Am i racist?
Can you tell one Korean apart from another, or distinguish a Chinese person from another Chinese person, or a Chinese person from a Korean? No?
The usual dinner with friends. I always leave these dinners with some food for thought.
It’s a safe space, where none of us feel judged or discriminated against, and so we feel very free to ask all sorts of questions, from everyday life to cultural differences.
Why do Indians shake their heads when they say yes, for example? Is it true that soy sauce makes your skin yellower? Are all Koreans surgically enhanced? (You’ll find the answers at the end of the article!) We ask the most absurd questions, feeling safe in this environment. I love them very much for this. I learn a lot, about them and about myself. It’s nice to ask questions like children do, without fear.
It all started with a mistake of mine. A blunder. One of those moments when you wish you could sink into the ground. I invited someone to an event, thinking, or rather being convinced, that it was M. While M. was introducing herself to others, I discovered that the person I had invited was actually G. Both of Asian/East Asian origin. I had mixed them up.
We joked about it with my friends, and I found out that it happens to everyone. And just as we Westerners confuse Asians, they confuse us. I mean, we all kind of look alike! For me, this was a shocking discovery.
Why do we confuse each other?
1. Lack of familiarity with that type of appearance. It’s called the "exposure effect." This phenomenon suggests that people tend to be better at recognizing faces from ethnicities they are more familiar with. For example, someone with greater exposure to Caucasian faces might find it more difficult to distinguish between Asian faces, and vice versa.
2. Facial and physical characteristics seem the same Skin color, eye and nose shape, body shape, hair color, and so on. Some studies have shown that people tend to categorize faces from different ethnicities into broader groups compared to faces from their own ethnicity. This can lead to less attention to individual details when observing faces from different ethnic groups.
So no, it’s not always a matter of bias linked to prejudice and stereotypes, but simply a matter of habit. We process information quickly to understand how to act, and this can lead to mistakes.
Answers to the questions!
- It’s a bit like gesturing for us, it emphasizes the "yes."
- No, but it's an inside joke among them: “you’re too yellow, eat less soy sauce.”
- South Korea, according to ISAPS statistics, ranks sixth in the number of plastic surgeons.
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