This troper's boyfriend. His dad is white, and his mom looks black, with maybe some Indian. The boyfriend? It's impossible to guess his correct etnicity. Even this troper won't know until she guesses correctly, so she's checking countries off a list.

This Troper, is a "Mega-mutt". So far she's figured out that she has: African,Melungeon,Portuguese,Brazillian,Scottish,Irish,3 Indian tribes, and unknown (maybe) European roots. Has thick (not Afro-like)dark brown hair( which can get reddish when exposed to to much sunlight), black eyes,an hourglass figure, and pecan colored skin. She usually gets mistaken for Black, other guessers just get confused. But overall can pass as Indian or Middle eastern. How's that for Purple Prose?

This troper has a similar physical description including VERY thick (though naturally Afro) long hair that too shines a near auburn in the summer. Though only of black heritage, as far as the eye can see, she still gets an oddly large number of out of the blue guesses as to what her other half MUST be (your dad or mom (usually dad) has to be white/Italian/Mexican/Brazilian/maybe Middle eastern) or whether Spanish is her first language. Mexican, whole or half, seems to be the most common for some reason. Though most Mexicans I know never see it. It doesn't help that my Mexican sister in law and halfsie nieces look a lot like me feature wise.

Strange but this troper almost fits that description too. Her heritage is Black, Native American, and Irish. She can easily pass for Hispanic, Indian, Malaysian, and Middle Eastern and doesn't even have a trace of either one of races.

This troper (who started the post) is 14 now and is glad she's not alone. However, has forgot to mention she has narrow " Asian shaped" eyes. But, neither her parents nor her sister seems to have them. She remembers when a child at a movie theatre asked her if she was half Japanese.

This troper is multiethnic, with very light olive skin and off-black hair.

This troper knows a girl who causes this. She has tan skin, straight black hair, listens to Latin music, and speaks Spanish fluently. Everyone (this troper included) thought she was Hispanic at first, but she's actually Italian.

Her adopted cousin is similar in that he looks to most people to be African-American, but is in fact black, Hispanic and Chinese with some European ancestry. The Asian part of his ancestry is most obvious in his eyes.

This troper knew a girl who grew up bilingual, speaking both Spanish and English. Her parents are from Puerto Rico, but she was actually adopted from Korea. It's confusing for people who don't know the situation.

Rosario Dawson. I couldn't work out her ethnicity for a while. According to the OtherWiki, she's Puerto Rican/Afro-Cuban/Native American/Irish. So that probably explains it.

Subversion of sorts: This troper's friend is black as expresso and is a complete Oreo. He describes himself as a "fake black person".

You do know that calling a black person an Oreo isn't a compliment, right?

This (non-OP) troper never heard it used with an obvious connotation.

It means black on the outside, white on the inside. It's a definite BerserkButton for blacks who choose not to be "urban" in mannerisms, plus the UnfortunateImplications that an educated black person is somehow less black.

Played straight with this troper, thanks to the weird mix between Mexican, Jewish and Native American heritage: Brown skin, reddish hair, and Asian-like eyes for no apparent reason (I guess I'd have to ask my grandparents about that detail...)

The "...Asian-like eyes..." can be attributed to any or all of the three parts of your heritage. The Indio part of the Mexican and/or the North American Indian, as American Indians - North and South - are of Asiatic origin. And/or the Jewish part, if that part is Ashkenazi or Mizrahi because both of those originated from areas that were at least partially conquered by the Mongol Empire. I have a friend whose ethnic ancestry is Irish and Polish whose eyes have an epicanthic fold as a legacy of her Polish ancestors long-ago interbreeding with their Mongol conquerors.

Friend of mine in highschool was half black and half Arabic. He looks rather like a white guy with a good tan.

This Troper certainly qualifies as an example, being a mulatto of Dominican descent. People don't seem to believe I'm even Dominican, much less that I'm of Spaniard descent on one side and Afro-Hatian descent on the other. The Dreadlocks don't help. Most people just assume I'm black.

This troper had a friend in highschool who had dark-ish skin and fairly long black hair. He could never quite work out what ethnicitity he was, as he just seemed to be ambiguously brown-ish.

This troper is definitely pale-skinned, but her own dad once pointed out she looked Hispanic in an ID photo. I'm actually Anglo/Slavic, but I have dark hair and eyes, a large, rounded nose, and full lips. My younger sister, who's quite olive-skinned, looks even more vaguely Hispanic.

