That’s probably because Australians and New Zealanders frequently get mistaken for each other - something New Zealanders hate (we see it as an insult) but which Australians don’t mind (they see it as a compliment) 
Seriously though, I do apologise if I can’t get an accent right - to mistake someone’s birthright and nationally, while not directly insulting is also not very nice.
I want a bumper sticker that says:
“I am not being an asshole, I am being pedantic; let me explain the difference to you.” I like being an English teacher.
I hope God gives me enough days that I can be at a party or perhaps a lecture where someone explains Arabs and Islam to me. That, if handled well, might make all of this worthwhile.
I’m from Spain. 50% Basque, 50% other. The other includes some Italian and an itsy bit of German; some of the Basque is french-Basque.
Dad and his brothers (all blonde and light-eyed) used to be mistaken for Austrian refugees when they were children, because of their looks. Someone recently told me there were a couple Viking razzias that got down to the Ebro River and the blonde might come from that.
My cousin on Mom’s side is what’s called “phoenician” in Catalonia, i.e., a redhead. Her dad’s side has a ton of redheads; she is the only one in our side but since those genes are recessive they must come from someplace. We think it may be from our Asturian great-grandmother, lots of Celt over there so redheads and blondes happen occasionally.
I love reminding people that accourding to La Canción de Breogán (I think his name is spelled Breghan up there), the Celts went from Spain to the British Isles and not the other way 'round.
Philly. A VP from a company with 30K direct employees worldwide is declaiming that “we should carpet-bomb any country where terrorists live”. I thank him for killing all my family and explain that Them Good Old Boys are bad enough and we’d truly appreciate it if the motherfuckers didn’t get help from the Marines.
I’ve sometimes derailed an anti-whatever rant from Mom by informing her that “(a friend of her or someone she admires) is (whatever group she was ranting against)”
That’s exactly what my husband says. Where we live, the largest Spanish-speaking population by far is Mexican, and he says that they are much more likely to question his “Hispanic credentials” than whites, blacks, or any other non-Hispanic ethnic group.
It depends on what it is. My SO is Chinese, and I am never going to single-handledly eradicate the “Chinese people kidnap cats and sell them in their restaurants”, although this stupid rumor makes me so think the person is so stupid I mentally cross them off my list forever. However, when the Chinese had our spy plane, people used to say a lot of shitty things about Chinese citizens, and I stepped up every time, mostly with humor, like “My SO’s Chinese; I’ll ask him if he’s got it in his closet. Lots of stuff in there, you know.”
But the worst is when you’re both prejudiced against. I’m E. Indian, and we not too long ago went to a pizza joint in Albany. Well, we watched as they served every white or black person in the room but us. We even stepped forward and tried to get us some attention but they told us to wait. It’s hard to explain how you know when they’re doing it because of your color, but you just know, as I’m sure others in this thread can attest. I almost never attribute things to racism but this time I was quite sure.
I get the opposite thing, myself. A lot of people will think I’m Muslim. So they apologize when they say something even faintly negative about even one Muslim, even if it’s true - “This Muslim prophet said uncovered women are like meat! Asshole! Oh, sorry - you’re not Muslim, are you?” Um, no, and even if I was I would like to think I would still be offended by that idiot!
My wife’s step father is an albino Puerto Rican. With his white hair and pale skin he certainly doesn’t look latino. He also speaks English without an accent despite being born in Puerto Rico. He tells the story about going into a Spanish resturant in Manhatten and sitting at the bar. Several of the regulars started making comments about the gringo who can into their bar. He let them go on for a while then proceeded to rip them a new asshole in Spanish. He ended with “And where did you learn to speak Spanish, your grammar sucks”.
I sometimes get the opposite reaction to what the OP asks about. I have been mistaken for Jewish all my life. People don’t know the difference between traditionally Jewish names and traditionally German names. I know there is some overlap but I have not met anyone with my name that is Jewish. Since I am Italian on my mother’s side I don’t look like a stereotypical German either. I had quite a few Jewish friends so people automatically grouped us together. I rarely hear any bad comments about Jews around me.
When my mother brought my father home to meet her parents my grandmother told her he seemed nice but mixed marriages don’t work. Think about the children growing up with two religions. My mother had to explain about my father’s Irish/German family and about all the priests, nuns and mother superiors in the family.
