https://daily.jstor.org/the-forgotten-untouchables-of-france/Most bigotry is exactly this ^ ridiculous to me. I have partial face blindness; one of the side effects of this is that race is mostly a meaningless concept to me. Sure I can usually tell black & white people apart, but not always. I've mistaken white people for Greek or Mexican or Spanish, and vice versa. People's hatred for the Jews never made any sense to me because it's always been one group of white people hating another group of white people; I literally cannot tell a Jew from a gentile without some additional context or without them identifying themselves. And the cultural reasons for the hatred are even stupider to me because I've never been Christian, Jesus Christ was never a real person, and even if he had been, it was Rome that executed him in the story. And there's the fact that Judaism is just a much better religion than Christianity ever was.
1Yes, this does also mean I can't tell most Asian ethnicities apart -- Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc mostly all look the same to me. But the same is true of white ethnicities and most shades of brown ethnicities. Black people are generally pretty distinct from white people and other people of color, but not always. I have mistaken black people for white, and white people for black (usually the lighter skin tones). And at the same time, some ethnicities are very distinctive to me. The Dalit, while black, are distinct enough for me to usually tell them apart from other black ethnicities. (Dalit = India's "untouchables.") Mongolians are also pretty distinctive to me. India's other ethnicities are distinctive to me, generally. I can also usually spot the Himba people of Africa, and the San peoples of Africa.
For anyone who doesn't already know, let me explain partial face blindness. Full face blindness is when someone can't recognize any faces apart from maybe their own in the mirror; they can't even recognize the faces of their own immediate family members. They learn to recognize people by body language and other signs. My character Vedya Ravenstone and her multiverse doubles all have full face blindness. They can see faces just fine, and can interpret facial expressions, they just can't tell one face from any other face.
Partial face blindness, like I have, is a
difficulty in recognizing faces. For me, my main issue is memorizing faces. Once I have a face memorized, I usually recognize it in the future, but small changes can make me fail to recognize someone I know. New unexpected haircuts, a difference in clothing choices, or even running into someone I know in an unusual context (especially unexpectedly) can make me fail to recognize someone. The last photo I got of my mom, when I saw it, I knew at once that if she had come to Portland without telling me before seeing this photo, aging had changed her face so much that she could have walked right by me on the street, and I would not have recognized her
at all unless she got my attention and spoke. Though the opposite has happened to me before as well, of mistaking strangers for someone else. (I've mistaken at least five different strangers for my friend
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kengr before, for instance. At least, from a distance.)
But yeah, when it comes to anyone I don't know, in most cases I wouldn't recognize someone I hadn't memorized. At some jobs I've had in the past, I've gotten on some customers' bad sides accidentally because I didn't recognize them, even if I had seen them come in a few minutes ago, or even talked with them a few minutes ago. It usually takes me a few days of regularly interacting with someone for my brain to memorize their face, though there are occasions when it can happen in just a few minutes, like if someone feels like a threat or if I rapidly develop a crush on them, or really like them on a friend level and thus put in the mental effort to rapidly memorize their face. But otherwise, I can see faces fine, but they usually go in one eye and out the other, to twist an expression. If you're still having trouble with the concept, think of it like cats or dogs: most humans can't tell most cats or dogs apart very easily, and it takes time and/or effort with your own pet or someone else's to memorize their appearance enough to recognize that individual.
And, so, like I said earlier in the post, that makes recognizing someone's race/ethnicity rather difficult for me. And even with people trying to explain the differences between some of these races, it still doesn't make much sense. Someone can say "Jews have big noses!" But like... so do a lot of other ethnicities, including many white gentiles. Hell, Romans were pretty famous for having prominent noses, and their noses persist in the gene pool. Also, it's been my observation that many people who identify as Jewish do
not have particularly large or prominent noses at all. Many have rather small noses, in fact. Anyway, I find it very weird that members of a particular religion are considered a 'race' as well. That's silly to me. Christianity isn't a race, so why is Judaism considered a race? Why are Muslims considered a 'race'? Ridiculous.
1 = Christianity is the direct result of cultural appropriation of Judaism by people who started out pagan and twisted the old testament into something ridiculous. Original Sin isn't a thing in Judaism because G-d forgave Adam and Eve. There is no Satan or Hell in Judaism; when someone dies, the Jewish people teach that everyone goes back to G-d. Judaism is a true monotheism, whereas Christianity and Islam are bitheistic religions pretending to be monotheistic. Abortion is allowed in Judaism, especially if it threatens the woman's life to have a child; the Torah says life doesn't begin until the infant takes its first breath in the world after being born. Kosher rules can be ignored if your only choice is to either eat something not kosher or die of starvation. Fasting can also be ignored for the same reason, or if someone is recovering from an eating disorder like anorexia. Judaism prioritizes life above their religion's many rules. Judaism has its own flaws, like many of those rules for a start, but if Christianity and Islam were both replaced with Judaism, that'd be fine by me.