People often outright ask me what ethnicity I am (actually, they say "nationality," but get frustrated when I say "American"). I respond by asking them to guess. Apparently, my phenotype is consistent with various people's expectations for Italian, Korean, Indian, generic Asian, generic Hispanic, and generic Native American appearance. As for my actual ancestry... won't you take a guess?

Central Antarctican? (This troper ''should'' be a pale AmbiguouslyBrown thanks to being only very slightly less than half Native American and both parents' hair and eye color, but his other half [Dutch and Castillian], intense dislike of sunlight, and very possibly his very distant Norwegian ancestry result in him looking like a red-and-blonde viking with grey-to-TechnicolorEyes.)

This troper. With tan skin, long dark hair, and almond shaped eyes I have been mistaken as anything from Persian to Brazilian to Swedish. Most of the time the guesses are wrong, even by people of my own race!

This Troper's mom is white and daddy is black. She took after her mother to the most extreme. Her siblings however.... most people think they're Puerto Rican. Amusing my dad to no end, who always asks my mom who her boyfriend is.

I'm Arab (Saudi) and a quarter Dutch, however, I'm also extremely pale with thick, wiry, dark brown hair (I'm told that's the Dutch), and East-Asian eyes (although they're double lidded). I have no idea what happened. I almost think my mom was cheating.

One of this troper's friends is half-black, part Greek, and a natural redhead. I know someone in my psychology class who's half-Irish, half Japanese and can easily pass for both with the right dye job. (Natural ginger, by the way.)

This troper is mostly Scot-Irish (yes, we mean Ulster-Scot, no need to get hung up on semantics in American English), with a fair if small portion of French, American Indian (5 generations back at most on the patriarchal pedigree, and about the same on the matriarchal pedigree) and whatever Anglo-Saxon/Germanic phenotypes that are common to Texas. This equals Scot-Franco-Indian features manifesting in different places on each person born into the household. Having Europeans guess our ancestry is a hobby of my family. Most common other then Scottish (obvious guess) is ''predominately Russian''.

This Troper is 1/4 Czech, 3/4 assorted Asian. He has straight black hair and brown eyes + epicathic folds. However, he has a European-ish facial structure and eye shape. Also, due to suntanning, his skin is somewhat darker than it should be.

A whiter shade of 'brown', but This Troper's mother is olive-skinned and black-haired, and has been mistaken for one of their own by multiple ethnicities of Mediterranean-Australian folk. So far as we're aware, we're of primarily Celtic and solely West European origin, though there's a rumour of an Aboriginal ancestor passing a-ways up the tree. I, on the other hand, am freckly, auburn, and so pale some cosmetic lines don't make a foundation shade that works for me.

This troper knows a guy who is just about every ethnicity on the planet, and she couldn't figure that out until she asked him. He's a very clear example of the classic metaphorical American melting pot.

This troper comes from a Latino family where everyone have brown skin, straight black hair and dark brown eyes. Except my sister who is almost white have light brown eyes and black ''totally frizzy'' hair. One day one of my friends came home I introduce her saying "It's my little sister ", he looked to me, to my mother, to my father and said "No way".

This Troper has straight black hair, medium dark skin, Asian features (except for the eyes). Very, very few people guess his ethnicity correctly. He has been said to be everything from Thai to Filipino and even in a few cases ''American Indian''. He is Chinese.

Are you/your ancestors, perhaps, from Southern China?

I was born here but my parents are from Hong Kong. My grandparents are from Taishan. We are from Southern China.

This troper was having a conversation with two guys, one was obviously white, the other was (what we thought) black - until the black guy said something about often being mistaken for being black.

This troper's met the gamut living in the Big Applesauce. A good number of his friends from high school like playing it up like a shell game.

This troper's father is Caucasian with a little African-American thrown in, though you can't really tell. He has dark hair and eyes. He is INCREDIBLY tanned; he looks Italian or hispanic or something. When this troper was a child, she seriously didn't know what race her own father was.

A girl this troper knows is AmbiguouslyBrown. She is medium-skinned, with light brown hair and eyes, and her name sounds African. This troper met her 2 years ago and she is still trying to figure out what race she is. Hispanic? Black? Latino? This troper has absolutely no clue and is too shy to ask.

A girl from this troper's book club. She has black hair, brown eyes, and is olive-skinned but not too olive-skinned. Other than her skintone, she looks mostly white. After about five minutes of knowing her, this troper gave up on trying to figure out what race she was. She ''thinks'' Middle Eastern or maybe Hispanic, but she isn't sure.

This troper went to kindergarten with an AmbiguouslyBrown boy. She once asked "Teacher, why does Akhmed have brown skin?" She is still embarassed about that. And it's been over 7 years since she was in kindergarten.

