{"id":54,"date":"2012-08-06T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-06T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2012\/08\/06\/indiscriminate\/"},"modified":"2012-08-06T18:01:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-06T18:01:00","slug":"indiscriminate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2012\/08\/indiscriminate\/","title":{"rendered":"Indiscriminate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another blog post cobbled together from Facebook posts. I should get a way to edit my research code on my iPhone…<\/i><\/span>
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\nLast week, a student came to talk to me about postgraduate research and I suggested that she speak to my colleague as her previous experience was aligned with his current research. I mentioned this to the colleague in question and he asked me wether she “looked Nigerian”.  I said I honestly couldn’t say, as I don’t know what a Nigerian is supposed to look like, to which he replied <\/span>“oh, do all black people look the same to you?”<\/span>
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\nThis exchanged bothered me enough to tweet about it, but I’ve been unpacking why it bothered me for a while. <\/span>The thing is, I can distinguish between black people easily, it’s just that I don’t think I could classify a stack of pictures of any people (of any colour) into country groups with any accuracy.  <\/span>I’ve been thinking that I would have remarked on a French accent, because I can recognize it. I’ve been looking at photos of Nigerians online, and I’ve even googled around for West African facial features, but to be honest I would say many of my South African students share those same features, which as far as I can glean are wide face, wide nose and dark skin.<\/span>
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\nI would say context adds a lot of clues. If you already know someone is from India, you can go into nuances, but how easy is it to take a picture from a stack and say with certainty that a person is from India instead of Pakistan – or South Africa for that matter? <\/span>Is it easy to tell someone is from West African descent, or is it a stereotype (and one I am unfamiliar with). I know what the stereotypical Dutchman looks like, although I have only met one person from Holland that actually looked like that (tall, blond, biggish teeth). I just didn’t know the Nigerian stereotype, and found its very hard to get that info from looking at Nigerians.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s a more subtle point here about the utility of such a distinction. In fact, I find it vaguely racist (or at least discriminatory) to categorize beyond pure description in identifying a student. It’s one thing to refer to skin colour when describing someone’s appearance, as this is directly descriptive. It’s another thing to add references to race when talking about a person’s academic performance, as it’s a clue that you feel that race is related to academic performance.<\/span>
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\nMany people I spoke to about this repeated the tired old line that stereotypes are based on a grain of truth. Unfortunately, when it comes to perceptions of national character in personality, this paper<\/a> shows that e<\/span>veryone agrees on the typical character of a German, but Germans don’t test the same as these stereotypes<\/span>. And if you’re thinking “But they didn’t test the real<\/i> Germans”, look up the No True Scotsman fallacy<\/a>. Of course, you may also be thinking that casual classifications like these are not harmful, but you may be interested in the idea of stereotype threat<\/a>. By the way, if you think you’re impervious to the group effect, have a look at the out-group homogeneity<\/a> effect, which makes groups you are not a part of look a lot more homogeneous than groups you are a part of. Basically, this explains why you don’t here South Africans asking “did she look like a South African?”<\/span>
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\nI think it serves everyone best to be vigilant in the use of possibly biased language. I try to refrain from gendered language except where it applies to a known individual. Similarly, I try to avoid mentions of race or other irrelivant information when describing someone’s competence. <\/span>I know people who seem obliged to precede positive reports of minorities by a description like “oh, that black girl who just started working here is doing so well”, while the “default” white male’s competence is a given. This makes me cringe. I know a couple of my preconceptions end up slipping into my language as well, but at least I am (partly) aware of the issues. If you clicked on the three links in this story, you may be more aware now, too.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another blog post cobbled together from Facebook posts. I should get a way to edit my research code on my iPhone… Last week, a student came to talk to me about postgraduate research and I suggested that she speak to my colleague as her previous experience was aligned with his current research. I mentioned this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}