Today’s woke world needs to wake up to a blatant bias

A sinister problem is seeping stealthily throughsociety, spreading its tentacles and hounding good men. I became aware of itwhen a friend told me I was the splitting image of his cousin and showed me thecousin’s photograph on his phone. The man had a lighter complexion, rounderface and broader nose than me. His eyes were wider apart. And while friendshave often remarked on the prominent nature of my chin (“It enters the roombefore you do”), his was almost non-existent.

In fact, we shared only one characteristic: a smooth, well-shavenhead. The gross injustice, always hovering in the depths of my subconscious, surfacedsuddenly. I realized that this was not the first time a bald man was beingdeclared a close resemblance to another bald man and it won’t be the last. Irecalled my bald friends relating instances of their friends, acquaintances andeven strangers declaring them to be identical looking to a cousin, boss,colleague or distant uncle. The prejudice is everywhere: bald men are beingmistaken for each other in WhatsApp forums, dimly lit pubs and crowded footballstadiums in every country, every day.

Today’s woke world comes down hard on peopleexhibiting any form of this insidious bias of likening one human being toanother just because they belong to a common category. For example, if you wereto ask two of your black American colleagues whether they are related would younot get a severe and well-deserved reprimand from human resources? And if youever express wonder at the resemblance between two Koreans because of thesimilarity in their passports, would they not immediately (and justifiably) scoldyou?

IndeedWikipediahas a whole section called cross-raceeffect that covers mankind’s confusion in distinguishing between people ofanother race. It includes complex concepts like ‘emotion recognition’ and‘cognitive disregard’. And for those afflicted, there is increasingly helpavailable to handle the pain of the cross-race effect. For example, in 2016, TheWashington Post wrote about “published guides to help readersdistinguish between” Asians of different origin and went on to explain how“computer scientists at the University of Rochester tried to teach an algorithmto tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces.”

But is the cross-baldy effect raging around us gettingthe same indignant response from the same woke world? Far from it. TakeWikipedia for starters. Apart from a dry section on ‘hair loss’ offering thevapid and completely useless information that hair loss is also known asalopecia, there is nothing. There aren’t any training programmes to teachpeople how to distinguish between bald faces (Lesson 1: “The face starts abovethe eyebrows and proceeds downwards fromthere.”)? And no computer scientist is working on a baldy-recognitionalgorithm.

Perhaps we baldies are to blame. We have not comeforward. We’ve accepted this grievous injustice with stoicism and resignation.That is why conducting research in Google on the topic of bald men beingmistaken for each other throws up not examples of this happening but a varietyof balderdash instead. There is an article in TheGuardian offering tips for dealing with baldness, startingwith asking you to accept it – and making bald men wonder if there were indeeda choice in the matter that not been conveyed to them – and then pontificating aboutthe use of wigs, hair transplants and drugs. Otherlinks lead you to examples of bald men who are famous andsuccessful, hinting that if you’re bald you should simply hang in there, and yourvery hairlessness will one day catapult you to fame. (These articles fail to mentionpeople who are famous and successful, and have a head of hair. I believethere are a few of them.) There is researchto reassure bald men that their affliction is not their mother’s fault. Andfinally, there is some claptrapclaiming that women find bald men attractive. All I can say on that matter isthat the woman who chose to marry me often looks at old photographs featuring myhirsute days and sighs wistfully.

So I urge my bald brothers to take inspiration fromthis ground-breaking article and flood the internet with real stories of real hairlessheroes. Tell the world that you don’t really care that you’re bald, that youlike it, that you actually use a razor twice a week to achieve the effect. Clarifythat you have not spent the better part of your life and a significant part ofyour mother’s blaming her for your baldness. Admit that you would not mindbecoming rich and famous and successful, but you don’t believe baldness alonewill take you there. And above all rave and rant about the injustice being reapedon you when you’re mistaken for another bald person. Tell them it rankles. Exhortthem to stop.

But if they say they cannot help themselves, that, inorder to earn a good night’s rest, they must equate one bald man’s looks withanother, request them to aim higher: instead of mistaking you for an obscuresecond cousin on their father’s side, mistake you for Bruce Willis or JeffBezos and seek your autograph.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, in Oct 2022