Does being faceblind make you racist?

Post Reply New Topic

We all do it, so do I and yes its totally annoying and makes you feel like a jerk but I simply cannot not remember peoples names or faces without drilling it my head for ages or meeting/seeing them allot, like if I only meet them once in a while I will probably forget but for the most part I have more troubles with names.

No, not at all. I have a weird thing -- I'm faceblind about white men with shaved heads! (I'm a white woman, so that's one for the books, hahah!) I have a terrible time telling white bald men apart, seriously. Particularly if they are young. Older men with shaved heads seem to have developed enough distinctive face wrinkles and other imperfections that my memory has something to grab onto to differentiate between them.

But young white men who shave their heads ALL look the same to me, all of them. They all look like clones and I honestly can't see any differences in their facial features. And they're my own ethnicity/race, so you would think I'd be more attuned to my own bunch of people more than anything else. This is just something visual that your brain can't help, not deliberate racism.

.

i guess from the you all look alike to me thing i'm guilty. i'm very face blind. and don't care about what color someone is. so i can see how that could be offensive. but of course at the same time i don't think one race is better than the other, no def not prejudiced in that way.

I'm a little face-blind too, but not enough for it to be a problem. Once in a while, I might think that two look-alikes are the same person; but that's usually only if they have the same hair color, hair style, eye color, skin color, facial hair or lack thereof, basic facial dimensions, degree of skin wrinklage, and degree of frecklage. Someone's size, shape, and clothing preferences can also help me to identify them. It's generally easier for me to tell whites apart than people of other races though, because there's more variation in hair color and eye color. I imagine that NTs just instinctively catalog the profiles of faces, rather than the specific details like I do. It's not instinctive for me, it's just a function of my photographic memory. I catalog faces in the same way that I catalog species of birds.

Hi, thanks for all the replies - btw it wasn't that I mistook black woman for white woman it was that I got two black women mixed up. I'm pretty sure they had the same hair cut and for sure had the same uniform, but I could see it upset her a little and made me feel bad. But like I said, she turned out to be really nice and got over it quickly.

Face blindnesss sucks!

That elephant is certainly happy to be alive.

Yeah.

I always feel worse when I confuse two black people because of the whole "they all look the same" being an actual racist thing as well as being a cognitive bias that may not even link to racism (I found an article last night, but I forgot to save the link).

Thing is though we can't help being faceblind and being faceblind isn't racist.

Hi Verdandi! How ya doing?

You are right, but they don't know that unless we tell them. I don't care so much if they mistake me for a jerk, I just don't want to make them feel bad.

Yeah, totally.

I am never sure how to answer "how are you doing?" anymore.

Here is an interesting article for you to consider on this issue:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/neur ... look-alike

I'm sorry, I forgot that's not a good thing to ask around here. It's ok you don't have to answer, I just haven't talked to you for a while. I don't think our paths have been crossing much.

Wozeree don't worry- if people think you're racist because you once didn't recognise them, they are narrow minded and obsessed with the fact they're not caucasian, believing anything bad that happens is because of their race.

I made myself look like a racist once in front of a bus load of listening people. Actually, it must've been quite funny for them to overhear haha

I got on the bus and saw a friend who 'happens to be black' lol (I'm white btw). I know her through my close friends and we've had a few proper conversations and a LOT of chit-chat type group conversations. Anyway, it was someone I definitely should have recognised so I smiled and walked straight up to her, sat down and started the obligatory "how are you?" chat. She looked at me totally blankly and said "do I know you?". It turned out to be her sister, who insisted she has NEVER been told they look alike! I still can't tell her and her sis apart when she posts Facebook pics together because they really do look identical to me, not because they're black though!

At least that gave me a bit of insight into how I recognise faces- through noticing some genetic traits etc, their "aura", face shape and body language. I often find it hard to distinguish between siblings who have the same hair colour/style etc. I didn't know what face-blindness was then :/

Oh no, it's just lately things have been ridiculously complex.

Like before even when I had to answer with lots of detail I could make sense of it. Right now not so much.

This doesn't actually reflect reality. The demographic most likely to blame their gender, race, etc. for any problems they experience are the same people least likely to experience such problems - that is to say, in the case of racism, white people. There have been actual studies and in general, people of color are much less likely to attribute problems to discrimination than white people are.

Like this thread isn't even about anyone calling the OP racist, just about anxiety over appearing to be racist because of faceblindness.

I'm interested by this thread as have always had problems with faces. One of my scariest moments was my son's first day at school when all these small boys came out of class in identical clothes and I had no clue which one was mine! Thankfully he knew which was his mum.

Thanks for your comment- that's what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear- that the OP shouldn't take on that persons ignorance as their own guilt, if indeed that shop assistant DID think it was racist. It is NOT racist, so don't worry about what they think. IMO Racism is making a judgement about someone based purely on their race.

Also, I should have said "the majority race in that location", not "caucasian", it's just that the majority of people where I live are White, and In my childhood (before mass immigration in the last few years) in the north-east of England I hardly EVER saw anyone who wasn't White, but I still had no judgement when I did meet a black or asian person. I have more recently been called a "milky" in an majority Asian area of the city and I laughed at the irony of how I'd never, EVER call them a "darky" or something, and if I did I'd probably get arrested!

My comment was probably based on the way the media always shows the "is it coz I is black?" stereotype, as if it's an automatic protective response when they don't get what they want, especially adopted by African Americans on tv, because they HAD to fight against serious racism since slavery.

As a ginger person you would not believe how many extreme, sometime threatening comments I receive (or overhear when I have dyed my hair), yet nobody in this country sees this as wrong or taboo! I know what it's like to be abused in the street based purely on colouring, but I just feel sorry for those idiots, not for myself, and I CAN take a joke about having no soul or whatever coz it's funny! Stereotypes usually have some truth to them (nigerians are more likely to be late, Russians show no emotion, Germans don't want to talk about the war haha) and we just have to remember that they are just very exaggerated generalisations based on characters in the media etc. Having ginger hair may have made me less likely to get jobs etc because people sometimes even shudder or even have phobias of my hair colour (I really have experienced this first hand!), but I'd never assume I didn't get a job or was being treated differently because of my hair colour unless someone gave me a specific reason to think that ie. if they said it. I have also experienced old black women "protecting" me on buses etc, saying things like "come over here and get away from those black boys. You should be careful, they only respect black women because we know how to control them", because I was White and living in brixton (a majority black area in london) ...so people can be racist against their own too!

Oh and I also remember having a MASSIVE problem telling white boys/men with shaved heads apart when I was younger, and they were the majority of boys in my school! Still find it hard but I found other ways to remember faces as I got older.