Discussion Main / MistakenNationality

i've been mistaken for an arab,a philipino, and an italian, but my dad is a white american, and my mom is a mexican america(she's mestizo btw, which makes me mestizo too).

Would it be alright to re-add a Real Life section with non-complaining examples? Perhaps we can add a note at the bottom of the description advising against examples that are really just complaining?

One of the examples I was thinking of using is from a book I've read (I'll have to look it up), where a Canadian man recounts a visit to Japan. While he's hitching a ride in the car of a nice Japanese family, the family's young son assumes he's American. When the man replies that he's not American, the boy says, "But you're not Japanese", which the man confirms. Completely baffled, the boy says, "Well, if you're not American and you're not Japanese, then what are you?!"

Another example I was going to add is this gem from Not Always Right, an example of someone who looks and is foreign (inverted here, but you understand) actually speaking their language. There are plenty more of those I could add (mostly involving Spanish) without sounding whiny.

crossovershipper, I feel your pain. I'm 1/4 black and 3/4 white. The white side of my family (my mom's side) is very white, genetically (there might be some aboriginal in there somewhere), and I was raised by that side alone, plus I was raised in an affluent and predominantly white city, so naturally I identify as white. But due to my features, some white people have asked if I'm Hispanic, and some brown people have asked if I'm brown. And when I was in grade five, bullies liked to call me "Egyptian" as an insult.

Not that I'm not guilty of this. There's a person in my college class who I figured was Asian. My peers were baffled by this and said he was "obviously" South American or somesuch, like I was totally blind for thinking otherwise. But it's really a subversion because I was technically right — he's from the Philippines, which is in Asia, though not the part of Asia I had assumed (I figured China or Korea). Then there was a girl I met in high school (and am now good friends with), who had just moved here (Canada) from Guyana. She has a heavy accent and speaks what I assume is Guyanese Creole (though she speaks something closer to "standard" English with Canadians so it sounds more like a regional dialect), which to someone like me just sounds like a poor command of English. So I assumed English wasn't her first language, and I asked how long she had known English for. Imagine my surprise when she replied, "Since I was born!" It's actually much worse when she's talking to people back home — when I look at her MSN conversations or Facebook comment threads with Guyanese friends, most of what they say to each other is unintelligible to me. It's like she speaks a mesolect with people at home and switches to an acrolect with Canadians. It's weird.