To think it's wrong to say all people from a certain race look the same?

[pregahes]

Someone said this to me recently, AIBU or are they?

It's lazy thinking and bordering on racism.

Stereotyping an entire race by claiming they all look the same is not just ignorant but harmful in my opinion.

Recognising people out of context is really tough. If I'm used to seeing someone in certain clothes in a certain place if they appear somewhere completely different dressed differently I struggle to recognise them. Eg randomly coming across someone from work at a sporting event you didn't know they were into, you just won't necessarily click that they are the same person you see every day.

People you only see in sports kit suddenly appearing in a suit can be a big change too!

It’s not racism, it’s brain pruning. It’s biology.

People are very bad at recognising individuals of different races (unless they were around people of that race in the very early part of their lives). The brain literally prunes the neurons that would enable it to distinguish between the features of those of other races if these neural networks are not used early on (I.e if your main caretakers when you are a baby are not of the particular race in question then you will literally lose the ability to perceive differences in the faces of those of that race).

Study after study has shown that after babyhood, people of all races struggle with perceiving differences in the facial features of another race.

Add to this the fact that some races are less genetically diverse than others and objectively have less diversity in things like facial measurements, hair colour etc.

Biology and ignorance (ignorance in the sense that your friend isn’t distinguishing between her perception of the race in question and objective reality). Not racism though.

This

Omg sorry but ‘white people’ make such a fuss about everything these days. Your responsibility to solve by learning? ALL ‘races’ do this. People from different backgrounds get confused by white faces too and think they look the same. It’s a biological thing, not a racist thing. It’s just a thing. Not some thing to beat yourself with or white saviour yourself over about how you will learn and grow or some shit. It’s exactly the same as seeing two bald white English men and thinking they’re look the same. Obviously once you get to know them you’d easily be able to tell them apart. Obviously stating “all [fill the blank] look the same” is racist because someone saying this is trying to be dismissive. But that’s not the same as finding two people who have similar features and colouring difficult to differentiate against

Yer reckon?

I've known Japanese people and Chinese people who say that white people all look the same to them. So your Korean friend's opinion isn't necessarily universal.

It is wrong to say it and of course it's racist. I would add though that I have very poor facial recognition and often use hair as a distinguishing feature, so I can find it hard to tell people apart if they have similar hair or no hair and no major obvious differences. This applies to people of any race. White people usually have more variation in their natural hair colour than people of other races.

Where I live in Sydney it’s very multicultural and my kids school has a majority of children with Asian heritage. It did take me a little longer to remember who was who but once I knew the parents I was surprised to think I had ever found it difficult.
One of my close friends (Chinese) always mixes me and a friend up, and our children as we are both white women with shoulder length hair, although facially totally different! We laugh about it though and she says “you all look the same to me” 😁😁

However, something I found was that when we all had to wear masks, I was totally at sea as to my Asian friends - when you can only see hair and eyes it is much more difficult to tell people apart. I found it a bit hard with everyone but with my Asian friends I had to do a lot of pretending until it clicked or I heard them speak.

I'm white & grew up in the Middle East around people from many different countries, but I struggle with facial recognition due to autism- I've completely unintentionally blanked people I've known for years because I'm just not able to retain the memory of their facial features.

It’s not racism that you can’t tell the difference in a population. It is racism that you think there is no difference.

@C8H10N4O2 If that wasn't clear from my post, I will rephrase. The bias reflected the exposure of the programming to people from different races and therefore it couldn't find the markers to differentiate between people. I think in articles from the time, it points our that it reflected the bias in the computer programming industry which was mostly white and male and the area in which the programming was designed. The flaws were in the program but it is a similar point to people saying they lack experience differentiating between people of other races than their own.

I can easily tell most people apart, regardless of ethnic group. However, there is one exception for me - K-pop idols! My daughter is a huge fan and no matter how hard I try, I can't tell the difference between them. I think a lot of this is probably because of the way their hair is all styled the same and each band has a very curated look. Also, the way they are photographed probably has a lot to do with it. But to me, the girls are all incredibly similar and so are the boys. I'm sure if I met any of them, if would be different because they would have different voices, mannerisms, etc. But K-Pop is a very homogenous look, in my view.

