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kaigou[If you haven't read the other posts in this ongoing conversation-with-myself, you'll probably find it helpful to do so, to get some of the context before reading this post.]
The first, and maybe most important, thing to keep in mind (even if it did take me awhile to figure this out) is that absence of a thing does not automatically indicate presence of something else. I know, that's basic logic, but still. It's easy to forget.
The second is that if what you're about to read strikes you at any point as wrong, or wrong-headed, or simply not-okay to think... I get that. Chances are, I agree with you. But I also think that sometimes, you have to say the stupid thing out loud to fully grasp the depth of stupidity. Yes, there's that whole thing about needing to pull up your pants, but I think sometimes that reminder/colloquialism is misinterpreted (willfully or no) as a message to simply not speak of this. To cram the reaction or statements down somewhere, hide that ignorance away lest everyone see clearly that we retain some ingrained ignorance.
But this is something I can tell I need to work out, to understand what's going on in my brain, before I can understand what it means, let alone what to do about it. If saying it aloud (typing it aloud?) here gets me farther along to see any wrongness, then I'm willing to take the chance of looking like an idiot. If the alternative is denying a possible flaw, I'd rather look like an idiot. At least the second can be fixed, but the first never would be.
This all began around the midpoint of watching Hong Gil Dong. If you read/recall the demonstration of belated recognition I gave in the second post in this string, then what I'm talking about is the reverse of that ahah! moment.
To describe: I had watched Kang Ji Hwan through myriad emotions, for easily eight hours, and then suddenly, halfway through a scene... his face stopped making sense. It lost all familiarity. It's not that it was suddenly strange -- as in, bizarre, or inexplicable. It was just that it was... no longer the face I'd been watching. Like having an emotional context of a good friend, but then suddenly -- oh, how to put it? Like talking to someone and suddenly you simply can't place their face; abruptly it has no emotional resonance for you, so none of the expressions have any deeper meaning for you.
That only sort of gets at the sensation, which in some respects just plain felt like a chunk of my brain must've fallen out. Kang's face simply stopped making sense. But why? What had changed? What was I seeing, that hadn't been there, or what had I been seeing that I couldn't, suddenly?
That sensation of not-making-sense flittered in and out with the lead actors (Kang and Sung Yu Ri), but never quite as abruptly or as thoroughly as that mid-point scene. What happened next was mostly around older actor-faces, while watching a jdrama Abe (Hiroshi) vehicle, Shinzanmono. Something kept tickling at the back of my brain, until I went and snagged two pictures for (somewhat) comparison.
Guy on left: Japanese. Guy on right: English-Scottish-Dutch.
I'm not saying that Abe started looking Anglo, only that I found myself asking: if eye-shape is in some way disguised or altered by the way faces change as we age -- crow's feet at the corners, the droop of the brow, etc -- and if eye-size (how much eyeball you can see around the iris) has little to do with an epicanthal fold... then what else identifies? I mean, Eastwood's always had that hundred-mile squint, but Abe's eyes are clear and open... and that got me looking closely at eye-size of nearly every actor who appeared on-screen.
[Note: before anyone knee-jerks on me, I am not saying that eye-shape is the only identifier. There are significant other aspects in facial structure that can/may indicate Asian ethnicities, but for the next bit, allow me to retrace my thoughts before I get back to reiterating that point.]
If it seems odd to emphasize the eyes, it's because tapped into the dreaded "they can't be Japanese if they have big eyes" hoohah. Comparing faces like, say, Abe and Eastwood, I hope it'll be pretty obvious that eye-size is, well, completely a strawman, or red herring, or whatever the fallacy-name is. That it's entirely possible to have big gorgeous eyes; white people have hardly cornered the market in that facial detail.
If you search for youtube videos discussing the "big eyes in anime = white faces" rigamarole, there's one video that discusses what else in animated faces defines or indicates a Japanese face, outside of eye-shape, eye-color, or even eye-size. (My google-fu sucks today, or I'd link, sorry.) That particular video-maker has several astute observations about depth-of-profile, brow-line, cheekbones, jawlines, and so on, and makes a strong persuasive argument that the (illustrated) eye-shape isn't the entirety of defining ethnicity.
Which is a big fat duh, of course, but it's one I think had been stored in my brain in a box called "issues related to watching anime" and never extrapolated further. But first, more chronology of the thought process.
Anyway, those thoughts come and go and then I'll be distracted by the storyline (and Shinzanmono is slow to unfold but my favorite kind of involved storytelling all the same)... so I didn't really revisit these strange momentary side-thoughts until early in watching My Girlfriend is a Gumiho.
