What's in a face? About Stereotypes

This week I finally started my new job as a lecturer in a masters studies program called "Germanistik und Interkulturalität/Multilingualität " ("German Studies and Interculturalism/Multilingualism"). As you may figure, this seems to be just the right thing for me and I'm excited to go back to teaching again.

Interestingly, a new colleague asked me, if I was from New Zealand. It seemed that I looked a bit Maori to her. Not long ago, I talked to another italki user and told him, that I was mixed-race to which he replied that he always thought of me being American Indian. This prompted me to conduct a little experiment on stereotypes and I posted this discussion on italki: https://www.italki.com/discussion/165794. If you're not an italki user, you can't read the whole discussion, so I'm going to summarize it.

My initial post was: 

I had some discussions with other users that it seems to be difficult to guess my ethnicity and my age from my profile pic. So, I‘d like to ask users who don’t really know me, what they think what my ethnic background is and how old I am.

Please take your guess just judging from my current profile pic. (And please don’t give away the answer if I already told you or you have read it somewhere). 

The range of answers was interesting. Age-wise from 20 to 45. The guesses about my heritage were: East Asian. American Indian, Spanish speaker from Central America and a mix of Spanish and some indigenous tribe, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Filipina, Mongolian, Taiwanese Aborigine, Navajo from Arizona, Chinese, mix between Taiwanese mother and American/British father, Cambodian, Inuit, Peruvian, mix of European and Mongolian/Chinese parents, Japanese. In another thread, someone also came to the conclusion that I could be Iranian. Wow, quite a big range!

I added links to voice recording of mine, so that users should guess my native tongue based on my accent.

• Here is a snippet of me speaking Spanish in an episode of the podcast Español con José https://teacherjose.com/podcast/67/. (with the time stamp, you can jump to 2:45 where my part starts)
• Here you can listen to me reading a poem in Russian: https://vocaroo.com/i/s1gtE9x0BLGB. (This is a recording from when I haven't started studying Russian yet.)
• And this I recorded just for the italki discussion, speaking Japanese, Chinese and English: https://vocaroo.com/i/s1tX6LKdB4Z0
• This is a very old recording of me speaking Farsi: https://vocaroo.com/i/s0pt3SKCu44S.
• One user requested that I say "Hello, my name is Miriam" (because my "r" would normally give away my German mother tongue) and I added a sentence in Arabic: https://vocaroo.com/i/s1g9Q3VZhWd7 

The answers to this challenge were also interesting. Ranging from my accent giving away my German native tongue, having an Asian-British accent, speaking Chinese like a Korean and Japanese like a Chinese, having a Dutch or Scandinavian accent, having a near-native Farsi accent.

In the end, I gave the solution: I'm 43, being of German-Japanese decent, but having only German as a mother tongue. And I concluded this little experiment with a German recording: https://vocaroo.com/i/s1ohMvlTyOlk.

It was a lot of fun doing this experiment and it was very revealing to see what we project on the faces of other people. We can only see skin-deep. But based on the looks and the accents we form ideas of where the person comes from. But in the end, we aren't so different from each other.

I'd like to conclude this post with a great comic by tuffix (downloaded here: https://tuffix.deviantart.com/art/Prejudice-and-Pride-319123154). We are not always what we look like but both sides should not overthink. Don't put people in pigeonholes and don't let other people put you in pigeonholes.