Last night, my best friend came galloping through my door giggling about some hot guy she picked up at the library. His basic stats: studies physics, spends his summers working at the university library, is apparently the hottest man alive … and he’s white, which, according to her, makes him “so much smarter than Korean guys.”

Wait, what?

If my life were set to a soundtrack, this is where you’d hear the screeching-halt sound effect because in just three seconds she effectively turned my collegiate life’s work upside down, inside out, dressed it in a SpongeBob costume and made a public mockery of it.

This wasn’t your average stereotype about Asian guys being nerdy, socially awkward mathematicians. This was a whole new brand of racial profiling. She was actually reverse stereotyping, saying that now Korean American guys are the idiots sleeping through lectures while white guys are the ones setting the curve.

Wacky, I know.

But if you’ll allow me to make this one hypothesis, I believe that the bottom line to these stereotypes remains unchanged: that Korean American men always lack those characteristics most valued at the time. Back in the day when Asians were seen as perpetual foreigners, it was said that our guys lacked a certain panache in social settings. In other words, they never got the girl because their math jokes weren’t witty enough. And now, when strategy-minded CEOs of corporate conglomerates with MBAs from Wharton are marrying beautiful aspiring supermodels, our guys lose again. Why? Because, according to my best friend, they just aren’t smart enough, anymore.

She then went on to explain how she blew off this other KA guy on her campus who dared to speak to her. My heart went out for the ballsy stranger who managed to collect the courage to introduce himself simply as someone in her sociology class. From her short account of how the scene played out, he strayed into her personal space and interrupted her conversation, only to be carelessly dismissed without much more than a cursory nod to his existence. Again, why did this happen? Because he was Korean American and, according to her, he looked like an absolute idiot.

Although I’m not exactly sure how this whole stereotyping-your-own-kind thing is supposed to work, I do have my one hypothesis. And I’ll let you know if I come up with anything more concrete, but only if you share yours, too.

Personally, I’d choose a Korean American guy over a white guy any day, so I might be a bit biased. I mean, it’s hard not to when you’ve been ogled by pricks with fetishes and asked vehemently if you’re Chinese or Japanese. Or when they announce hopefully that they really like Asian girls. Or when they lean in to tell you that you being Asian is the best thing that ever happened to you. No joke! This actually happened.