Pho

Here’s my first post brought over from Why oh Why, as I said I’d do in an earlier post:

My wife and I recently ate at a Vietnamese place.

We were the only diners lacking an epicanthic fold. We were almost, but not quite, the lightest skinned people in the restaurant. We were not the tallest people, nor the shortest. We both have brown eyes, black hair, and more or less Mediterranean complexions (especially me).

There was a little girl there, maybe three years old. And I started wondering whether she could already tell that we were, in a broad sense, different.

Here’s what I was thinking:

We all have different faces. But some of us have certain features that make us recognizably of European, Asian, American, or African descent.

(I hate that I have to do this, but by “American,” of course, I mean Americans who came to America some time before the Europeans did.)

Ok, those features are only recognizable because we know what to make of them. A Vietnamese man may have lighter or darker skin than his neighbor. But he and his neighbor both know that the difference isn’t enough (or important enough) to make the two people “different” in a broad sense.

They may look completely different from each other (as I do from my step-brother), but there are certain clues that tell them that they are the “same,” on a broad scale.

They know that certain, even dramatic, differences are NOT indicators of long-term geographic separation (or race, or whatever you want to call it).

On the other hand, other (maybe even smaller) differences ARE indications of a “difference.” Like a lack of an epicanthic fold, or hair or eye color.

When does that understanding come about in a child’s life? At what point does a child see that SOME differences are more meaningful than others when distinguishing those “like self” from those “other than self”? When does the child know that the eye thing may be more important than minor shades of skin tone?

It may seem obvious to us which difference is important, but I think that’s because we’re used to seeing certain things and overlooking others. An alien (i.e., newborn) may not know that a difference in finger length isn’t as socially important as a difference in facial breadth.

I wonder if someone’s done research on this.