(Untitled)

[shreena]

I meant to post about this ages ago because a discussion on someone else's journal prompted me.

I absolutely hate the following conversation:

Someone I don't know:  Where are you from?
Me:  Cambridge
SIDK:  But where are you really from?
Me:  I was born in Newmarket.  Does that help?
SIDK:  But where were your parents born?
Me:  My mother was born in

Comments

Re: Not just non-white

[shreena]

Yeah, I was just pondering the accent thing. quizcustodet gets asked about his American accent a lot too. I think that part of it is the same - the lack of realisation that this is likely something that the person in question is bored of talking about - but that part of it is different in that I've never heard anyone query his answer. I.e. no-one seems to ask pursuing questions that amount to doubting his own classification of where he's from.

Re: Not just non-white

[oedipamaas49]

Exactly. I get this a lot in Berlin, because I have an obviously foreign accent. It's tedious, but I'm fairly sympathetic because people are often desperate to start a conversation, or trying to subtly ask if I'd rather talk in English. I've never had anybody challenge my responses - if they did, I'd be hopping mad about it.

Re: Not just non-white

[lisekit]

I get asked a lot about my "American accent", too! People just get fixated on weird things.

Re: Not just non-white

[aldabra]

I get that about my accent. I say Cambridge and people say no you're not that's not a Cambridge accent.

It's a congenital speech defect. I had speech therapy for thirteen years. Clearly it didn't fix it 8-(

It doesn't help that I have an obviously foreign name which nobody can place. I get told I'm South African more often than anywhere else, presumably because it's somewhere very far away where white people live.

Re: Not just non-white

[khalinche]

*eyeroll* although I don't think it's equivalent to your experience, and that of other non-white people, I get frustrated when my accent is misread - and I do sometimes get people who refuse to take me at my word when I say I grew up in Scotland. A while ago a guy I'd been making small talk with at a bar actually argued with me over where I was from, and told me I couldn't possibly be Scottish as there 'wasn't a trace' of it in my accent. This after he'd heard me speak all of 15 words.

More recently, I was in a meeting on Tuesday and a woman who hardly knows me at all made an announcement about an American expat committing crimes somewhere else in the world, and prefaced it with a twinkly, 'Sorry, Emma' as though I were related to this guy somehow. And it's not as though you can take them aside afterwards and say, 'I'm from Scotland, actually'.

Coming back to your post, it must be incredibly aggravating. I can't believe people still do this.

Re: Not just non-white

[offensive_mango]

I am with you here. I have had the exact same conversation with everyone I have met for the past 10 years, and it always goes like this:
1. "Where are you from?"
2. "Arkansas? Bill Clinton's territory!"
3. (optional, choose one) "So what's it like growing up in the desert?" (?!) or "So why is it pronounced ARK-an-saw when it's pronounced ar-KANSAS?"
4. ends with "So do you spell things properly yet?"

Please, people, ask something interesting for once. Though I know I'm just as guilty of similar sins.

Re: Not just non-white

[offensive_mango]

(p.s. shreena: it's the boringness I'm identifying with here. I don't know what it's like to have my identity questioned, except that recently on a job offer letter it ended with "If we find out that you are in breach of any immigration laws, we will terminate your employment without notice." I can't imagine that they would put that on a letter written to someone who had an English accent, and I find it incredibly irritating that they very obviously put that on the letter even after I had made it clear in my interview that I have a British passport. The letter already states that they require a copy of everyone's passport on their first day of employment, and that should have been enough.)

Re: Not just non-white

[cangetmad]

I actually have had that written on an employment-related letter to me, and I have an English accent. Of course, I live in Scotland...

Not saying it wasn't gratuitous in your case, but some places are over-keen on the new legislation.

I have similar-ish experiences when people hear my last name. Instantly, they realise they'd mistaken me for a pukka Brit and must find out what I am really. The sequence of questions is quite similar, too - where am I from? Cambridge. Where are my parents from? One from Kent and the other from Hull...

Re: Not just non-white

[offensive_mango]

Ah, fair enough. I am probably being over-sensitive there.

I think the problem that some of us have (when we don't encounter racism on a regular basis and don't consider ourselves racist and therefore don't think things through as well as we should) is that meeting people who look like us and have the same names as we do gets boring, so we get all excited when someone looks different or has a different name, and we want to know about "heritage," because maybe the person we're meeting has a family who has raised them with some interesting traditions or somesuch.

I don't do the sort of thing shreena describes, especially not in London where the differences between Asian people are hotly defended and I'm not informed enough on the subject to ask the right questions. But I'm pretty sure I've done it in the past out of curiosity, especially in America where "heritage" is something that people actively talk about (even us ordinary white folk whose white families have lived in the same white area for generations). I'm sure it must have been

Re: Not just non-white

[shreena]

it will have been more an expression of genuine interest than a demand that the person explain him/herself.I do realise this. The conversation that I transcribe in the post comes across very differently from different people. It's almost more annoying when I realise that someone is asking out of genuine interest, though, because I still don't want to talk about it. I understand that the other person is interested in my great grandparents' birthplaces but I'm not. And the conversation shouldn't just be about what they're interested in. A lot of the people who do this sort of thing wouldn't dream of pursuing another subject in the face of obvious disinterest from the person that they're talking to and so it's still "I'm entitled to know where your ancestors come from" and the fact that it's because they're really really interested in my "heritage" doesn't actually make it much more pleasant for me than the "explain yourself" types

Re: Not just non-white

[offensive_mango]

No, what you say makes total sense. I have encountered both the genuinely interested people and the go-home-Yank people, and the conversation is boring and annoying either way. I wish I had realized this when quizzing my Hindu friend at university about her family's religious practices. I'm pretty sure that got old for her. I guess I'm paying for it now ;)

Re: Not just non-white

[triskellian]

I'm working on convincing all English people I meet that the US is organized in alphabetical order from right to left.
That's brilliant. I shall henceforth believe that the US is alphabetical :-)