Here's where you'll need to bear with me, and understand that I was a bit freaked myself: I was watching Shin Min Ah, and abruptly her face lost all familiarity, just like had happened with Kang's face, in Hong Gil Dong. But by this point, I'd also been reading a variety of posts on dramabeans, Ask a Korean and the Grand Narrative -- mostly as three (among many) resources for figuring out intricate cultural details like, "why all the piggy-back rides?" and other mysteries of the ages. Other tidbits were seeping in, though, like the obsession Korean women have (and this in common with Japanese women, it seems) with that kind of eye-surgery that creates a double-lid.
The instant that Shin Min Ah (who played Miho) stopped looking familiar, several thoughts went through my head in rapid succession, as I tried to figure out what (and why) part of my brain had stopped processing the images on the screen. My first thought was: am I suddenly mis-seeing her face because she's had that plastic surgery? Maybe that's why her face stopped-making-sense for a bit there, because I was picking up on the fact that something had been changed, somewhere, that I could only register on an unconscious level?
Immediately on the tails of that, I thought: brain, that is one of the stupidest questions you've ever asked.
But still... her face just suddenly looked so... No, this is not where I say "normal" (and if you're feeling a flash of irritation, trust me, I already got it from CP, for reasons now obvious). I'm in no way saying that Shin Min Ah (or anyone else in any of the East Asian dramas) had at any point looked abnormal, or even unusual, let alone exotic. To get to the nitty-gritty: the shape of her eyes was no longer pinging on my radar.
Okay, then. But then, I asked myself, what does she look like? This is where I repeat that absence does not equal presence. She didn't start looking Anglo, or Hispanic, or whatever else -- there were still far too many cues (even in a static image) that said, very clearly: Korean woman. None of the faces had a combination of signifiers that would tell me, unequivocally, that I was seeing an Anglo face; everything else still signaled an Asian face: jawline, cheekbone, nose, lips. That was also when I posted about the visual similarity of, and mistaking for, a (male) Korean face with a (female) Scottish-Irish-Dutch face, and under the male/female cross-mistake hid this larger puzzle.
To make this perfectly clear: I am not saying any face onscreen shifted from not-normal to normal. Far from it. I'm saying that I think the action of change wasn't in the quality of seen faces, but in my brain's processing. If anything got normalized suddenly, it was me. Or maybe I should say: my brain got recalibrated.
Let's go back to the anime big-eyes debate: that argument (by non-Asian viewers) pivots on a single aspect of the face, the shape of the eyes. For any illustrated face, the logic is saying, to lack that identifying feature is to therefore to wipe the face of all Asian-ness. In other words, if the eyes aren't shaped like this specific way, then the person isn't Asian at all, ergo, they must be white -- it's absence causing presence. (Alternately, it's arguing that whiteness is an absence of anything else, and that's an entire problematic post/perspective in and of itself, but you can see it hiding in there.)
In the previous post, I mentioned that living with CP has affected me (as concerns faces) in two ways; this would be the other way. Not entirely by example but definitely by exposure, I've learned to see that cheekbones and jawlines and brow-lines and so on are also crucial facets of ethnicity. What I hadn't learned -- what took me so long to learn -- is to see those facets regardless of the eye-shape.
For each ethnicity, it seems (to me) that white-USian culture has certain requirements you have to meet to make the white-USian twig on an ethnicity. Skin color, eye shape, build, eye color, whatever. The result is that if you lack the specific trigger for an ethnicity, you'll get the "you don't look ___" -- even if you have sixteen other features that all scream a specific ethnicity. Wrong nose! Wrong eye-color! Wrong skin-tone! Wrong hair-texture! Without that single main detail, people won't even treat you as, well, whatever you really are.
The second part of this is that white-USian culture -- by using these single identifiers -- teaches/allows its members to see nothing else. In other words: so long as someone satisfies the basic requirement of this one feature (that signals an ethnicity), then no other features are measured. Maybe no other features are even noticed at all. This hair, that nose, these eyes, and then you get the, "but aren't you ___?" reaction. Why? Just because the hair is kinky-curly, or the nose is this shape, or the skin is this pale? Well, basically, yeah. That one feature checks off the mental box and voila, the person viewed is categorized as ___ and will probably never be re-classified, because that's settled.