My uncle and his son in law are preachers. An apparent consequence of this is that they subscribe whole-heartedly to many of the associations between devil worship and Role-playing games, heavy metal, Harry Potter books, etc… On holiday get-togethers, I become very quiet when I endure their uninformed opinions. A lot of their behavior is because my sister wasn’t so silent in disagreeing with them. My uncle knows how she feels and will specifically bring up those subjects because he knows it bothers her. Apparently, one can be a preacher AND an asshole at the same time.
I grew up a white, southern-baptist, anglo-saxon male in the Washington DC area. So I was THE MAN in most situations involving race. Apparently, I’m trying to keep everyone down. In my school I was not a majority. One side effect of all this was that I had never heard many types of racial slurs. And when I did hear them, it was always in a hushed kind of voice. So I knew that they were “bad words.”
Then I went to college in the south. There, I was suddenly in the ethnic majority and surrounded by guys who had no hesitation about using slurs. It was there that I first heard that “jews have horns” or that something was “the best thing since nigger pussy.” (Racism and misogyny all in one convienant sentence!) It was also the first time I heard the word “jew” as a verb.
It was really discomforting being lumped in with those guys. Any time one of them would say such a thing I would surrpetitiously look around to see if anyone heard.
Both of my mother’s sisters adopted their children. Not a one of those children were purely white (about half were mixed race - a variety of mixes).
One of my cousins is biracial (black/white) who looks remarkably caucasian. Well, remarkably caucasian if you know she’s biracial. She’s nearly as pale as me (which is going some - I’m one of Nature’s fishbelly people), massively befreckled and green-eyed. She has riotously curly hair that she wears in an afro - but it’s medium brown rather than black.
One time a couple of years back she and I were at the playground watching her kids, her sister’s kid, and a couple of our other cousins’ kids play in the sandbox. There were a few other mothers sitting on the benches around the play area watching assorted kids.
My cousin’s kids are both blue-eyed blonds (like their father), her sister’s son (Adam) is very traditionally Hispanic looking (dark hair and eyes and beautiful mocha skin), and the other cousins kids ran the gamut (a redhead, a blue-eyed brunette, two more towheads and Matthew (who’s black and asian and very attractive). Adam and Matthew were the only boys we brought - and were impatient with all their girl cousins. Plus they were a little older. Typically enough, they started picking on the girls - and the girls were retaliating with the sniping namecalling (or possibly it went the other way around - Og knows those girls were instigators). My cousin and I were pretending to ignore them (since they were all staying within reasonable boundaries - for kids their age - and they were keeping it at a low enough roar that adult intervention wasn’t really called for). One of the other mothers turned to my cousin, sniffed derisively and said “Those little porch monkeys should stay in the projects where they belong! Don’t they know they don’t belong here with the good people? Look at those poor girls they’re hassling!”
My cousin turned, very very slowly to face her, stared at her for a minute and then called the boys over.
They came running over “What Auntie? They started it!”
The look on the other mother’s face was priceless.
We all went for ice cream.
Reminded me of when we were all kids, my cousins and I, and people used to try and “rescue” me from the older cousins set to watch me (which was never an easy task - I was fearless and independent and tended to disappear if you took your eye off me for a second) because the cousins old enough to watch me and young enough to be drafted into it were invariably not white, while I was ghost pale and redheaded. They’d never believe we were cousins. We had to wait patiently for a parent to explain the relationship to the nice police officer on many an occasion.
I have Native American ancestors, though I don’t look it. The office bigot once made a comment about the Native Americans, and when I told him to shut his face because I was one, he informed me I wasn’t. When I asked him what he was basing that assumption on, he said “You don’t look Indian.”
I happen to be scandinavian, and not all of us are blond and blue-eyed, you know! 
Actualla, really blonde people with true-blue eyes are not that common, though not rare either. If someone is described to me as “looking scandinavian” I’ll assume the person has pale skin, not blond hair. Most people here are pale, and have some sort of brown hair. And then again, some have skin as as dark as olives while the rest of their family is redhaired and freckled. The scandinavian genepool is filled with Og-knows-what at this point, Northern Europe having been invaded, traded with, travelled over and generally muddled for thousands of years. Your “swedish” ancestors could be albanians a few more generations back for all anyone knows, or russians (russia is close to sweden, you know), spaniards, samic nomads, greeks or any combination thereof.
