TOW #2

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

Rachel L. Swarns

The New York Times

            It seems like every week there is a new story about the police doing something they shouldn’t. This article focuses on the incident where an undercover New York Police officer tackled, handcuffed, and detained retired tennis star James Blake. Blake was mistaken for a suspect they had a picture of. Now this was not just a recount of the event as the author assumes the audience is already familiar with the incident. She wants to look beyond the obvious overuse of force and look into why Blake was misidentified in the first place. She states that most people see it as an example of “Racism, pure and simple” however there is phycology behind this misidentification and countless others. Phycologists call it the “other-race effect” where the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other racial groups makes more difficult for us to distinguish people of other races. The article starts off with a recent racial incident and Swarns then argues how it can be partially explained by a theory backed by prominent phycologists. To further her point she then employs two examples of famous people of the same race who often find themselves mixed up. But the reader doesn’t just have to take Swarns’s word for it, she shows the celebrities side by side. I can’t speak for everyone but I could definitely see myself confusing them and they don’t even look alike. Her argument and credibility are strengthened when she talks about how when she was a Washington correspondent she was often told how similar she looked to Condoleezza Rice (she then states that she doesn’t even look like her). Swarn wants to show how we shouldn’t be offended when we are confused with another person of our race because it is an issue of ability not “bias or bigotry.” However it is one that can be fixed, you just need to spend a lot of time with people of another race and your ability to “decode faces across color lines” will improve.” This was an extremely eye opening article that puts science where many have just seen racism.