What took me a long time to figure out was that in watching so many dramas, somewhere in there, my brain said: "there is no reason to pay attention to this one single detail any longer." Eye-shape, in this case, became something that didn't require the focus -- that "aren't you ___" categorization -- to understand the face I was seeing. When I say recalibrated, my theory of the strange leap in my head from seeing to not-seeing was because my brain finally stopped putting eye-shape at the top of the list.
I think that's a crucial leap. I haven't a clue as to whether anyone else goes through this, or has ever gone through similar, or if I'm just hyper-aware as a result of already knowing I'm someone who always has belated recognition of familiar faces... so it's possible this is entirely just me. But if not, then, there it is: dark brown-black skin may be a signal that a person is of African ancestry, and an epicanthal fold may indicate Asian ancestry. But to differentiate within those two incredibly broad and diverse labels requires, in a way, ignoring the big honking white-USian preferred-marker (skin color, eyes, hair, nose) and seeing everything else.
But again, to catch anyone before yet another kneejerk, I'm not talking about erasing a feature, or pretending like it can be ignored. That would be the other extreme -- that of the ridiculous notion of 'color-blindness' (in re ethnicity) -- in which people steadfastly pretend they can disregard someone's ethnicity. Any ethnicity, and thereby turn this forced absence into a pseudo-presence of whiteness, to be perfectly blunt.
[This is probably inarticulate, and I apologize, but multiple revisions haven't gotten me any more coherent on something I'm mostly fumbling around on, because... well, to be honest, I can't recall any conversations online or off about this single-marker aspect of USian white culture other-identification. It's probably out there, but I haven't found it, so I don't know if what I'm saying is a huge duh beforehand, or only in hindsight.]
USian white culture teaches you -- or so it's beginning to seem to me -- to never see more. Hell, the very notion of that so-called 'color-blindness' requires that one steadfastly never stop seeing the color. The only time people insist they can be color-blind (ethnicity-blind?) is when they're facing a non-white ethnicity, and when I consider all the tap-dancing I've watched others (and myself) go through to ignore/disregard ethnicity in misguided attempts at colorblindness... well, it's a lot like watching a dysfunctional family tap-dance around the big honking elephant that's just smashed the coffee table. It's a whole lot of doing everything possible to forcefully disregard what's as plain as the nose on your face.
Paradoxically, a mode of forced non-awareness requires awareness of needing to force the non-awareness, and USian white culture uses those single-markers (eye-shape, skin-color, etc)... until that single ethnicity-marker is the elephant. It's the only thing noticed, it takes up the entirety of one's awareness -- despite every attempt to 'ignore' it for the sake of absence-into-presence elephant-ness. If there's a giraffe in the room, who can see it with the elephant in the way?
Mind you, I'm not saying that this elephant -- or giraffe -- is something borne by, or created by, or in any way the responsibility of ethnicity. It's entirely the creation of, and the burden of, the person who has completely internalized USian white culture attitudes about race -- triply so, I think, if the person in question has tried to adopt an anti-racist mindset. The attempt is laudable, but this perspective-shift has made me realize that what USian white culture considers 'good' behaviors to demonstrate anti-racism... are pretty stifling in their own right.
Maybe as a simpler (if less fine-tuned) analogy, I might riff off bell hooks and say that USian white culture has attempted to deconstruct the racist house and rebuild it into anti-racist, but all we've got is duct tape. It makes a fun sound when you're unwinding the roll, and enough of it can hold for a little while, and it certainly feels productive, but it's not actually a constructive tool at all. Not for anything truly long-lasting. You might fix a broken window with it, but I sure wouldn't want to use it to anchor ceiling joists. Yet to see just one marker -- and then steadfastly pretend like that marker doesn't even exist -- is, I'm realizing, about as productive in the long-run as thinking that with enough duct tape, your ceilings won't fall in. You're not actually constructing anything durable; you're just using enough tape to cover the flaws and hope it holds.
After all that, and the first set of posts (as I continued to process), I found that Faces Exam again. This time? I got a score so low the test mocked me with a statement to the effect that the only way to get a score that bad would be on purpose. To say this was distressing would be a major understatement. The only faces I got right were Chinese, but only half of them. Japanese and Korean? Missed every single one.
(On the other hand, I scored fairly high on the architectural exams and the food exam, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone who's read this journal for the past few years.)
When I told CP, he replied that although I've many friends across many ethnicities, these are all (now, post-moving a few years back) friends we don't get to see regularly. More like, once a year if I'm lucky enough to be on business near any of them. Not seeing faces daily would have an impact, he suggested, which bears on the theory that faces we learn as children are longest-lasting in our ethnic-recognition mental files, while faces learned as an adult will be -- like language, come to think of it -- something we'll have to practice daily to retain fluency.
