Do you know who this is?
No, it’s not me. It’s the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset. When I placed these photos on FB a while ago, people who had known me my whole life, including my own mother, thought it was me.
I even used to wear this hairstyle back then. A writer, too. A Nobel Prize winner. And I’m an identically looking literary critic.
Clearly, somebody in my family line was Norwegian. It feels kind of likelier than somebody in Undset’s family tree being Ukrainian, although who knows?
This is why it’s ridiculous that Candace Owens finds it suspicious that Macron looks similar to Brigitte’s nephew. Yes, French people have a phenotype. A look. My friend married a Frenchman, and he also bears a great similarity to Macron. When that friend first saw N, she said, “Eeww, you are dating your cousin? I didn’t know this was a thing in your culture.” N is obviously not my cousin but our Slavic ethnicity does make us look alike to people from other cultures. I would think that an African American like Owens would be a bit more conscious of the “all of you people look the same” approach.
My father, by the way, looked so similar to the French actor Pierre Richard that once, when we were watching a comedy with Richard at an outdoor movie theater, the whole audience heaved with laughter, seeing my father’s very Richardian shadow.
This is Pierre Richard:
My father’s goofy, shy, endearing personality was also identical to the image Richard projected in many of his comedies. You could create a delicious conspiracy about my family based on these facts.
Interestingly, my parents and sister have jet black hair while I’m naturally blonde. I grew up amidst tiresome jokes about “have you ever wondered whether there was a neighbor who looked like you and your mom liked?”
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When I had been in SE Asia for about three weeks, all roundeye tourists started to look the same. It started to be like… I’d see a couple of british tourists on the bus, and be weirdly fascinated by how puffy and pink and sweaty and inelegant they were, and then shudder knowing I look exactly like that. They looked so weird and foreign.
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“all roundeye tourists started to look the same”
For several years I was kind of between the US and Poland and each time I returned to Poland for the first few days I kept seeing people I thought I knew everywhere and then it would wear off as my eyes adjusted. There are a number of distinct phenotypes that you see over and over (very different from the very ethnically and somewhat racially mixed place I grew up in). I do remember hearing the cliche about black people looking the same and wondering what planet that person came from.
“weirdly fascinated by how puffy and pink and sweaty and inelegant they were”
I had that experience in Southern Mexico, where after a couple of weeks Mexicans seemed completely normal to me but gringo tourists seemed… puffy and pink and sweaty and inelegant (and oversized…). Part of it was probably body language as whiter Mexicans or resident non-Mexicans or even less…. gringo-y acting tourists didn’t provoke the same response.
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Gringos are weirdly awkward and clumsy next to locals. But a lot of it is just straight-up physical proportion. I remember the girls I was staying with comparing *wrists* with me. I’m pretty short in the US. At the time, I was kind of an average height for a man in SEA. I wasn’t huge. But everything about me was large and unfeminine there. My wrists are all bone, but still ~one-third larger than the ladies there. I look beefy next to them.
That was not, apparently, genetic. The whole country has become much more prosperous since then, and the kids who’ve grown up in the interim (we still exchange family photos) are notably taller, the girls have hips, etc.
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“I kept seeing people I thought I knew everywhere”
The brain in a big adjustment phase does *weird* things. Pattern-finding overdrive, scrambled circuits.
Did you ever do that thing where you stand there slackjawed for a minute trying to figure out what language someone is addressing you in, even though it’s a language you know… because the context was wrong?
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“trying to figure out what language… because the context was wrong?”
Oh yeah…. I also have a colleague who often mixes languages. We share about three languages pretty well but they often manage to start speaking in one that the person they’re talking to doesn’t understand. I stopped correcting them and just wait for them to figure it out (it can take a while).
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Candace Owens is not only crazy, she’s dumb and racist to boot. A lot of Americans and many nonwhite people don’t realize that Europeans have different phenotypes, not all white people look alike. French people have a certain look and so do Scandinavians, Celts, different Slavic ethnicities and so forth,
I think it’s because so many Americans are ethnically mixed, especially in urban areas. Pure groups of European people in the US only exist in more rural areas or among first generation immigrants, especially among Catholics. Where I live in New Jersey, a lot of white people have at 3-4 different ethnicities in their background, something like having an Italian/Irish father and a German/Polish mother, and sometimes the German or Polish part is Jewish but the person was raised Catholic.
My British pen pal thought I was joking at first, she’s from Cornwall where most people are of Celtic Cornish or Anglo Saxon English heritage and few Americans. She thought it was interesting that Americans can have such a wide range of ethnicities in their background because that’s highly unusual where she’s from, whereas in the US a mixed ethnic background if you’re Catholic is common
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It’s part of the whole “white people” thing. We don’t differentiate between Slavic, Scandinavian, Celt, Anglo, Iberian, or even Greek and Italian, much, because most of us are more than one of those strains, so “white” is the most convenient shorthand. There’s no tickbox on the form for “germano-celtic-scandi-mutt”
But it’s easy to spot white foreigners, even before they start talking. They look different. Different face types. Different posture.
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I agree that Americans tend to lump in all European descended people as white, it makes sense. Where I live there’s a lot of Eastern European immigrants and they really do look different from many American white folks, a combination of facial features and temperament.
It’s especially jarring since I’m a substitute teacher and many schools here have few white students, mostly African Americans and Hispanics. It’s weird to see a class roster of African Americans and Hispanics with a smattering of white Eastern European students, it’s because they’re recent immigrants whose parents can’t afford private schools.
The kids often seem bewildered since they are among a handful of white students surrounded by minorities, it doesn’t look like an American school of the sort shown on TV. The African American and Hispanic students just called them white and seemed genuinely confused that these kids came from different countries and cultures, they had no idea that Polish, Ukrainian and Russian students came from different countries and were not just “white”. Yet, the Hispanic students got seriously mad if one got mistook for another, if someone accidentally confused a Puerto Rican student from a Dominican.
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If you have mixed ancestry, you can be all sorts. We used to say my German Jewish grandmother rembled the queen. Kids at school called my dad Superman, no doubt due to North England resemblance to Christopher Reeve. In SE Asia, they asked if Harrison Ford was my brother, probably due to Irish ancestry on my mother’s side.
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