Wyz_sub10

I'm not sure this is a pure S&S topic, but it's an anthropological one (although highly political).

Check out the PBS site and this exercise on sorting people by race through visual identification.

I was quite surprised by how poorly I did.

Sorting People

Principia

Wow, that was surprising.

LeftCoast

So was I, I only got 4 out of 16 correct - though the pictures you were working from were so small and at such low resolution that you really had very few clues to work on other than skin color, hair and gross facial features. That's my excuse anyway, whether I'd have done any better with 8x10's I don't know.

Principia

Click on the icons to blow the images up... even then, those were not trivial calls.

Lobstrosity

There were twenty total pictures. I happened to get seven right...though I think I failed to identify a single Hispanic properly and to me Asians can be almost interchangeable with American Indians from a visual identification perspective.

echidna

Hmmm, 8 out of 20, but I suspect the small size of the pictures is deliberately misleading.

I'm mixed Anglo / Chinese but I've variously passed myself off as East European & Middle Eastern at times, although in general I find S.E. Asians are better at spotting my ethnicity.

pariah

wow, this is a bunch of bullshit propoganda.

first they find 3 "african americans" who have white/black parents, mix in philipinos with asians (they also look like hispanics or blacks), then take the pictures, pixelize the FUCK out of them, discolor them (those were some HORRIBLE quality pictures, wtf was with the tonal qualities? some cheap POS disposable cam i bet), then make them 16 by 16 pixels

yeah...seems like a very scientific test thingy to me.

Wyz_sub10

So I'm guessing you missed a few?

It wasn't scientific - that was the whole point. The article on the site talked about how visual indicators were used as a basis for race for the census prior to self-identification.

That area of the website, as a whole, dealt with the issue of defining race.

So many of my track and field buddies cannot distinguish between race and population group when discussing things like genetic speed.

lowmagnet

I didn't even get through 'sorting' them. Without knowing who their parents are, I wouldn't know whether to mark them as 'hispanic' or not (since you can't tell hispanic by looking at someone)

That, and I couldn't fit all 20 into the pile marked 'human' (of which there was none) because that's about how much 'race' matters to me.

Nostalgic Pushhead

I got... 5.
Two native amercans, one asian, one black, no hispanics, and one white.

Not suprised. Even if the pictures were higher quality, I wouldn't have been able to tell. The lines are so blurry...