"Racism" - was Re: ICR and its slurs

John B. Tant (jtant@exis.net)
Tue, 20 May 1997 12:13:49 -0700

I seem to recall something on PBS about 15 years ago about how we
learn to recognize faces. They talked about something that they
called a "template" for recognition. Each race, they said, has
its own set of distinguishing racial characteristics. Therefore,
to recognize a face from race "X", your eye has to pick out certain
features (the "template") and that is different for each race. So,
to a person of race "Y" with little/no experience with group "X"
people, they will look alike - not because he hates them, but because
he's never had the opportunity to learn to recognize them -- each
group having different characteristics. As I recall, it also has
something to do with imprinting babies to recognize their parents
and helps, on the basis of parental appearance, to "define" what
that child will call beauty. It was an interesting program, but
that was several years before I owned a VCR.

Does this ring any bells with anyone?

jbt

Paul A. Nelson wrote:
>
> Funny story about this. Throughout medical school, my wife had a
> second generation Asian-American (Japanese) room-mate, a woman is now a
> lieutenant commander surgeon in the U.S. Navy. This woman had grown
> up in a heavily Asian section of Los Angeles, and rarely spent any time
> with Anglos. When she arrived at medical school, in the Midwest, she
> complained to my wife that "all the white guys look exactly the same to me!" --
> whereas the Asian male med students were easy to distinguish from each
> other.
>
> So go figure.
> 

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