Except, I've been watching jdramas! And kdramas! I practically mainlined a number of them, so how is it I couldn't recognize/identify the various features of this ethnicity or that one?
This actually took me about a week to figure out: it's because the faces on television are. Not. Real. People.
Doh.
They're gorgeous, they're skinny, they're young, and they're very much the ideal of what a society considers worthwhile to watch for hours on end -- and this seems to be true of American television as much as British or German or Taiwanese or Moroccan. Outside of comedy -- where 'being beautiful' seems to be a hindrance, and from what I've seen of laugh-track sitcoms from about sixteen different countries now, the awkward or quirky or downright plain comic is a near-reliable facet -- what you see on television is the ideal. It has nothing to do with reality.
I mean, think about whatever television shows you watch. Do you ever feel like you're watching people who are just like you -- in the sense of, you feel that skinny, that young, that photogenic, that put-together, with flawless skin and gorgeous hair and not to mention great lines and a soundtrack perfectly suited to a moment's mood? It's a rare person who feels completely at ease watching American television, from what I've ever heard from anyone; there's always that subtext underneath that's reminding us we're seeing something we'll never achieve. We are mere mortals who don't come with an entire fleet of hair stylists, makeup artists, and wardrobe consultants.
When you consider how many East Asian dramas are also populated/starring idols, it becomes even more of a big fat duh that to watch such dramas is to be soaking up a whole string of faces that... well, probably don't exist in reality. Or exist, but in a much rougher form, because with the right lighting, anyone can look good. (And the right hair, makeup, clothes, and so on, of course.) Even a supermodel on her day off will look pretty ragged, if she doesn't get enough sleep -- so what we see on TV or in the movies or in a magazine isn't reality, even when the subject is the same.
You'd think I'd know reality from fantasy -- and I do! -- but still, to forget this fundamental fact... Cripes. There's television, and there's real life. Isn't that one of the earliest lessons we learn? Reminds me of the movie quote, "Sometimes I forget and think I'm a grown-up."
I think perhaps a reason I suddenly tripped over a lifelong rule (of male vs. female faces when there are gendered clues elsewhere) was because I was also adjusting or calibrating myself to seeing past the single ethnic feature of eye-shape. When that's set aside, I went through a bit of time where I was consciously analyzing, near-memorizing, the faces on the screen, and things were getting a bit disconnected. That might've opened a pathway for my brain to then begin linking features cross-gender, as well.
When I made the first post about recognizing faces, this was the nitty-gritty of what lay underneath that question, because I had no idea whether this might be something that the average person would find crazy-talk. Was my growing inability to see eye-shape impacted, possibly, by my difficulties recognizing the emotional context of faces? If someone has excellent facial recall, would they be less likely to ever 'not notice' or 'fail to notice in favor of some other detail' when it came to faces? Was it maybe easier for me to stumble over this realization because I feel like I'm frequently re-learning faces each time we meet again? Or is this something that in fact, others go through much faster than I have (and probably with a lot less agony-effort, too), but was a stumbling block for me because I do rely on studying faces to force the switch-flipping to recognize someone? Does it make a difference that I live with someone whose eyes no longer ping for me as not-like-mine, to the point that it's his cheekbones and the depth of his brow to jawline that I notice more? Or did that long-term exposure actually muddy things a little, because I had no daily anglo-face-interaction to act as contrast to non-anglo-face-on-television?
As you can probably tell (and probably aren't surprised about, at all, ye long-term readers), I don't have any answers. I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions, and I'm really rather worried that what I am saying might be misinterpreted. I'm not advocating erasure (per color-blindness), only of learning to see more -- even if that means that midway through the process, what used to be 'the only thing noticed' suddenly drops off the radar. Given my reactions/observations this past week or so of continued drama-watching, awareness of that single-marker does return. It appears to be that in the process of recognizing consciously the rest of the ethnicity-markers, those temporarily overwhelm the USian white-culture-taught single-marker... and then, with more exposure, feature-noticing balances back out.
That's my theory, at least, that best explains the empirical situation. Still not sure what to do about the fact that I'm spending a lot of time seeing idealized faces, but I suppose that's a risk with any culture's entertainment. Guess this just means I need to find the energy and cash and take the time to go visit old friends, eh.
Note: as always, I retain the right to edit if, upon rereading, I figure out a way to say the same thing but in half as many words.
