All Y'all Look Alike

[eyez0nme]

A famous line delivered by Chris Tucker in Rush hour 2 to describe a misconception in most people that all Oriental Asians do look alike...

but let's think about this....


There are COUNTLESS shows made in europe and America that picture white families as having members that don't even remotely look like one another, yet no one bats an eyelid.

Yet if i was to say all White people look alike, A lot of people would highly disagree, and i think it would be fair to do so.

Again the same can be said for any race of people, (except for dwarves and midgets and maybe aboriginees who do for some reason all look alike j/k)

I'm trying to make a couple of points here

firstly, is the way we see the world and other races very naive especially when there is more reason for them to think of westerners in that way, yet we would find it more insulting if they did so.

secondly, do we all generalise that members of a single race look enough like one another so such a comment could be passed, or are people just being lazy and ignorant, and more importantly make fun of a subject that actually isn't so funny.

This topic is also slightly related to eyes airport screening thread which somehow implies that only asian muslim men within a certain age range are responsible for crimes, and also relates to the stopping of young black males inquiring about their recent whereabouts implying they were the cause of a crime, which has happened to me before.

It would seem when giving descriptions of people of other races, the whole world becomes kinda unobservant, and gives the vaguest of descriptions, where stereotypes then get used instead.

It came to me that not many people may have thought about this before so i thought i'd take the opportunity to bring it to light, thanks for the input in advance...

[eyez0nme]

In other words: All black people look alike, all mexican people look alike, all asian people look alike.

no white looks alike

[Monkey]

All whites look alike. In that we are white...

When you live abroad in a predominately different country/area like Africa or Asia, you will notice the differences more. Admittedly at first it is very easy to say that all Asians look alike, it's just that your brain hasn't warmed up it's pattern recognition yet for the new faces.

[Sardaukar]

I'm short-sighted, so everyone looks the same to me from a distance.

[Jay]

Nothing like a pointless thread.

Banstick!

[nice gaijin]

Actually Jay, this thread raises an interesting point; just because you bring nothing to the discussion doesn't make it pointless. This is definately not a new topic, but I don't recall it being discussed here.

I would like to bring up the thought that if people spend a lot of time with members of another culture or ethnic group, they are less likely to make comments like "y'all look alike." In a world where we separate people into groups based on their similarities, we tend to separate ourselves from people who are different, which makes it harder for us to distinguish the differences between members of those separate groups. I personally think that race classifications are moot, especially in a world where no group is truly isolated anymore. It's like saying that all christians look alike; it's such a sweeping generalization that it can't possibly be right.

As for profiling; there are a lot more factors involved than just race when giving a first-glance determination of whether someone is up to no good. I'm not absolving racism, but profiles do make preventative police work more efficient. If we treated everyone the same and conducted truly random searches, the real criminals would slip past while we're rummaging through grandma's suitcase.

[Jay]

Fine, so it does have a topic. I'll just go blend in with the wallpaper again. ----->

[Quartermaster]

I think it has to do with the hair style and that face markings-freckles for instance, may not be as readily apparent on a black. Dunno what to say about the others though.

[Pierrot le Fou]

When I first came to Japan, I had a REAL tough time differentiating people. Other than the fact that I was meeting hundreds of new people a day, the standards by which I distinguished people in the US don't tend to apply here.

How would you explain an American to another American? Race, eye color, hair color, height... Beyond that, we explain who they look like.

Well, here I ran into some problems. The answers to the first three questions would be 'Japanese, black, black' and that isn't very descriptive in differentiating people. Facial features and subtle differences that I'm not used to having to pay attention with on a first meeting completely evaded me for several months. Now I'm pretty comfortable with faces and whatnot.

On the flipside, Japanese people think I look like any white celebrity, regardless of whether or not I do, because I am big and white.

You adjust to distinguishing between people you see every day. If you haven't grown up with lots of Asian folk, it'll probably be a lot harder to tell them apart, not because they specifically look alike, but because we're not used to having to distinguish them, and the immersion shocks our senses of perception. The same is true in reverse for the Japanese.

[KujiInRetsu]

It's a given that a person of another ethnicity will not be able to tell the difference between people of your own ethnic group unless that person has been raised among enough people of your own ethnic group to know the difference. Hell, I've been born and raised in the United States so I know the difference between white people and Asians, I can also tell the difference between certain Hispanics and Blacks, even people from the Middle East, though in those three groups I do tend to notice more repeat facial patterns, but that is once again just me not having known that many people from that ethnic group.

If you do have trouble distinguishing between Asians, I can at least tell you this-- Koreans tend to have the most "colorful" hair, as in their hair tone tends to be more on the brown side than black, though they have plenty of black-haired ones too (I have seen Japanese and Chinese with equally colored hair, but I've seen that hair among the Koreans the most by far). My friend, who is white and doesn't seem to have lived among many Asians, can still differentiate between Asians, and when he watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, he commented that Cloud seemed to have been designed from a Korean face template, which on examination, seems to have some truth to it. Surprised the hell out of me when he said that, though.