Comments on: Kate Gosselin before & after!

By: trajan23

trajan23 — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:17:36 +0000

Assigning a racial identity to a mixed race individual on the basis of a purely visual inspection is a tricky thing and is usually shaped by the observer’s preconceptions . I have known several people who were unaware that Keanu Reeves, Rob Schneider, and Phoebe Cates were partially Asian in ancestry;however, once I informed them of this fact, they swiftly stated that they could now discern “Asian” facial characteristics (which had previously gone unnoticed) in each performer.
As a test of this phenomenon, I then told some of these same people,at a later date,that Catherine Zeta-Jones is also of partially Asian descent (which, needless to say, she is not). Once again, they all said that they could discern “Asian” characteristics in her facial features.
By the way, Razib, has any kind of study been done on the social construction of racial identity, with people being asked to assign a racial identity to anonymous people of mixed racial background? It would be interesting to see how “unbiased” observers would regard, say, a Tiger Woods or Dean Cain.

By: dale

dale — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:37:03 +0000

My friend’s cousin is half Korean half white, and when he was a baby and a young kid he actually looked completely white. He’s older now and looks more like one of the people you mentioned, 1/4 E Asian, 3/4 white.

By: Sigmund

Sigmund — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:50:58 +0000

There’s certainly a lot of variation with mixed race children. My son is half Irish and half Japanese but looks quite european apart from having distinctively Japanese eyebrows. These eyebrows make him look Japanese when he’s sleeping!
He actually has a classmate who is half Japanese and half Ashkenazi Jewish who looks very Japanese looking (which tends to cause some surprises when she asks for particular dietary requirements – people don’t tend to be accustomed to fully Kosher Japanese people.)

By: David B

David B — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:31:15 +0000

I read somewhere that Kate Beckinsale, who is part-Burmese, was nicknamed ‘Chinky’ at school, because she looked quite oriental, but it has become less noticeable as an adult.