This trope was pretty frequent when This Troper was in high school and only made the girls in question even hotter. Black-White girls who could pass as Latina, a Greek girl that could pass for Puerto Rican and especially a Samoan girl leading to the catchphrase, "I dunno what she is, but I'd hit that!"

A kid in my English class fits this trope perfectly. In my own words, "Wait, you're not Mexican?"

This troper once told his kindergarten teacher that "my mommy is black, my daddy is white and I am dark white." I'm actually what I jokingly call either a "Heinz 57 Variety" or simply a "Mutt". I'm (takes deep breath) black, white, Mexican, Spanish, Irish, Polish, and American Indian (I forget what tribe, I asked my mother once she told me and I've long since forgotten). I once asked my mother what that makes me. Her answer... "An American." In the summer I get naturally darker, and lighter in the winter. My wife is a self-described "Painfully Pale" Scotch-Irish, and our son tends to lean more on her side of the color line (except in the summer, where he tends to get almost as dark as me). He does have one other thing in common with me, when we were infants we were both "light, bright and damn near white" due to our mixed heritage.

This troper knows a Hispanic girl who has skin pale enough to pass for Caucasian, an extremely pale girl who's actually a Peruvian of Spanish descent, and a mixed white/black girl who everyone else in drama club (including herself) refer to as "brown".

This Dutch troper's father has curly jet-black hair and a tan skin, and he and one of my uncles are so AmbiguouslyBrown that both of them have been mistaken for Turks, Spanish or Portugese in the past - in spite of the fact that most of our relatives are typically white, and that our family has no non-Dutch ancestry that we know of.

Alpha}} This troper looks fairly Caucasian, but is actually half-Mexican (the other half being Irish-German). Most people don't realize this and are often surprised to hear me speak Spanish with a Mexican accent or find out that I have relatives in Guadalajara. This trope also applies to my mother, who is a full-blooded Mexican-American, but was often mistaken for Persian when she was younger.

This troper has an olive complexion and glossy black hair. Probably the most uncomfortable question he's ever been asked was by a guy who wanted to go out with him - "Just checking really quickly, you are white, right?" Turns out his mother is Melungeon. That just raises further questions!

This troper once knew a girl when I was in primary school (which is seven years, I did it from four years old to eleven). She was dark skinned for sure, but at that age I couldn't tell the difference between Australian Aboriginals and black Africans. I am enclined to assume she was the former now, though most of them were genocided or made part of the stolen generations by the colonial authorities, so I'm not too sure. Regardless, she was cute, not to mention funny!

Some foreings can confuse Mexicans and Arabs, which probably sucked for those going to the States after 9/11. In any case, when I was living in Mexico I had classmate whose lastname was Rabadan, the funnier thing was that he was actually White; yeah, a white mexican called Rabadan, I wonder what would happen if he ever went to the US...

This Troper's husband qualifies. He's Puerto Rican and German, and I always thought it was obvious he was of Latino heritage, but his roommates in college guessed everything from black to Italian to Somoan, when the subject came up one night. And then there was the time some woman on a bus thought he was Middle Eastern and a terrorist, and called the cops, who stopped the bus to question his whereabouts that day.

This troper's family, due to the fact that nobody ever took the time to trace them past the Civil War.

I knew a guy in high school who was part Chinese, Indian, Black, and White. That's two generations of parents who weren't the same race at all.

This Troper looks like her father, who is adopted. Not knowing anything about his heritage leads to all sorts of fun speculation. We both have dark hair and olive skin, which means that his birth parents could have been from any number of places. Once, a couple of Middle Eastern guys asked my dad if he was "one of them", to which he replied that it was possible. And more recently, I was talking to two of my (African-American) friends when another friend came up to us and jokingly exclaimed "It's my two favorite black people! And [This Troper], who is ethnically ambiguous!".

This Troper has a similar situation except with an adopted mother, we both have dark olive skin and dark brown hair. Most British people (where I come from) guess Spanish or Italian. I've been mistaken for Spanish, Italian, Greek and Turkish including by people from those countries. Amusingly I'm actually darker skinned or as dark as my Indian friend whose's ethnicity is never questioned.

This troper very rarely figures out the race of any of her characters for two reasons: 1) it limits her options for their looks and 2) she always always ''always'' makes mutts, so it doesn't matter much anyway. So excluding that one girl who's {{Roma}} and Alsace-Lorraine (Franco-Germanic to the point it would be hard to figure out which is which), it would be hard to figure out anything. It might have something to do with her being bad at writing racist stuff, even characters. Except by implication.