The first, and maybe most important, thing to keep in mind (even if it did take me awhile to figure this out) is that absence of a thing does not automatically indicate presence of something else. I know, that's basic logic, but still. It's easy to forget.
The second is that if what you're about to read strikes you at any point as wrong, or wrong-headed, or simply not-okay to think... I get that. Chances are, I agree with you. But I also think that sometimes, you have to say the stupid thing out loud to fully grasp the depth of stupidity. Yes, there's that whole thing about needing to pull up your pants, but I think sometimes that reminder/colloquialism is misinterpreted (willfully or no) as a message to simply not speak of this. To cram the reaction or statements down somewhere, hide that ignorance away lest everyone see clearly that we retain some ingrained ignorance.
But this is something I can tell I need to work out, to understand what's going on in my brain, before I can understand what it means, let alone what to do about it. If saying it aloud (typing it aloud?) here gets me farther along to see any wrongness, then I'm willing to take the chance of looking like an idiot. If the alternative is denying a possible flaw, I'd rather look like an idiot. At least the second can be fixed, but the first never would be.
This all began around the midpoint of watching Hong Gil Dong. If you read/recall the demonstration of belated recognition I gave in the second post in this string, then what I'm talking about is the reverse of that ahah! moment.
To describe: I had watched Kang Ji Hwan through myriad emotions, for easily eight hours, and then suddenly, halfway through a scene... his face stopped making sense. It lost all familiarity. It's not that it was suddenly strange -- as in, bizarre, or inexplicable. It was just that it was... no longer the face I'd been watching. Like having an emotional context of a good friend, but then suddenly -- oh, how to put it? Like talking to someone and suddenly you simply can't place their face; abruptly it has no emotional resonance for you, so none of the expressions have any deeper meaning for you.
That only sort of gets at the sensation, which in some respects just plain felt like a chunk of my brain must've fallen out. Kang's face simply stopped making sense. But why? What had changed? What was I seeing, that hadn't been there, or what had I been seeing that I couldn't, suddenly?
That sensation of not-making-sense flittered in and out with the lead actors (Kang and Sung Yu Ri), but never quite as abruptly or as thoroughly as that mid-point scene. What happened next was mostly around older actor-faces, while watching a jdrama Abe (Hiroshi) vehicle, Shinzanmono. Something kept tickling at the back of my brain, until I went and snagged two pictures for (somewhat) comparison.
Guy on left: Japanese. Guy on right: English-Scottish-Dutch.
I'm not saying that Abe started looking Anglo, only that I found myself asking: if eye-shape is in some way disguised or altered by the way faces change as we age -- crow's feet at the corners, the droop of the brow, etc -- and if eye-size (how much eyeball you can see around the iris) has little to do with an epicanthal fold... then what else identifies? I mean, Eastwood's always had that hundred-mile squint, but Abe's eyes are clear and open... and that got me looking closely at eye-size of nearly every actor who appeared on-screen.
[Note: before anyone knee-jerks on me, I am not saying that eye-shape is the only identifier. There are significant other aspects in facial structure that can/may indicate Asian ethnicities, but for the next bit, allow me to retrace my thoughts before I get back to reiterating that point.]
If it seems odd to emphasize the eyes, it's because tapped into the dreaded "they can't be Japanese if they have big eyes" hoohah. Comparing faces like, say, Abe and Eastwood, I hope it'll be pretty obvious that eye-size is, well, completely a strawman, or red herring, or whatever the fallacy-name is. That it's entirely possible to have big gorgeous eyes; white people have hardly cornered the market in that facial detail.
If you search for youtube videos discussing the "big eyes in anime = white faces" rigamarole, there's one video that discusses what else in animated faces defines or indicates a Japanese face, outside of eye-shape, eye-color, or even eye-size. (My google-fu sucks today, or I'd link, sorry.) That particular video-maker has several astute observations about depth-of-profile, brow-line, cheekbones, jawlines, and so on, and makes a strong persuasive argument that the (illustrated) eye-shape isn't the entirety of defining ethnicity.
Which is a big fat duh, of course, but it's one I think had been stored in my brain in a box called "issues related to watching anime" and never extrapolated further. But first, more chronology of the thought process.
Anyway, those thoughts come and go and then I'll be distracted by the storyline (and Shinzanmono is slow to unfold but my favorite kind of involved storytelling all the same)... so I didn't really revisit these strange momentary side-thoughts until early in watching My Girlfriend is a Gumiho.
