Americans are WHAT?? Responding to Stereotypes


Having lived abroad for about five years now, I’ve encountered a few (understatement) preconceived ideas about me/people from my country. Recently I came across a book called “Survival Kit for Overseas Living” that actually lists the stereotypes many people from around the world hold about Americans. Fascinating!


I then shared a partial list of these stereotypes on my Chinese social media to see what my international friends thought. (I should mention that I have friends from all over the world on that app, and the responses / these stereotypes do not exclusively represent the Chinese perspective.) I have now come up with a slightly modified list based on their comments.

So without further ado, I’ll end the suspense and share it here:

Americans are usually…
-Friendly, outgoing
-Optimistic
-Casual
-Loud
-Rude
-Hardworking
-Aggressive, confrontational
-Wasteful, extravagant
-Confident
-Uninformed, ignorant
-Privileged
-Impatient
-Generous

As an American, my initial response to reading this list was… Oh, yeah, I know Americans EXACTLY like that and that and that! But on a second reading, a strange and uncomfortable feeling comes over me, like, Well, we aren’t ALL like that! I mean, I’m not. I think.

I identify the discomfort: it’s offense. Which is the natural response when people stereotype you, put you in a box, label, make broad generalizations, etc. You feel offended.

As a white American female, I’ve also encountered other stereotypes, a lot of which tend to stem from movies. Believe it or not, I did not spend my whole college career wasted and sleeping around. Real relationships do not progress the same way they do on TV shows. Also, my country is not constantly being destroyed by aliens.

Yet, I haven’t only been stereotyped by the internationals I’ve met in China, but also by other Americans from different parts of the U.S. Sometimes I wonder if we even come from the same country!

Which just goes to show how big and diverse this amazing world is. China is also a huge country, spanning a breadth of climates and languages and cuisines, in which very few people fit the stereotypes I knew from back home, such as Chinese people being nerdy, unstylish, stoic geniuses. Oh, and bad drivers.

Everyone develops ideas about the unknown and projects their assumptions. It’s a survival tactic that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. But when in heat of the stereotype spotlight, feeling offended and frustrated and insulted, I’m not thinking about humanity’s universal tendency to assume. I’m formulating my own judgments about how ignorant my offender is of real Americans such as myself!

In this situation, I have a choice: whether to continue to wallow in offense, or take the opportunity to openly express the real me. I can’t speak for other Americans about everything, but I can share who I am and what I am about. Hopefully I exude friendliness, optimism, diligence, confidence, and generosity (that is, the positive stereotypes) as humbly as possible. Hopefully the more we humans mingle on this earth, the more we treat each other as unique individuals worth the time to get to know.

As “Survival Kit for Overseas Living” advises:

1. Resist becoming angry or defensive.
2. Avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes.
3. Persist in being your (sweet old) self.

Solid life advice.

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