As i said -its badly written software, badly trained models, bad testing, bad specification by a default west coast white frat boy mind set.

The problem is the assumption that the default human is white and male and the default ethical stance is white male frat boy.

There is no "was" about it - this has not changed. The default is still white and male.
Google fired their most effective advocates for fairness and equality in AI, Meta are even worse. Both (and the others are no better) build based on a set of values and sets of source data which assume white, male and usually middle class as the key inputs to the frameworks.

I’m Pakistani, so not that dark, automatic taps rarely work for me, the same with automatic soap dispensers. And my palms aren’t particularly dark, so I now have a habit of always taking a square of loo roll from the cubicle so wave under a tap/soap dispenser. They obviously use different technology to hand driers, as they’re always fine.

I wouldn’t care if someone said that about me but I’m not a minority. If someone said that to me in a country where I am a minority I would feel very unseen.

Not Racism - I'm not good at distinguishing the difference points of race X
Racism - People of race X all look the same.

Its not complicated.

I'd be interested to see the study which proves there is less genetic variation in some races. Every time I've seen a study claiming this it has either taken a very small sub set of the race in question, usually geographically constrained or it has used arbitrary points of difference based on the main white recognition points eg hair colour, eye colour etc and ignoring the markers used by members of different racial groups.

Every race has small subsets which are less genetically diverse if you look for them.

Sensors are not my area of expertise but I have a memory of driers using movement sensors rather than the inadequate optical sensors for skin in many handwash devices.

I've usually carried small tubes of my own hand wash in my bag, although in part that is due to sensitivity to some chemicals.

Sorry, but I highly doubt a Korean/Japanese person would struggle to differentiate between, say, Penelope Cruz and Tilda Swinton. Both Caucasian but complete opposites in terms of features.

Obviously differentiating between a group of all-blonde young women or old grey men (as a pp said upthread) might be more difficult, but there’s no denying that it’s the features that make people stand out, and on the whole Caucasians have a wider variety of natural features.

I teach in a primary school. I so often get the white boys with brown hair confused.

People often think my (white) DDs are twins. There are 2 years between them and look nothing alike to me.
Though Apple would disagree. They can unlock each other's iPhone with their faces.

It's a general phenomenon that people who are 'closer' to you in some way are easier to distinguish than those who are 'further away' in some way. So e.g. at work I have 3 bald middle age men who report to me. I have no trouble distinguishing between them. One of then has 3 twentysomething women reporting to him. I struggle to remember which is which. I mixed up two mums at school recently who both have very similar short grey haircuts. I've also done it to two men at work who are both from southern India, but I'd only spoken to them on zoom a couple of times and so got confused when I spoke to one of them face to face for the first time. It's so embarassing when I do it, I always think I must be making the other person feel so shit that they can remember me but I can't remember them.

I also really struggle when there are lots of women in a Hollywood film with long blond hair. Between the hair and the plastic surgery they tend to merge in appearance.

So, I think mixing up people is something we all do, but saying, e.g. 'black people all look the same' is clearly a racist thing to say.

@ace56 you forgot to add "in my humble Caucasian opinion". You clearly have no idea! It is absolutely possible to struggle to differentiate. White people don't have a monopoly on extreme variety - it just isn't to your eye.

Saying other races all look the same - but white people don't, as their features/hair is so varied... now that is racism. SMH.

There are six Chinese women in my team at work. Although some colleagues have got them mixed up I find them really easy to distinguish. They're actually quite different in terms of their facial features and build. Some petite but one is around 5ft 8.
At least two Chinese women have told me they think us westerners all look the same. I commented that we have a greater variety of hair colours and eye colours than Chinese women but they said they don't focus on these things. They look at facial features and they think westerners have similar pointy faces.
I think it all depends what you focus on. As westerners we tend to notice hair colour and styles but maybe Chinese/Japanese people study actual facial features more closely.

That makes sense

I work in a large, government office and get a number of my Caucasian colleagues with similar features and hair regularly mixed up with each other (I’m white myself). Now I’m middle aged (sob) I especially have trouble with some of the young women.