Racialized public figures are routinely conflated with unrelated colleagues and strangers

Evidence

This is fair. Countless people on this planet riven with racial hierarchies contend with far more heinous forms of ethnic and racial projection, forced to represent only their skin color to white eyes. They also log on to social media to find themselves blamed and credited for the words and actions of others. The Australian poet Omar Sakr regularly shares outrageous stories about TV bookers and random readers confusing him with a parade of other public figures with brown skin. Once, he was even sent a complete travel itinerary so that he could arrive for his guest appearance on a home improvement show with which he had no prior contact. And the show made the same error with another writer, Osman Faruqi. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 916

Categorization

• CANDY: The travel-itinerary anecdote is a light, shareable absurdity about a booking error snowballing.