people from ethnic minority groups who live in and around you. These days there are so many social media accounts run by interesting and entertaining people from all over the world. Follow lots of people and keep track of their content, read magazines that profile stories and images of people from different ethnic groups, and attend cultural events. If you’re not into social media, go to bustling high streets in multicultural neighbourhoods, support a local business by sitting down for a meal. You can spend a few hours people-watching in a leisurely way, the way you might in any cool neighbourhood.
As my mother got older, she also got more honest. Sometimes, she’d laugh and say, “Sorry I didn’t recognise you, sometimes I find it hard to tell white people apart.” In a context in which this sort of admission is rarely spoken out loud, and because she was the Black person in the scenario, this was often disarming. Her interlocutor would usually laugh, and my mother would charm her way out of the situation.
For obvious reasons, I would not propose that you take this approach! Still, as you build up your capacity to tell the faces of people who aren’t white apart, you’ll need a short-term strategy to avoid humiliating those who are likely offended by the fact that you still don’t recognise them after several encounters. I suggest you say, “I’m sorry, I think we might know each other but I’m terrible with faces. Remind me how we know each other?”
Good luck!
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