Here's where you'll need to bear with me, and understand that I was a bit freaked myself: I was watching Shin Min Ah, and abruptly her face lost all familiarity, just like had happened with Kang's face, in Hong Gil Dong. But by this point, I'd also been reading a variety of posts on dramabeans, Ask a Korean and the Grand Narrative -- mostly as three (among many) resources for figuring out intricate cultural details like, "why all the piggy-back rides?" and other mysteries of the ages. Other tidbits were seeping in, though, like the obsession Korean women have (and this in common with Japanese women, it seems) with that kind of eye-surgery that creates a double-lid.
The instant that Shin Min Ah (who played Miho) stopped looking familiar, several thoughts went through my head in rapid succession, as I tried to figure out what (and why) part of my brain had stopped processing the images on the screen. My first thought was: am I suddenly mis-seeing her face because she's had that plastic surgery? Maybe that's why her face stopped-making-sense for a bit there, because I was picking up on the fact that something had been changed, somewhere, that I could only register on an unconscious level?
Immediately on the tails of that, I thought: brain, that is one of the stupidest questions you've ever asked.
But still... her face just suddenly looked so... No, this is not where I say "normal" (and if you're feeling a flash of irritation, trust me, I already got it from CP, for reasons now obvious). I'm in no way saying that Shin Min Ah (or anyone else in any of the East Asian dramas) had at any point looked abnormal, or even unusual, let alone exotic. To get to the nitty-gritty: the shape of her eyes was no longer pinging on my radar.
Okay, then. But then, I asked myself, what does she look like? This is where I repeat that absence does not equal presence. She didn't start looking Anglo, or Hispanic, or whatever else -- there were still far too many cues (even in a static image) that said, very clearly: Korean woman. None of the faces had a combination of signifiers that would tell me, unequivocally, that I was seeing an Anglo face; everything else still signaled an Asian face: jawline, cheekbone, nose, lips. That was also when I posted about the visual similarity of, and mistaking for, a (male) Korean face with a (female) Scottish-Irish-Dutch face, and under the male/female cross-mistake hid this larger puzzle.
To make this perfectly clear: I am not saying any face onscreen shifted from not-normal to normal. Far from it. I'm saying that I think the action of change wasn't in the quality of seen faces, but in my brain's processing. If anything got normalized suddenly, it was me. Or maybe I should say: my brain got recalibrated.
Let's go back to the anime big-eyes debate: that argument (by non-Asian viewers) pivots on a single aspect of the face, the shape of the eyes. For any illustrated face, the logic is saying, to lack that identifying feature is to therefore to wipe the face of all Asian-ness. In other words, if the eyes aren't shaped like this specific way, then the person isn't Asian at all, ergo, they must be white -- it's absence causing presence. (Alternately, it's arguing that whiteness is an absence of anything else, and that's an entire problematic post/perspective in and of itself, but you can see it hiding in there.)
In the previous post, I mentioned that living with CP has affected me (as concerns faces) in two ways; this would be the other way. Not entirely by example but definitely by exposure, I've learned to see that cheekbones and jawlines and brow-lines and so on are also crucial facets of ethnicity. What I hadn't learned -- what took me so long to learn -- is to see those facets regardless of the eye-shape.
For each ethnicity, it seems (to me) that white-USian culture has certain requirements you have to meet to make the white-USian twig on an ethnicity. Skin color, eye shape, build, eye color, whatever. The result is that if you lack the specific trigger for an ethnicity, you'll get the "you don't look ___" -- even if you have sixteen other features that all scream a specific ethnicity. Wrong nose! Wrong eye-color! Wrong skin-tone! Wrong hair-texture! Without that single main detail, people won't even treat you as, well, whatever you really are.
The second part of this is that white-USian culture -- by using these single identifiers -- teaches/allows its members to see nothing else. In other words: so long as someone satisfies the basic requirement of this one feature (that signals an ethnicity), then no other features are measured. Maybe no other features are even noticed at all. This hair, that nose, these eyes, and then you get the, "but aren't you ___?" reaction. Why? Just because the hair is kinky-curly, or the nose is this shape, or the skin is this pale? Well, basically, yeah. That one feature checks off the mental box and voila, the person viewed is categorized as ___ and will probably never be re-classified, because that's settled.
What took me a long time to figure out was that in watching so many dramas, somewhere in there, my brain said: "there is no reason to pay attention to this one single detail any longer." Eye-shape, in this case, became something that didn't require the focus -- that "aren't you ___" categorization -- to understand the face I was seeing. When I say recalibrated, my theory of the strange leap in my head from seeing to not-seeing was because my brain finally stopped putting eye-shape at the top of the list.
