Kelly McCreary is a Black actress on Grey's Anatomy. Jerrika Hinton is also a Black actress on Grey's Anatomy. When Getty Images confused these two women in a caption, McCreary posted a powerful message on Instagram about the visibility of Black women in media.
After Sunday night's Emmy awards, the photo agency posted an image misidentifying McCreary as her Grey's co-star. McCreary posted the photo on Instagram with an appropriately scathing caption: "So I’ll just take this as an opportunity to do a quick PSA — Check your unconscious biases today," McCreary wrote. "We all have them. Managing them takes discipline, vigilance, and self-awareness, and you can practice it anytime. Why not do it today?"
The photograph shows McCreary at Entertainment Weekly's pre-Emmys party. On Instagram, she wrote that she was excited to appreciate the night's nominees and celebrate her own show's recent premiere. But when she searched for pictures of herself the next morning, she found that she had been mistaken for another Black woman with curly hair.
"Now Jerrika is a beautiful lady, inside and out, with talent for days," McCreary wrote, after saying that the pair has been confused far too often. "I would be flattered to be mistaken for her, if it didn’t seem like the all-too-frequent occurrence of this 'mistake' indicated the careless conflation of two black actresses with curly hair on the same tv show."
Mistakes like these are careless, but McCreary highlighted the community that's subject to these mixups the most: people of color.
"I wonder, does this happen when there are two blonde women in the same cast? When there are two dark-haired white dudes with blue eyes? Maybe it does. But I’ll tell you what — to constantly wonder whether I’m facing a micro-aggression I should call someone out on, or a harmless mistake I should let slide, is a real energy drain," she wrote.
McCreary wasn't the only Black star to be confused with totally different person on Sunday night. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences — which handed out the Emmys at last night's ceremony — posted a tweet confusing Empire's Terrence Howard and The People v. O.J. Simpson star Cuba Gooding Jr.