Not All the Same

Although I didn't watch last night's Golden Globe awards (because I don't normally watch award shows and I was watching a bad Netflix movie instead), I did read about the awards ceremony this morning. The Hidden Fences thing just makes me shake my head. How do you confuse two totally different films just because they each have words that start with the letter "F" in the title? Easily, apparently. And you add the fact that both movies have mainly black casts, you've got a perfect storm for wrongness. As a black person, I just have to laugh at this mistake because it's all too real. I've been mistaken for other black women in the workplace...black women who I don't resemble in any way other than that we're black. At one of my jobs in Philadelphia, one of my co-workers looked me dead in the face and called me another black woman's name. The other black woman was probably ten years older than I was and had salt and pepper colored hair that she wore in a really cute natural style. She was also about five shades lighter skinned than I am, yet I was still called by her name. (We both did wear glasses, so maybe that's where the confusion came in.) We all make mistakes, I know, but when things like the Hidden Fences thing happens, it just reminds me that some people find it easier to lump non-white people and their projects together rather than treating them as individuals and that's both dismissive and sad.