Fun with Stereotypes

Since my classes have already taken their final exam, we are free to mess around a little for the last couple weeks of school. This week, that meant having a little cultural lesson about American diversity, woohoo! In a Powerpoint, I presented the students with pairs of pictures and asked them to guess which person was American and tell me why they thought so. The results were predictably misguided.

Not to say that all Taiwanese people look the same, but you can't really deny that they don't come in the same variety of hair/eye/skin colors that Americans do. Coming from this kind of environment, it is easy for students to assume that Americans also have one characteristic hair/eye/skin color. When asked why they thought a certain person looked more American than another, the most common response by FAR was, "her skin is whiter." Other frequent answers: she has blonde hair, her eyes are blue. I certainly don't conform to these stereotypes in any way, haha! Another amusing answer that I heard a couple times was, "because she is prettier." Taiwanese children think Americans are good-looking! Do I have to correct this stereotype too? In our next class we will look at pictures of ugly Americans! Or maybe I will just let it slide.

For people whose photos I showed to my class:
a) I hope you don't mind that I used your picture! I just took ones that I had on my computer.
b) How You Look, According to Taiwanese Children:
my father: very handsome, although a couple of kids asked if he was my grandfather
Luke, stroking his beard: like a monkey
Gina Bodoh: very beautiful, nice smile
Arjun: Taiwanese! Italian! Russian! Canadian! UTTER CONFUSION

Oh, children.

Anyway, in the end we all learned that Americans come in all kinds of colors, and an American who looks Taiwanese is no less American than one with blonde hair and blue eyes. Now, if only I could finagle a way to give this lesson to a certain few school administrators...cough coughDragoncough...