The title is shit and confusing, so let me explain.
I’m a white latin american who lives in a latin american country, so in my environment there is very few asian people, in fact, in my region there is so few asians that if there is one in a friend group, they will automatically be “El chino” or “La china”.
Anyway, I understand there is a phenomenon that when ur not used to hang out with people from other races, you might see people from other specific race as “they look the same”. This is part of the reason why so many people in this part of the world thinks that “asians look the same” when that is absolutely not true. It might also happen that some asians also think all white people look the same. And yeah, in a limited genetic pool, many people will look similar.
Anyway, I like asian media and I consume Jpop, Kpop, and I’m starting to try and get into watching more dramas. The thing is when I face the “they look similar” barrier so I have a hard time differentiating people.
I can identify well for example the Black Pink girls, GIDLE girls, Mamamoo, half of the BTS members, etc, just to give you an idea, but sometimes I’m stuck playing a game of “Oh, this is X? No, I think that’s actually Y, nah, I’m wrong, really is Z”.
Is kinda stressful sometimes, not being able to differentiate people in dramas or groups and trying to hang on certain identifiable features to do not get me lost.
Is there a way to kinda “train” myself into identifying Asian people and differentiating them better?
I hope this post doesn’t sound racist, is not my intention at all. I’m just looking for some advice. Thanks.
Telling people apart is hard. White people all looks alike. Black people all look alike. Several groups of East-Asian people all look alike. It’s why the racists from yore had to write entire hooks on how to classify the different races of people, because it’s really not that obvious.
Recognising races is actually quite difficult, that’s why phones and their facial recognition took decades and still gets things wrong. iPhones use fancy 3D scans if your face to identify you because a picture of your face can easily be accidentally confused for someone who grew up in the same town as you.
Your brain learns to tell people apart based on arbitrary groups, and what makes specific people stand out from their group. If you’ve grown up around white people all your life and you only meet one Asian, that’s quite easy; that’s “the Asian guy”. When you meet a second Asian person, they become “the Asian guy with the round face” and “the Asian guy with the pointy face”. The more people you get to know and interact with, the easier you will learn to tell them apart. Meanwhile, you can tell white people apart by the delicate bone structure in their face and the dimples in their skin because of how similar they are to all the other people you talk to. The tendency for some races to have a small range of eye/hair colors doesn’t make things easy; they’ll have their own characteristics that will be obvious to them, of course.
Celebrities make telling them apart harder by having designed faces, expressions, and mannerisms, all made to look pretty and convey a certain attitude because that’s how they make money. Lots of people find people that look like Chris Hemsworth hot as hell, so the media attracts and promotes people that look like him, and suddenly you’re dealing with a bunch of copycats all making their stylists out-Chris-Hemsworth each other. Women are also often covered in more makeup than men, making distinguishing small features even harder.
Put Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Matt Damon in the same clothes with the same hair style, and it’d be thought to tell which one is which if you’re not an avid fan of one of any of those particular actors. They all have generic, pretty, white faces, because white people just look alike in general. This has actually been a problem for movies in which such actors are cast together, even among white audiences.
Nazis have had to take out tape measures to measure the sizes of people’s noses to show that they were Jewish, because apparently even the people obsessed with their “superior race” couldn’t tell their compatriots apart from the race they built an entire hate ideology for.
