As many of you know, I am a high school English teacher.
Today, I was standing in homeroom, bored, waiting for the dismissal bell to ring, and I looked down an aisle of desks.
Three girls, in a row, had on the exact same shoes.
Except, they didn't.
On second glance, I realized that the shoes were all slipper-like and they were all the same tan color and they all had a puffy roll of wool around the openings. For three girls to have on identical shoes (on "casual day" -- our school usually has uniforms) seemed weird, so I looked at them again, more closely, and I noticed the treads were slightly different. Also, while two pairs had a seam running across the top, one didn't. Quite simply, they were not the same.
My brain was doing its thing -- trying to draw the quickest conclusion. In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, he explores the value of conclusions like this. Sometimes, snap-judgment is great and it can even be more accurate than scientific study -- but it can have its downside, as well.
Can this "shoe incident" be connected, in any way, to prejudice?
I remember, years ago, Samuel L. Jackson, in an interview, getting very angry because an interviewer (a white guy) confused him with Laurence Fishburn (another Black actor). Jackson quipped: "We don't all look alike. We may all be Black and famous, but we don't all look alike." The interviewer, making every attempt at maintaining a shred of dignity, apologized for his mistake but he did try to mitigate his response -- implying it wasn't just because they were both Black actors; there was something about another commerical that ran during the Superbowl, blah, blah, blah. (I dunno -- I didn't look into that, as far as its validity.)
Still, excuses aside, it doesn't sit well with people of color or of Asian descent to be confused for one another, in my observation. And, in Jackson's case, as an artist, it must have been doubly annoying to simply have his work confused with that of another actor -- socio-racial issues aside.
But I think the whole thing bears a little more exploration.
(And, of course, we need to keep in mind that this is written by a white guy trying to understand things that affect people of color. I welcome discussion and dissent to whatever I say here. I have been taught many a lesson by people who have experienced things that I have not, and I welcome those lessons.)
At my old school, we had two fine young men, both Black, both large -- tall and broad-shouldered -- both football players (so, often, in their uniform shirts before games) and they both styled their hair the same way. A colleague used to confuse
the two all of the time. For months, the good-natured fellows (and they really were two of the most likeable guys I have ever taught) sort of laughed it off, but, gradually, they became more annoyed, until one finally mentioned that he had had quite enough of it.
But, is there any racism in this? Well, there can be, theoretically, for sure -- in the concept, not in my former colleague, by the way. When I thought all of my students' shoes were exactly alike, until a second look, who was I hurting? And...the brain does this.
I learned in psycholinguistics, as an undergrad, that the brain, in categorizing and labeling, compares everything it sees to every other thing it has ever seen, in a fraction of a second, before sending the message to the mouth to say, for example: "book." It happens fast, and sometimes it needs to. So, can it also be a simple case of identification keys? Well, yes, psycholinguistically speaking, but we need to be careful.
I have a ton of white young men and women, as students, who wear their hair the same as each other's and, as I am at Catholic school, they are all in uniform. I confuse them all of the time. I'm white, so it would be genuinely impossible to label that as racism, right? If I confuse two Black students, it's, to me, the same thing as with my white students. With the white kids, I am seeing white skin, poofy hair. and...maybe...glasses. Two kids with those characteristics are very easy to confuse. Does this change if the students are Black or Latino? Not empirically, no. At least, not for me.
Unless the observer is actually racist. I think its about the cause of the confusion.
In the case of Samuel L. Jackson, the interviewer was the sole entertainment reporter for the TV station. He was supposed to be prepared. A snap-comparison should have been off the table. His facile confusion of the two might signal something deeper than a mere mistake. (Would he have confused Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds?) Jackson went after him for blowing this, even though his "one job" is entertainment reporting. Smells faintly race-ey to me.
The bottom line is that all people of a given racial background do not, in fact, look alike. But we do have to understand that the brain reaches for commonalities when it identifies people or things, so confusion might be understandable. Those shoes, at first glance, were identical in my impression. I had to actually spend a moment examining them to see the multiple differences. If two individuals have similar skin tone (whatever that tone might be), similar hair styles and similar fashion choices, confusion is possible without deeper sinister tendencies.
But there is pure confusion and there is impure confusion, especially where race is a concerned.