I think that's a crucial leap. I haven't a clue as to whether anyone else goes through this, or has ever gone through similar, or if I'm just hyper-aware as a result of already knowing I'm someone who always has belated recognition of familiar faces... so it's possible this is entirely just me. But if not, then, there it is: dark brown-black skin may be a signal that a person is of African ancestry, and an epicanthal fold may indicate Asian ancestry. But to differentiate within those two incredibly broad and diverse labels requires, in a way, ignoring the big honking white-USian preferred-marker (skin color, eyes, hair, nose) and seeing everything else.
But again, to catch anyone before yet another kneejerk, I'm not talking about erasing a feature, or pretending like it can be ignored. That would be the other extreme -- that of the ridiculous notion of 'color-blindness' (in re ethnicity) -- in which people steadfastly pretend they can disregard someone's ethnicity. Any ethnicity, and thereby turn this forced absence into a pseudo-presence of whiteness, to be perfectly blunt.
[This is probably inarticulate, and I apologize, but multiple revisions haven't gotten me any more coherent on something I'm mostly fumbling around on, because... well, to be honest, I can't recall any conversations online or off about this single-marker aspect of USian white culture other-identification. It's probably out there, but I haven't found it, so I don't know if what I'm saying is a huge duh beforehand, or only in hindsight.]
USian white culture teaches you -- or so it's beginning to seem to me -- to never see more. Hell, the very notion of that so-called 'color-blindness' requires that one steadfastly never stop seeing the color. The only time people insist they can be color-blind (ethnicity-blind?) is when they're facing a non-white ethnicity, and when I consider all the tap-dancing I've watched others (and myself) go through to ignore/disregard ethnicity in misguided attempts at colorblindness... well, it's a lot like watching a dysfunctional family tap-dance around the big honking elephant that's just smashed the coffee table. It's a whole lot of doing everything possible to forcefully disregard what's as plain as the nose on your face.
Paradoxically, a mode of forced non-awareness requires awareness of needing to force the non-awareness, and USian white culture uses those single-markers (eye-shape, skin-color, etc)... until that single ethnicity-marker is the elephant. It's the only thing noticed, it takes up the entirety of one's awareness -- despite every attempt to 'ignore' it for the sake of absence-into-presence elephant-ness. If there's a giraffe in the room, who can see it with the elephant in the way?
Mind you, I'm not saying that this elephant -- or giraffe -- is something borne by, or created by, or in any way the responsibility of ethnicity. It's entirely the creation of, and the burden of, the person who has completely internalized USian white culture attitudes about race -- triply so, I think, if the person in question has tried to adopt an anti-racist mindset. The attempt is laudable, but this perspective-shift has made me realize that what USian white culture considers 'good' behaviors to demonstrate anti-racism... are pretty stifling in their own right.
Maybe as a simpler (if less fine-tuned) analogy, I might riff off bell hooks and say that USian white culture has attempted to deconstruct the racist house and rebuild it into anti-racist, but all we've got is duct tape. It makes a fun sound when you're unwinding the roll, and enough of it can hold for a little while, and it certainly feels productive, but it's not actually a constructive tool at all. Not for anything truly long-lasting. You might fix a broken window with it, but I sure wouldn't want to use it to anchor ceiling joists. Yet to see just one marker -- and then steadfastly pretend like that marker doesn't even exist -- is, I'm realizing, about as productive in the long-run as thinking that with enough duct tape, your ceilings won't fall in. You're not actually constructing anything durable; you're just using enough tape to cover the flaws and hope it holds.
After all that, and the first set of posts (as I continued to process), I found that Faces Exam again. This time? I got a score so low the test mocked me with a statement to the effect that the only way to get a score that bad would be on purpose. To say this was distressing would be a major understatement. The only faces I got right were Chinese, but only half of them. Japanese and Korean? Missed every single one.
(On the other hand, I scored fairly high on the architectural exams and the food exam, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone who's read this journal for the past few years.)
When I told CP, he replied that although I've many friends across many ethnicities, these are all (now, post-moving a few years back) friends we don't get to see regularly. More like, once a year if I'm lucky enough to be on business near any of them. Not seeing faces daily would have an impact, he suggested, which bears on the theory that faces we learn as children are longest-lasting in our ethnic-recognition mental files, while faces learned as an adult will be -- like language, come to think of it -- something we'll have to practice daily to retain fluency.
