And Indian stereotypes, too, according to my Indian friends.
White people don’t manage their money.
White people are irresponsible with alcohol.
White people are impulsive.
White people don’t educate their children.
White people can’t do math.
White people are more readily violent.
White people are good at sport.
White people are kind of dumb.
White people are disrespectful of authority.
White people are promiscuous.
White people commit more crimes.
White people are racist.
I just realised this the other day. I thought it was kind of cool how you could replace “white” with “black” and nothing would change. The next time I hear a white person complaining about blacks I shall think of this list and the irony will take the edge off my pissiness.
It might be more accurate to replace “White people” with “People of any color who make bad life choices that keep them at the bottom of the socio-economic scale”. Somewhat wordy, but more accurate.
Also, according to a good friend of mine who is half-Chinese, white people smell funny. He said that when he went to China to visit his mother’s family, they remarked that he smelled like a white person.
He would also jokingly say that white people had hair “like that of animals” (wavy and brown, not straight and black like the hair of real humans). He also said that he didn’t understand how we could see with those horrible blue eyes - they looked like the eyes of blind people.
I don’t know about Indians, but if the Chinese citizens I worked alongside in Asia are any indication of the norm, they have no room to talk. Those dudes were nasty drunks.
Yeah, drinking is pretty bad these days. It’s not just that everyone pressures you to drink, it’s that they get offended if you don’t drink - and most of the time there are spirits involved.
My grandma used to say that thing about their eyes. She said about a kid on TV something along the lines of “So young, and his eyes are already starting to rot” -
A friend from Taiwan once told me quite seriously that “all white people look alike”.
An acquaintance from Macedonia said that her people didn’t understand why Americans wore white socks all the time. I looked around and was surprised to see how often we do wear white socks.
I’ve heard this is because of the higher incidence of dairy products in the Western diet. The distinctive fatty molecules don’t really get completely broken down and some get excreted in perspiration.
I was going on and on to Ingo (The World’s Most German) about Saudis. He pointed out to me (in his thick German accent) “Everzing you say about dem, ve say about you!”
It’s true. But it’s a dietary issue, not a racial one. You eat a lot of meat, you eat an american diet, you smell different from someone who eats a chinese diet. Not that surprising.
There is a certain caliber of “white people looking alike”. Watch some of the old 80’s movies. There’ll often be two leads, two blonde, handsome young men.
Well, I have trouble with faces anyway, and those kind of movies throw me for a loop every time. Sometimes, white people do look alike.
Yeah, no doubt - I’m a white guy and it takes me forever to figure out who’s who in movies with great numbers of military men (i.e. “Saving Private Ryan”, “Band of Brothers”, etc). I must really rely on hair and clothing styles.
In 9th grade Social Studies, we had to read part of an account given by a Chinese official who had met a Portuguese envoy, his first encounter with westerners. He started out with “They all look alike, although some are taller than others.”
A software company I once worked at had a quite mixed set of employees – various European, Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Korean ancestries. One day, one of the Chinese fellows needed to take a document to one of the secretaries, “Maureen.” “Which one is Maureen?” he asked me. “You know her,” I responded. “She’s the Irish lady.” She had the stereotypical Irish look – pale complexion, red hair, greenish eyes. The Chinese man had no idea what I meant. He looked a bit embarrased. “You all look alike to us,” he admitted. We talked about this further. He honestly saw little difference between the olive-skinned Italians and the pale Irish folks. OTOH, it was quite obvious to him which of the Asian folks were Vietnamese and which were Korean or Chinese.
When I lived in the far north of Japan few foreigners (of any nationality) lived there. One of my friends was a British woman, very short and petite with very long hair, then, in the same town, an American woman came - she was very tall and heavy (butt was a shelf), with long hair. You’d be surprised how many times people confused them. Denise was often told she’d been seen somewhere she hadn’t been and Andy was complemented on her saxophone playing skills, when she didn’t play saxophone!
Actually, I think most Chinese men think Americans are wusses when it comes to alcohol. We don’t have really strong alcohols and we don’t drink nearly as much as them.
Drinking in China is part of the culture. It’s a bad part, in my opinion, but it is part.
