Alllooksame.com

Alllooksame is a website created to break down the generalizations we all hold onto about how another culture looks. Throughout history cultures, usually dominate ones, have set guidelines as to how another, subordinate culture appears to them. A simple example is the Nazis in WWII who infamously made charts and signs allowing other anti-Semitic sympathizers to identify the enemy. Did all Jews have dark hair, large noses, or other noticeable traits? No, but this allowed the group in power to put a label on a culture and package them with visuals.

Alllooksame.com lets the viewer take a test to identify particular Asians as Japanese, Korean or Chinese using only photos. I happen to have quite a few Asian friends. My co-worker who sat 10 feet from me for six years was 100% Chinese. I have two close mom friends who both are Korean, and even have the same last name! Yun. So I would have thought I would score particularly high looking at these friendly faces everyday. The photos themselves are clear and in focus. They play a few tricks by having punk style or nontraditional haircuts on several of the subjects. All my Asian friend have very similar haircuts, which my Korean friend insists is because Asian hair is very difficult to style! So the radical hairstyles threw me with the women subjects. Also my Chinese friend loves to get tan on vacation, and she does. Her skin turns a beautiful tan when returning from whatever Caribbean vacation she has been on. So that misled me to take the subjects who had a suntanned appearance to be of Chinese heritage. I felt I had a pretty good grip of general assumptions that might help me cheat a little bit.

Surprise surprise. I scored really bad, no, really bad the site said! Did my friends steer me wrong? No, turns out you really can't categorize a people or a culture just by using a few visual cues. People are just as different on the outside as they are on the inside, we all know this. Happily, alllooksame actually proves it!