This didn't happen to me too often but I do have one good story. I'm half-Mexican and pretty white-passing; I like to say I have "vaguely ethnic" features. A while ago I was serving at a bar/restaurant that was named after the Italian family that owned it (although I'm fairly certain they'd lived in Wisconsin for at least a couple generations). Once I served a table of three retirement-age white guys, who at some point in the interaction asked me if I was one of the family members; I said no, figuring that was that, but no. They went on to ask "German? You know, there are those 'dark' Germans," and when I waffled a little (I actually do have a tiny bit of German ancestry) they proceeded to talk for like five minutes about it--no, actually, about me, without really trying to involve me in the conversation, but keeping me standing there. It was a really slow day in the restaurant so I didn't have a good exit excuse. It really did not feel good. The whole time I just wanted to scream "I'm Mexican!" but I just KNEW they were the type of people to have Opinions about Mexicans/Latin@s and good god did I not want to open up that can of worms.

eta: this was in a midwestern city with a huge German history/connection, so it wasn't exactly a bad assumption? It still felt really really gross.

I think that's the point where I started crying I was laughing so hard (at my desk at work...)

I really think this is the one that most matches my personality which means it was the hardest to get through because ahhh relationship/life goals PLUS I've always had a soft spot for Kal Penn. How dare you I was not prepared.

This is a wonderful article. I feel so, so lucky whenever I think back to my high school English classes, and each time it comes up I am even more grateful that we read what we did. Sure, we read The Scarlet Letter, but we also read Native Son, Beloved, and Fences. We read Solar Storms (Linda Hogan) and Green Grass, Running Water (Thomas King), and we watched the movie adaptation of Smoke Signals. We read Cisneros twice, I think. The Kite Runner and Persepolis. And there are probably more I'm forgetting. Granted, I was in honors/AP classes all four years, but still. I remember going to some College in the Schools day trip my senior year for our lit class that brought together all the participating schools, and out of the curriculum list the program provided, we had read more of the "nontraditional" possibilities than any of the other schools. These were pretty much all presented without comment, without making a big deal that we were reading "diversity" books instead of the classics, and I'm not sure any of us quite realized how different our curriculum was. But I'm almost certain I would not have felt half as engaged as I did if we had only read the DWM canon. Considering I went to a public high school in a small-ish (verging on suburban) Midwestern town, I am impressed and so very grateful.

see this is why the quickest way to make me want to stop talking to you is to tell me I'm so interesting (and/or smart and/or different than everybody else), because I guarantee you're just feeling at least one of the things on this list.