…or, you know, short and dark swedes. 
I have a very English name, cultural leanings and an RP accent, so people I’ve interacted with on the 'net or via telephone sometimes get a rude awakening when racism slips in. It’s even come up in milder form here - “Why, yes, I just so happen to be a “Hottentot”…”
My wife had something similar happen, which I have told about elsewhere on the board. We were in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and my wife had struck up a conversation with an older (mid-50s) guy. When it emerged that we had spent the last six years in Beirut, he said “Who would want to live in that filthy hole with all those dirty Arabs!?” My wife, who takes shit from no one, let him have it in no uncertain terms. But the real kicker is that our daughter is an Arab–we adopted her in Lebanon. I am really not a confrontational person at all, but if I had been there I would have gotten in his face and asked him if he really wanted to call my 2-year-old daughter a dirty Arab. Fucker. I’m still mad about it.
I can pick out Argentines and Brazilians and Venezuelans from a crowd of silent “white” people, no problem. Comes from working at Disney.
Also Puerto Ricans.
But your point should be well taken for most.
I believe that blond hair and blue eyes actually come from the Slavs-the original Scandinavians were carrot tops, weren’t they?
hm…thats interesting. I never heard they were carrot tops (orange or tow-headed, right?). The people on the western coast of Norway in the middle-ages are said to have been pale and dark-haired, with stocky bodies and broad faces. However, there really is no way to be sure. They were about 150 cm. tall, thats all I know.
But, there really is no such thing as an “original” Scandinavian. I mean, there is not like there was a multitude of distinct tribes who suddenly decided to mix. Mixing went on merrily at all times. I suppose some of them looked like the samic nomads do today, and some looked like slavs, and some like modern scandinavians and some like whichever southron trader came round these parts last spring…there really is no way to tell.
The only time I’ve really stood up for myself in this context was while talking with a (racist, bigoted, horrid) aunt. She’d said, in essence, that any African immigrants were clearly bad people who were going to rob your house and assault your children.
I calmly asked if that included a friend from school who’s South African.
She was quiet for a second. “But he’s white, right? So it’s different.”
:smack: For the sake of family peace I left the room then.
This is also the aunt who once told my openly-gay cousin (two different sides of the family) that ‘no wonder he was gay, if he was raised Jewish’. Knowing full well that, uh, my father (her brother in law) is Jewish. And my mother has converted (that would be her sister). My cousin, bless him, said something along the lines of ‘no wonder you’re bigoted, if you were raised Catholic’.
Carrot tops=redheads. I’ve been told that the stereotypical Irish redhair comes from the Viking invasion.
My very Scandinavian, red-haired uncles and grandfather would have you believe that very thing, Guin. Of course, I have the red from my British Isles dad’s side, too; maybe that side got it from the other side on a raid and I’m my own grandfather.
When I was working in LA County Hospital as a medical student I brought my basic high-school Spanish up to some sort of stumbling communication medium that only worked in the hospital. My patients began to tell me stories.
One repentant Mexican fellow told me he was having an anti-black-guy conversation in the corridor outside the ward with another Mexican man. The stimulus for the conversation was a stereotypical looking black guy hanging out with nothing to do ten feet away. I suppose another stimulus was the sort of boyhood glee you get from talking in a secret code - since there was no way the Anglos (including black Anglos) could speak Spanish.
Much to their surprise the black man came over and said, “Eh, compa’s, porque hablas mal de mi?” (Hey, countrymen, why are you talking bad about me?)
This produced a sensation of utter “conviction” (as my church used to call it) on the part of the guy telling the story.
Turns out a lot of people from the islands speak Spanish as their native language. And look African.
That reminds me of another situation entirely with some Spanish students late one night on the bus in Oxford. I sat down with an open but corked bottle of wine in hand (left over from a friend’s dinner party) and the girl I sat next to said something like ‘siempre se me pegan los borrachones’ - more or less “I always attract the drunks”. I gave her my sweetest smile and said, in Spanish - “be careful, you never know who can understand you”. She apologised and we ended up having a friendly chat.