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And you wonder why "they all look alike": When facial recognition goes too far [1]

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Date: 2023-05-01  

Last week, I was flipping through my YouTube news feed and saw a thumbnail for a story from 10 Tampa Bay, a Fox affiliate. It was a “photo” of a Black man with a stern mouth and heavy beard, dark skinned, with a pullover cap. I could tell right away that the picture was not real, but I had to double-check because it was attached to a news story.

The story was in regards to a DoorDash kidnapping and rape. The chyron was so ambiguously stated that it wasn’t immediately apparent whether or not this person was the victim or the possible assailant. But viewed through the lens of race (and gender) in American culture, the viewer is left to discern the role here. The man was obviously the purported criminal.

But it wasn’t a photo. It was a graphic produced by FaceLogics, apparently a virtual identity company. The visage was something straight out of a video game (perhaps The Sims): angular cheekbones with impossible planes, perfectly globular eyes set under an angry brow—this was obviously not a flesh-and-blood human being.

Still, this image was being pushed out to the public as a person of interest. The person depicted didn’t exist! It was a computer’s rendering, a high-tech version of a police sketch which once was completed diligently (and hopefully competently) by hand. By contrast, this rendering was cartoonish. But the public was put on alert to be watchful for this “man.”

The irresponsibility of this was immediately clear. It was a generic Black man. No real features were depicted. For any viewer to store that image in their mental files of “what Black people/Black men look like” is gravely injurious, not only to the population of Black people, but to those viewers’ understanding of such people. It creates falseness in their minds, further leading in all possibility to the sense that Black people aren’t fully human—because that picture was fake! It depicted a fake image as though it represented a real person. That risks all members of people in that mental category as being similarly cartoonish—not fully human, not fully real.

The updated photo, after the man’s arrest, was posted a few days later. The difference in facial structure and contour would be laughable if the situation weren’t so dangerous in its own right. A viewer could see the humanity in that man’s face. Whether or not he is proved in a court to have committed any crime, at least if a viewer were to see his face, they could determine the crinkle of his eye folds, the light as it reflected the orbit just above the cheek.

This is disregarding the constant portrayal of Black people (but especially Black men) as sub- or infrahuman. For some, stereotypes are not exaggerations but true reflections of real life, revealing the holders of that view to live in truly distorted worlds. When Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, recently complained in his patently racist diatribe against Black people (a move that got his strip removed from newspapers nationwide) that he constantly sees in his online feed Black people going around beating White people, he reveals his bias.

He also reveals his limitation: the blinders of his right-wing news feed. His sources oversample the footage of such acts as they were caught; and these were put on a loop, picked up by other outlets in the same closed silo of information, or both. The videos reinforce the same pernicious message: these people aren’t people at all: they’re bestial and attack in packs. They’re “wildin’.”

A mathematics video I recently came across a few weeks ago did the same thing. I went into the video hoping to refresh my memory about matrices, and I was treated instead to footage of Reginald Denny being dragged from his truck cab in 1992. There was no context given for this, no mention of why the L.A. riots began in the first place or why the city became a tinderbox that went up in literal flames. Nope. Just this footage plucked out to serve ostensibly as an example for whatever mathematical principle the host was hoping to model but also reinforcing any implicit biases his viewers were harboring.

Then also see a NYC spot by Fox 5 featuring an upper-class boutique “pharmacy and wellness store” as a target of shoplifting. All of the stock footage of people absconding with goods—these were not actually connected with the thefts in question at all but representations of theft—were all people of color. Meanwhile, the people interviewed for snap reactions were all not people of color.

The distinction would be hard to spot if the viewer were naive to this type of subtle demarcation, this delineation of today’s color line. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Even the classic 1989 sociological study on implicit bias and priming of racial attitudes does this, and one can only hope that the author, Patricia Devine, stumbled into the reinforcement of racial stereotypes unintentionally. Still, in her attempt to explain the phenomenon of implicit bias and how it can operate outside of conscious awareness, she quite openly highlighted words so stereotypical and so automatically stigma-invoking that she herself primed her audience’s previously stored biases, were they to exist (and almost assuredly planted some were they not there at the outset!). I won’t post the terms, but they can be found in the Methods, pages 9-10.

This is the type of bias that was discussed and deconstructed by MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez and her guests as they discussed the rash recently of “wrong place” shootings in America. The full spot focused on the interlocking triple narrative pushed in conservative media that

gives rise to viewing people of color as less than human, ties this to conspiratorial, paranoid ideas of the goals of the Democratic party (stratospherically strange stuff), and convinces their viewers that they must arm themselves to ward off this theoretical threat.

Menendez : Angelo, how do right-wing media outlets portray crime in America, and then how does that coverage play into the narrative from folks like the NRA that more guns are needed to protect Americans from this so-called crime? Carusone : So, one of the things that’s happened, especially recently, is sort of this alignment of two theories. One is the very traditional, you know, that people of color are committing crimes, and that they’ve actually gone and that’s increasing over the last two years, ever since Covid, that somehow they feel like they’ve had a license to commit these crimes, ever since the Black Lives Matter protests. When you go back and look at the coverage in six-month blocks, for example—we looked at a six-month period a couple of years ago, which showed that they attacked Black Lives Matter specifically, the movement itself, as violent extremists. 440 individual instances on Fox News alone. And so, they’ve been pushing this idea that there’s a bloodthirstiness amongst people of color. And then the flip side of that—and this is where it aligns with another conspiracy theory—is that this is all part of Democrats, liberal media’s plan for a great replacement, that actually they’re enabling and incentivizing people of color to commit these crimes, because they’re trying to wipe out White people, weaken them, neutralize them, so that they can actually fully take the reins of power in a permanent way. And that’s why those two things are scary, because they hype up the crime coverage—they oversaturate it, over-represent it—and then they explain it, saying that this is all part of a grand plan to actually take power away from you. And that’s where that third factor ties in, because the NRA and sort of the gun lobby offers the solution, which is that no one is going to protect you; this is why Democrats are attacking police officers, because they’re trying to weaken police departments, police departments are being weakened. The only way for you to protect yourself from Democrats using people of color to basically kill you, to wipe you out, is that you need to arm yourself and defend yourself. And that’s the sort of state, that is the lens through which a consumer of right-wing media sees the world today.

It’s so delusional; but it is fertilized and cultivated under the spotlights, the Kleig lights, of these biased portrayals.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/1/2166905/-And-you-wonder-why-they-all-look-alike-When-facial-recognition-goes-too-far

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