I agree, except skin colour is not equivalent to appearance as a whole, in fact, skin colour is but a minor variable in someone's overall appearance and thus of limited use in itself to make any accurate judgments of the individual and the cultures to which they belong.
We must also remember that culture is not some unified monolithic entity where all members are the same/follow the same basic principles (race alone is also subject to this since being 'black' can mean many, many different things). More than this, at any one time an individual is a member of multiple, fragmented cultures that could often be conflicting and even contradictory on some level. And this, I argue, is where initial judgments based on appearance fall to pieces since any stereotype we develop before hand is usually based on what we deem to be the most prominent visualization of culture we detect on an individual, regardless of its accuracy or actual importance/impact on the individual in reality.
It is of course true that our culturally ingrained stereotypes can be confirmed, after all stereotypes develop out of some sort of truth witnessed by people at some point in time. That being said, we should question stereotypes and not merely accept them at face value, after all we most likely did not create the stereotypes that we use everyday, they are the result of a larger cultural force and often serve to fill in the space that ignorance occupies, which is always a potentially dangerous proposition.
so, as a white person, when i'm looking at a black-skinned person, i'd usually look at their clothing, manner of movement/speech before trying to determine whether or not they are part of the ghettoville gangster culture
yes people are part of many fragmented cultures
we have to act differently around different people
an employed person will act a certain way while at work, and he will act differently outside of work, and in america, the differences in behavior can sometimes make a person look like he has 2 different personalities, we do this with different social groups as well, in america, when you have a male with an oral fixation, where he would be considered "bi-sexual" because he performs oral sex on people of both genders, you have a situation where almost no one would be aware that he's "bi", there would be 2 seperate, mutually exclusive groups of people, the people that know he sucks dick, and the people that know he eats pussy
even on a non-sexual level, we instinctively divide our friends into these mutually exclusive groupings, where the people he works with are seperate from the people he hangs out with outside of work, where the people that he hangs out with when he's drinking are seperate from the people he sees when he's sober, where the people that only see him when he's with his girlfriend are seperated from his freinds that never actually meet his girlfriend
when it comes to race, i think it's possible that you could have a black guy that hangs out with white people, but also hangs out with black people that hate white people
it's also possible for a white guy to spend time with black frinds even though he's spending his saturdays hanging out with white supremesists
but the individual's initial judgements are based on stereo types, and the stereo types are based on the previous obsevations of others, making generalities based on what's the most visible
so that when, as white people, we see black people, and we assume that the black people we see are belonging to the ghettoville gangster culture, it is because of the existence of the ghettoville gangster culture that we make these assumptions, just because an individual black peson is capable of behaving like a white person, (Caladan) doesn't mean that the whole black culture has dissapeared
