the world: nationalities

I'm white, but my father is pretty swarthy and has kinky hair. I inherited my mother's coloring -- very fair. One day when I was about six or so I held up my arm because I thought I had a sort of tan. My dad held up his (much darker) arm next to mine and said "Look! We're of different racial sects!" Ah, that's why he's so much darker, I thought: because he's black! I didn't really understand genetics, obviously, but I thought of one of my best friends as black, and he had a white mom and a black dad, so it all seemed totally reasonable. I don't remember how long it took for me to figure things out.

As an add-on to this, the picture of Abraham Lincoln hanging up in my 1st-grade classroom looked a bit like my dad, so I decided that he was black too. Made sense why he would want to free the slaves, didn't it?

I believed the line from the Australian national anthem was 'our land abounds in nature strips', not 'our land abounds in nature's gifts'. But it's true, my part of the country did have a lot of nature strips!

I knew that there were people of all colors. i thought there were black people (african american), white people (caucasion), yellow people (chinese), tan people (hispanic), and i thought that other people from different nationalities were different colors...including blue, green, purple, and orange.

When I was young and I had a placemat of the united states, I believed that the reason there were 50 states was that in every state people had different culture, looked different, and spoke a different language.

I used to believe you could only marry another person from your country -Canadians couldn't marry Americans, and you had to be the same age.
I also thought there were only Canadians and Americans, and when I found out about British people I was amazed and thought that now you could only be one of those 3.

My little brother once asked me,
"Erin, if Samuri Jack is Japanese, why isn't he black and speak Spanish?"

Im 20 and untill about a year ago whenever I would fill out paper work that asked your race I would always mark OTHER because I thought that caucasian was some kind of person from asia!

When I watched the Olympics when I was little, I didn't know that there were other countries and thought that Canada was another state.

I used to think that the U.S. and Great Britain were natural enemies -- I was just the right age when the Bicentennial happened in 1976, and there was a lot of information about Washington fighting those dastardly British.

I used to believe that there were only two races in the world, black and white. I thought until I was like 11 or 12 that Chinese people were just white people with different eyes because the skin was more or less the same color to me. And someone told me that it was the constant wind that caused that. After watching cartoons like Aladdin I also thought Arabic people could find genies and have wishes and stuff, and that he was actually Italian.
And I also thought Irish people were all leprachauns. And that the whole world was one religion.

I read in the Pippi Longstocking books that people in China walked on their hands all the time, and I believed that for years.

I used to believe…

That germs came from Germany.

I used to believe…

remember the expression "dig a hole to china"? i took it the wrong way and thought that it meant China was buried underneath us..and everytime i took a step i was probaly stepping on some poor chinese' persons head

When I would hear things on the news about Palestinians (from Palestine), I thought for the longest time that they were saying "Palaced Indians."

At a younger age, everytime I heard the word "Palestinians" on TV or what not, I always thought they were saying "Palace Indians".

When I was in first grade there was a poster in my classroom of children of the world in cultural dress. For some reason, the children from Thailand had very long fingers. For years I believed that they were born that way.