 He was unashamedly competitive, and he was beaten frustrated for his play. Wait, what? I heard what Ash was saying, and it's like I was saying that actually this new grouping is actual. Are you kidding? I was going to say that's not the first time that's happened. Can you believe this? A cringe wave is sweeping the nation's media, case after case of melanin aggravated mistaken identity. From Kobe Bryant to Dawn Butler, broadcasters have been having a difficult time recently when it comes to correctly telling apart people who happen to share the same skin tone. This is what some social psychologists call cross-race effect. Identified in studies from as early as 1914, cross-race effect describes how people are more likely to be able to correctly identify people from their own racial backgrounds rather than people from other racial backgrounds. The idea is that people are more likely to perceive distinguishing characteristics when there's already a degree of familiarity on the basis of shared race. The cross-race effect has been observed as a general trend across all racial backgrounds, though one study in 2003 from South Africa found that while all participants were better able to correctly identify faces from their own racial background, black participants were more likely to be able to accurately identify white faces than vice versa. You're wrong. So this hints at something really important. Most social psychologists think of cross-race effect as an arbitrary quirk of how humans process visual stimuli. But this ignores how what we think of as familiar or what we think of as alien is shaped itself by power. We don't just grow up looking at the faces of people who happen to be around us. In our media-saturated culture, we're all consuming images of people who look nothing like us all the time. So why is there a particular problem in British media when it comes to mixing up people of colour? It's not that black and brown people are visually unfamiliar. It's that there's social baggage that comes along with perceiving racial difference. You could even say that it's not melanin that people find it hard to see past. It's the social meaning loaded onto it. Racial difference isn't just a numbers game of in-group and out-group dynamics producing powerful majorities and marginalised minorities. If that was the case, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid would never have been able to sustain themselves in the first place. Race is a political tool which makes an artificial hierarchy of the human species seem like it's a product of nature. Difference isn't why we perceive race. Race is why we perceive and indeed reinforce difference. That difference can mean people of colour being treated as though they're invisible in particular when participating in or being assumed to participate in forms of work which are low paid or low status. Or it can mean being treated as hyper-visible. In some contexts, the mere presence of melanin exerts a powerful othering force and people of colour become subject to intense forms of scrutiny and attention. Hyper-visibility can mean being seen as an exotic novelty or a predatory threat. It can mean being demonised or fetishised just as long as you're never really humanised. So it might not seem like a big deal but treating people of colour as interchangeable with one another even when it happens by accident sends a message that your humanity will never be fully recognised. That's it, we've done Gary. Whatever.