Why people of colour are misidentified so often

By Zulekha NathooFeatures correspondent

Being confused with someone else can happen to anyone, but in majority-white spaces, it happens to people of colour more often. Why?

The first time it happened, business analyst Anupma Bakshi was working in Amsterdam. A colleague had responded to an email thread, cc’ing several people, and asked Bakshi for a user account. There was just one problem; Bakshi wasn’t part of the IT department, or related to it in any way. She passed on the message to the right person, but it didn’t take her long to figure out how the confusion happened.

While colleagues with whom she worked closely never had any problems identifying her, Bakshi says other workers in the building kept confusing her with a woman of Indian descent from another team. While a little taken aback, she was initially willing to overlook the mix up. But it continued to happen, even after she’d been in the job for months, and had sat in face-to-face meetings with the same individuals misidentifying her.

“The funniest thing is that we had nothing in common. Not in our appearance, not our job roles, titles, anything. Nothing at all. Not even in our behaviour, except our ethnicity,” said Bakshi, 42, who now lives in Toronto. “So, that made me wonder whether that's all that I have to my personality, if nothing else about me stands out except my brown skin.”

Being confused with another person of the same race or ethnicity by someone at work can happen to any employee, regardless of skin colour. But experts say in majority-white spaces, misidentification happens more frequently to people of colour. “I would be called [the name of] the only other black woman that was in the office, who was shades and shades darker than me, all the time,” says Akilah Cadet, whose workplace experiences led her to start a diversity and inclusion consulting firm in California.

There are scientific reasons that help explain initial mistakes; research shows that people identify faces from their own race better. But repeated errors can be frustrating, and take an emotional toll over time. Mistakes also carry career implications; visibility is a critical component of advancement, and Cadet points out that misidentification can impact work opportunities, such as travel and promotion. While BIPOC employees might ignore these missteps, or laugh them off for fear of appearing too sensitive, she adds, consistent mix-ups can be deeply isolating for the individuals involved.

‘Routinely mistaken’

High-profile gaffes, such as at last month’s Oscars, show how pervasive misidentification can be – even on a major stage. A South African reporter asked Judas and the Black Messiah star Daniel Kaluuya, who won Best Supporting Actor, how he felt about being “directed by Regina”. In fact, Regina King had directed fellow nominee Leslie Odom Jr in One Night in Miami, not Kaluuya. The journalist was forced to apologise after being criticised on social media.

Other examples abound. In 2019, an Australian magazine ran a feature on South Sudan-born model Adut Akech Bior, but printed a photo of another black model, Flavia Lazarus. British actor Sir Lenny Henry, Ugly Betty star America Ferrera and Samuel L Jackson are also among those who have also been confused for other celebrities of the same ethnicity.

Media outlets describe these kinds of events as innocent mistakes, but similar scenes play out in workplaces and institutions, too. A 2018 study on the experiences of black, Hispanic and Native American resident physicians in the US showed those doctors “were routinely mistaken for other minority residents”, sending a message they were “indistinct” from each other, which added to workplace stress.

Of course, science plays a role in how well we identify people. Work by Brent Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied cognition for more than a decade, reinforces a large body of research on the “cross-race effect”, or “own-race bias”. Simply, evidence shows that individuals identify faces of their own race better than those of other races.

In 2019, he and his team published research on the high-level visual cortex – the area of the brain used to process faces ­– in a group of white participants. After presenting the individuals with a series of photos showing the faces of black and white people, researchers digitally altered the pictures by various degrees: 30% (minor changes to facial features), 50%, 70% and 100% (separate identities). They found the brain activity of the participants reacted strongly to the most subtle differences in white faces, but didn’t register even very different black faces apart. When it came to black people, participants were “blind to the change”.

“This area of the brain that’s supposedly specialised for faces is really responding way, way more, or almost selectively, to white faces, and treating black faces as almost like they're not faces,” says Hughes.

The research also suggests that our bias against other-race faces emerges as soon as we see people. “You see someone as part of another group, and you process them: you identify their racial group membership. And then you sort of cut processing off at that level,” says Hughes. “People lack the motivation to process an individual more deeply.”

Hughes is now broadening the study to incorporate other races as well. Previous research in North America involving members of minority groups has demonstrated that while non-white subjects tend to identify other people of their own race better as well, most are more adept at identifying white faces compared to the other way around – something that is explained by power dynamics.

“People differentiate people from groups that are dominant in the society, especially if they hold power and status,” explains Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton University, US, and an expert in bias and stereotyping. “People pay attention up the hierarchy … People categorise other people by gender, age, race, social class, frequently – in less than a second.”

So, in a busy environment like the workplace, for example, we work harder to recognise the boss or the head of HR than other colleagues whom we depend on and interact with less. In those circumstances, facial-recognition expert Jim Tanaka, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria, Canada, says we can end up slotting people and their faces into two simple categories: “standard”, or what’s most common around us; and “deviation”, or what’s less familiar. And while we’re primed to better identify the ‘standard’, we do less well identifying the ‘deviation’ – leading to the kinds of errors Bakshi and Cadet experienced.

‘You have to care’

None of the science makes misidentification a workplace inevitability, however, because there’s a lot still within our control to change. Both Tanaka and Fiske say that when motivated, people can bypass or “short-circuit” those automatic categorisations; it just requires a reset.

“When you meet people for the first time, look at their face. Notice the details of the face and in particular, think about their situation,” says Fiske. “Thoughtfulness in individuating people when you first encounter them can help, and then you're less likely to mix them up with other people.”

Having “meaningful interactions” can also help break down unconscious categories, adds Tanaka. That means spending more time getting to know individuals at work, and expanding your inner circles outside the workplace. He says individuals who are better at recognising faces of other races tend to be those with many close friends of other races. “Who do you hang out with? Who are your friends? That seems to be a better predictor,” says Tanaka, “You have to care.”

If problems persist, says Cadet, companies and employees might need to do some soul-searching on whether the mistakes are an anomaly, or rather an indicator of other exclusionary traits in the workplace. That could mean examining whether there are too many people who all look the same at the top of an organisation and how those values might trickle down. Or whether there are unspoken structures in place that discourage a collaborative and open work atmosphere. It could also mean questioning whether individuals are making conscious efforts to include colleagues from marginalised groups.

If you’re the worker who keeps getting misidentified, saying something or finding an ally to speak on your behalf is often the most effective way to change the behaviour.

That’s the route Bakshi took, but not before she spent a lot of time trying to use humour to deflect the awkwardness of being confused with someone else. “We don’t all look alike,” she’d say with a forced laugh, hoping to get her point across without sounding too harsh. But deep down, Bakshi says it affected her sense of belonging.

After it happened several times, she recognised an unfortunate reality: it wasn’t her mistake at all, yet the burden had fallen on her to fix it. She called out the identity mix-up at work during a meeting, something she says was uncomfortable but necessary. “I could feel blood rushed to my face,” says Bakshi. “I re-lived that scenario in my head later several times, thinking, ‘did I make a fool of myself for this thing?’ But over time I realised I have to do this. Otherwise, there's no end to it.”

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