The difference can be positive or negative, as can the stereotype (eg “well built dudes are stupid” is just as valid for this as “people with glasses are smart”).
Interesting question…
There is a 5ft 8 in white young guy (20) called Alex in my college with deep brown eyes and a piercing neutral stare. I met him in CS class this year. He dressed in a ‘smart’ casual way. He looked quite athletic and masculine the first few times I saw him, and I did think he had a stereotypical ‘masculine’ personality but when I first got to speaking with him, he had a perfect smile. I found him the most desirable person to be around.
He has perfectly white ‘female teeth’ and he’s actually quite androgynous and feminine like me (for a male). Imagine an ‘elegantly’ feminine-masculine girl and picture her in a male body. He doesn’t look like at all like a rugged and built man but you wouldn’t guess he could be that attractive and kind.
Muscular bodybuilder covered in tattoos. But he has a PhD and has worked as a rocket scientist, and is very polite.
I had a college roommate for a year who was from South Korea on a student visa. I used to tell people that, if you needed a counter to the stereotype that Asian students were smart and studious, this was your guy. He was one of the laziest dumbshits I’ve known. He would skip classes to just lay around the room and get poor grades and then try to fake his report cards by pasting letters over the grades and photocopying it. I don’t think he even thought to change the GPA to match the grades. He stole my long distance phone card (remember those?) and made a ton of calls to Korea which was a real tough mystery to solve when the itemized bill came in. Towards the end, he was trying to forge tuition bills in the same manner as his report cards so his parents would send him money.
It would have been different if he was GOOD at any of this theft and deception but he half-assed it as much as he did anything else. I didn’t see him around the next year and assume either the school kicked him out for low grades or his parents caught on.
NBA player Chris Andersen presents himself in his “Birdman” persona, with outrageous spiky hair and 65% tatooed body, and your first impression is “Who the hell is this nutcase?” But Anderson is one of the most respected players in sports, and has trademarked his persona, with all the proceeds going to foundations for underprivileged children. He himself was raised in dire poverty, by a mother who was abandoned in a shack in the woods in east Texas to raise her large family any way she could.
Some years ago, we went to Bike Week in Daytona. As you might expect, the place was full of denim, leather, do rags, and tattoos. I saw one guy all fitted out like a bad-ass biker - wallet on a chain, boots, leather vest sans shirt, tats, scraggly beard - walking along the sidewalk holding hands with a pre-school girl all in pink, chattering away to her Daddy. The contrast was adorable!!
Decades ago, I worked for a minor-league baseball club as the stand vending manager (I hired, supervised, supplied and paid the “get-yer-red-hots”; “peanuts! Fresh roasted peanuts!” and “ice-cold beer” guys). One of my beer guys had a part-time day job as a local professional wrestler. He looked exactly like the offspring of a particularly gnarly mob enforcer and a salty old pirate, with a broken nose.
Sweetest. Guy. Ever. Polite, kind, hard-working, and totally optimistic about life in general. One of the sunniest people I have ever known.
I guess I’ve been an example of this for quite a while. I’m not sure it’s been intentional, though.
Back when I started college I drove a sport truck to work and school. Since my work uniform required black slacks and leather shoes, I started buying button-down shirts to go with them and wore ‘business casual’ clothes to school before changing to a white shirt and doing the theater usher job at night. Since I dressed so well and actually studied and had useful things to say during my classes, some of my professors and most of my peers thought I was a grad student and that I was just in their class to pad my semester units.
Then the truck broke down and I bought a cheap motorcycle to get around. I quickly learned that business casual attire is cold as hell at freeway speeds and was told that it offers no protection during a slide. So I started wearing jeans and a used leather jacket. And, since I wasn’t working at the theater any more, I was replacing my business-y shirts as they wore out with T-shirts that cost a lot less. By then I was sitting-in on graduate-level courses and, on the first days of classes, I would hear the other (well-dressed) grad students whispering about the stupid biker who must have wandered on campus.
One day when I arrived late to a park where I was teaching Tai Chi, I got off my bike and walked to where my students were gathered. As I approached, one of the ladies said, “It’s a good thing we know your face. If my son brought home someone looking like you do now, I’d be very worried.”
One day I was chatting with friends about police checkpoints in our respective neighborhoods. One friend noted that the cops always waved him through and I said that was strange because the cops in my area seemed to break their routines and double- or triple-up their attention when I approached the line. A third friend noted, “That’s because you wear all black leathers and ride a cruiser while he wears a blue-and-white track suit on his crotch-rocket. He might look like a punk teenager, but you look like a Hells Angel.”
–G!
I have a psychology professor who looks and sounds like a hippie. Long hair in a ponytail, says there isn’t any good music after 1972, and is kind of absent-minded, like maybe he’s smoked on too many joints. He’s a conservative.
Me. If you saw me you might write me off as a typical working class Republican, good ole boy conservative but on many issues I’m quite liberal. My typical attire is heavy on work boots and Carhartt. I own and wear several hats with tractor, chainsaw and trucking company logos. No “Make America Great Again” hats though!
A few years back, I was at the natural history museum in San Francisco. I saw a family there that was in full-blown redneck drag. Dad and son had matching sleeveless NASCAR tees and the most epic mullets you could hope for. Mom had full Tammy Baker eye make up, and appeared to have used enough hairspray to have personally knocked a second ozone hole over Australia.
Over the course of the afternoon, I saw them a few times in different parts of the museum, and without exception, they had the absolutely best behaved kid in the museum. The place was overrun with ill-behaved Yuppie spawn, running around screaming, climbing on exhibits, and generally being studiously ignored by their well-dressed parents. Mullet Jr. stayed with his parents, he was clearly interested in the exhibits, and was constantly asking his parents questions. At one point the kid goes to point at something behind glass, and his dad carefully caught his arm before he could leave a fingerprint on the display case. Meanwhile, behind them, some eight year old in Gucci shoes, whose name is probably “Teighlor,” is trying to ascend a full-scale replica giraffe while his painfully hip and stylish parents are engrossed in their smart phones.
I know a fat old man with a white beard who isn’t jolly at all!
I think he posts here, even… 
The first things you noticed were his deep brown eyes, right? 
Except for the bike, tats and girl, you described me, during much of the '80s.
Darnit ---- I resemble that remark. You been cruising the image album, ain’t cha? 
On the OP – the worst racist I’ve ever known, who just hated almost everyone with any degree of African background or ancestry, was himself African-American. Confused the heck out of me at first. Dude made David Duke look accepting and it took me a few months to wrap my head around it.
This black guy that wears a cowboy hat, boots and likes country music.
You know, there were lots of black cowboys.
Darius?
Well, Howdy!
I sold a couch on Craigslist.
A black couple came by: He was about 6’5’, covered in tatoos, with arms the size of tree trunks. And every bit of it solid muscle. She was all of 4-foot-noth’n. Probably weighed 90lbs soaking wet.
The whole time they were there, she kept yelling at him and bossing him around. And he was basically sheepish, apologetic, and did his best to keep his wife happy.
They were truly a sight to behold.
My shoe repair guy is a long haired Mexican who looks very much like Danny Trejo. Scariest looking dude you’ll ever see.
But an absolute sweetheart.
So what? The stereotype for “cowboy” is white guy.