Photo gaffe shows need for accountability
Last week the Toronto Sun weighed in on the highly talked about diss-tracks between Kendrick Lamar, Drake and to a smaller extent J. Cole. All three are revered rap icons with name-brand recognition that transcends the world of hip hop. Yet somehow the paper published online an image of a random Black guy instead of Lamar.
After receiving a few disdainful chuckles, the paper corrected the error.
The intention or thought process or lack thereof that led to this mistake is irrelevant in the big picture. What matters is how frequently this happens to Black people, how dangerously high the stakes can get and why, therefore, everybody needs to be doubly accountable for confusing Black people for one another.
There was Octavia Spencer mistakenly identified as Viola Davis by E! News at the Academy Awards in 2013. Oops! Three years later, same awards, different duo. Whoopi Goldberg, confused for Oprah by Total Beauty magazine. Oops! Another three years later, a Who Australia magazine profiled South Sudanese-Australian model Adut Akech Bior but — oops! — it ran with the photo of Flavia Lazarus, a Ugandan-Australian model instead.
“Big publications need to make sure that they fact check things before publishing them, especially when it’s real stories and interviews and not just some made up rumors,” Akech wrote on Instagram then.
This phenomenon of mistaking people for one another is not limited to Black people. In 2017 a CBC host mistook Sikh Liberal minister Navdeep Bains for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in a tweet that she hurriedly deleted.
People of all races can be mistaken for one another. The Cross-Race Effect (CRE) in face recognition is well-known by researchers who have repeatedly found humans are simply better at recognizing faces from their own race compared to those from other races, and find it easier to distinguish features from people of their own race.
That such examples of wrong photos of white celebrities don’t abound is more about how majority-white the media is than of deliberate racism by an individual. But over time and space, many such “oopsies” cluster together to send a reductive message to those at the receiving end: you are no more than your skin colour.
I’ve seen people mistakenly — and repeatedly — call one person by another’s name. I’ve heard bosses mixing up Black employees when discussing their career prospects or cutting off options for one employee because another person of the same race fumbled. I’ve heard of one boss angrily confronting a junior brown colleague because he confused her for another brown staffer he had sacked.
This interchangeability of Black and brown people means we are often not seen as individuals. It explains why a mistake by one of us may not be treated as a one-off and is likely taken more seriously because even our mistakes don’t belong to us as individuals, they are added to a pile made by the group as a whole.
In my own life, I’ve been called by many other brown women’s names. Just the other day I got an email addressed “Dear Rita”; it mistook me for the Globe and Mail’s Rita Trichur. A long-ago former colleague insisted on calling me Steve even after being corrected. (Since we unkindly called him Gollum behind his back that particular instance kind of balanced itself out.)
Well into the school year, an elementary school teacher who had called me in to complain about my kid, stood in class waiting for me with an arm around another brown kid. A year later I saw her scolding and dragging a little brown girl to after-school daycare, only to find out she had the wrong child. I shudder to think if there are children being wrongly penalized because she can’t tell one apart from another.
For people treated like a blur of melanin, “oops” has a long tail with a poisonous lash.
A “mistaken identity” by Toronto police in 2021 led to a violent takedown of student Hasani O’Gilvie, leading to severe emotional and physical trauma.
In February this year, Ottawa man Kane Niyondagara was tackled to the ground, beaten and arrested by police after someone misidentified him as a suspect.
In courts, jurors value eyewitnesses, but researchers advocate caution when such witnesses — whether they’ve seen an incident or are picking a suspect from a lineup — are of a different race. Black men have been wrongly convicted of various crimes after being “mistakenly” identified as perpetrators.
Little wonder then that actor Samuel L. Jackson’s reaming out a Los Angeles TV anchor who confused him for Laurence Fishburne in a commercial a decade ago still resonates.
“I’m the other Black guy,” he said caustically as anchor Sam Rubin all but crumbled. “I’m the ‘What’s in your wallet’ Black guy,” he said referencing a credit card commercial he featured in. “He (Fishburne) is the car Black guy. Morgan Freeman is the other credit card Black guy … And I’ve actually never done a McDonald’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial either. I know that’s surprising. And I’m the only Black guy in ‘RoboCop’ that’s not a criminal.”
Were it that ruthless wit alone could protect people from all these “oopsies.”