Except, I've been watching jdramas! And kdramas! I practically mainlined a number of them, so how is it I couldn't recognize/identify the various features of this ethnicity or that one?
This actually took me about a week to figure out: it's because the faces on television are. Not. Real. People.
Doh.
They're gorgeous, they're skinny, they're young, and they're very much the ideal of what a society considers worthwhile to watch for hours on end -- and this seems to be true of American television as much as British or German or Taiwanese or Moroccan. Outside of comedy -- where 'being beautiful' seems to be a hindrance, and from what I've seen of laugh-track sitcoms from about sixteen different countries now, the awkward or quirky or downright plain comic is a near-reliable facet -- what you see on television is the ideal. It has nothing to do with reality.
I mean, think about whatever television shows you watch. Do you ever feel like you're watching people who are just like you -- in the sense of, you feel that skinny, that young, that photogenic, that put-together, with flawless skin and gorgeous hair and not to mention great lines and a soundtrack perfectly suited to a moment's mood? It's a rare person who feels completely at ease watching American television, from what I've ever heard from anyone; there's always that subtext underneath that's reminding us we're seeing something we'll never achieve. We are mere mortals who don't come with an entire fleet of hair stylists, makeup artists, and wardrobe consultants.
When you consider how many East Asian dramas are also populated/starring idols, it becomes even more of a big fat duh that to watch such dramas is to be soaking up a whole string of faces that... well, probably don't exist in reality. Or exist, but in a much rougher form, because with the right lighting, anyone can look good. (And the right hair, makeup, clothes, and so on, of course.) Even a supermodel on her day off will look pretty ragged, if she doesn't get enough sleep -- so what we see on TV or in the movies or in a magazine isn't reality, even when the subject is the same.
You'd think I'd know reality from fantasy -- and I do! -- but still, to forget this fundamental fact... Cripes. There's television, and there's real life. Isn't that one of the earliest lessons we learn? Reminds me of the movie quote, "Sometimes I forget and think I'm a grown-up."
I think perhaps a reason I suddenly tripped over a lifelong rule (of male vs. female faces when there are gendered clues elsewhere) was because I was also adjusting or calibrating myself to seeing past the single ethnic feature of eye-shape. When that's set aside, I went through a bit of time where I was consciously analyzing, near-memorizing, the faces on the screen, and things were getting a bit disconnected. That might've opened a pathway for my brain to then begin linking features cross-gender, as well.
When I made the first post about recognizing faces, this was the nitty-gritty of what lay underneath that question, because I had no idea whether this might be something that the average person would find crazy-talk. Was my growing inability to see eye-shape impacted, possibly, by my difficulties recognizing the emotional context of faces? If someone has excellent facial recall, would they be less likely to ever 'not notice' or 'fail to notice in favor of some other detail' when it came to faces? Was it maybe easier for me to stumble over this realization because I feel like I'm frequently re-learning faces each time we meet again? Or is this something that in fact, others go through much faster than I have (and probably with a lot less agony-effort, too), but was a stumbling block for me because I do rely on studying faces to force the switch-flipping to recognize someone? Does it make a difference that I live with someone whose eyes no longer ping for me as not-like-mine, to the point that it's his cheekbones and the depth of his brow to jawline that I notice more? Or did that long-term exposure actually muddy things a little, because I had no daily anglo-face-interaction to act as contrast to non-anglo-face-on-television?
As you can probably tell (and probably aren't surprised about, at all, ye long-term readers), I don't have any answers. I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions, and I'm really rather worried that what I am saying might be misinterpreted. I'm not advocating erasure (per color-blindness), only of learning to see more -- even if that means that midway through the process, what used to be 'the only thing noticed' suddenly drops off the radar. Given my reactions/observations this past week or so of continued drama-watching, awareness of that single-marker does return. It appears to be that in the process of recognizing consciously the rest of the ethnicity-markers, those temporarily overwhelm the USian white-culture-taught single-marker... and then, with more exposure, feature-noticing balances back out.
That's my theory, at least, that best explains the empirical situation. Still not sure what to do about the fact that I'm spending a lot of time seeing idealized faces, but I suppose that's a risk with any culture's entertainment. Guess this just means I need to find the energy and cash and take the time to go visit old friends, eh.
Note: as always, I retain the right to edit if, upon rereading, I figure out a way to say the same thing but in half as many words.
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Date: 15 Dec 2010 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Dec 2010 03:45 am (UTC)