It's true that as an artist you put a little bit of your self into your work. Quite literally!
In fact, it can be difficult at times to avoid giving all your creations your facial features. This is not so much the result of arrogance as falling back on familiarity. You see your face in the mirror everyday. It is so familiar to you that any faces you imagine begin to unconsciously take on some of its features. This became quite apparent to me when I took on the task of portraiture. I discovered quickly my initial instinct to give everyone Asian eyes.
There are ways around this of course. The importance of reference cannot be stressed nearly enough. However, while plenty of texts cover the human face and its anatomy, there are nearly no studies of the subtle variations that aid in delineating different races. Perhaps this is because such talk is often deemed as racist and taboo. But that couldn't be further from the truth. By not studying how to render different ethnicities on paper, I can only create one ethnicity successfully...my own. The result is a culture far more homogenized than the one traditionally avoided by the politically correct.
To that end, I have begun my own personal studies of rendering different races. It's not terribly scientific (b/c I'm not a scientist) and involves a lot of pouring through Google Images. I find that the culture's own artwork is a great place for me to start for two reasons:
1) art demands a certain amount of simplification
2) art tends to represent the cultural ideal
In other words, that which a culture chooses to represent itself is likely that culture's idea of beauty. This helps me avoid any personal bias, while still focusing on distinguishing features.