This troper has this friend... "So, Rick...are you like, half-Asian? You've got like...kind of squinty eyes. But your skin's too brown, you look like you're half-Indonesian or something...or...half-Moroccan... ... WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU?!"

This Troper who has been questioned herself has a friend who has a black mother and a 1/2 Lebanese, 1/2 Chilean father. You'd expect an a little brownie. Nope! She came out with light golden blonde hair, bluish green eyes and light golden skin. Some think she is white, although most can tell something about her color is "off". Some relatives cried foul and others have accused her of lying or being mis-informed about her Afro-Latino identity. They often cite her light brown mother as being ''obviously biracial'' though both of her maternal grandparents and even great grandparents are dark skinned. Her very pretty Spanish name helps some, though she still occasionally deals with some stereotyping ''issues''. Suprisingly she's not so tragic. Her sister can look white or Hispanic/dark white depending on the dye job. Also another friend is ambiguously light olivey skinned with dark hair and light eyes who everyone thought is Latina...right.... 'cause her mother "definitely looks Mexican"...and she doesn't look "white white"....maybe Italian??... oohh..she's 1/4 Korean and 3/4 Scottish-Irish. Same thing!

This Troper's father looks Arabian, her mother is tall and blonde to the point that some people think she's Scandinavian, and this troper herself looks vaguely Hispanic on occasion. All three are Eastern European Jews.

This troper is almost completely white with some Native American. However he is very dark and when people find out that he speaks Spanish they assume that he is Mexican and when they hear that he speaks Japanese they assume that he is Japanese. I've had Chinese nationals assume that I was fully Chinese and Mexican nationals assume that I was Mexican.

This troper still has a hard time believing EdwardJamesOlmos is Mexican.

This troper and nearly everyone on her dad's side of the family are AmbiguouslyBrown; what we really are are Portuguese and Italian, but what people think we are covers a wide range of Europe and western Asia. This troper was once asked "Are you Indian or Pakistani" and of course had to reply "...Italian."

This troper has light-to-medium olive-colored skin and very dark brown hair and eyes, as well as being the best in her Spanish class. Due to this, she is often mistaken as being Hispanic. Having a somewhat large nose and dark (although straight) hair, she's often mistaken as being Jewish. At times, she's been mistaken for both at the same time. In actuality, she's a mix between West Indian, East Indian, and British, and is a Christian.

Troper has light brown skin, black hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones... the works. She's been confused as Hispanic, Native American (''by'' a Native American - her first question upon introduction was "So, what tribe are you from?" and she ''swore'' that I had to be at least half Lakota Sioux) Middle Eastern, and even, and I quote, "half black." Really, though? She's a mutt of indeterminate Northern European origins, with no Hispanic, Black, Middle Eastern, or (admitted) Native American blood anywhere in her lineage. says "admitted" because she has damned good reason to believe that her "father"...isn't. And not just because he's a raving, ignorant asshole, either.

This troper identifies as black, though I actually also have (to my knowledge) English, Scottish, and Native American (Cherokee and Navajo, I believe) blood in addition to African. I always thought I looked pretty much African American, but someone at one of my Girl}} many Sadie}} protests asked me if I was Native American, because I looked it. So yeah, it must be more ambiguous than I thought.

Nearly every family line in my background, if traced back far enough, includes Native American blood from various tribes. It's been diluted by the English/Irish/Dutch/German/etc., but it must still be there. My parents are both pretty ordinary white people--both fair-skinned with medium brown hair; my dad has blue eyes, my mom light brown--and my sister and I followed the trend. I'm green eyed, my sister hazel-eyed, and I tan better than she does. But then there's our brother. He has straight jet black hair, extremely dark brown eyes, and skin that's tanned in the winter and outright brown in the summer. He's been called Hispanic, Italian, Middle Eastern, and even Black--but mostly just Native American. Good thing his facial features look just like his paternal grandfather's, or there might be paternity questions.

Incidentally, my brother married a woman much like him--from a typical-looking white family, but somehow VERY dark--and they have a toddler son who is, I think, darker than either of his parents. He'll probably be the brownest little boy in his class claiming to be white.

This troper is ambigously white, because I have a set of Hispanic grandparents, but my father is caucasian.

This troper is hilariously ambiguous: most guesses are that I'm latino, even latino people think I'm latino, but I've also been taken for a Canadian Native American (Iroquois or Algonquin), Indian, Mayan, Incan, etc. Closest anyone's come is saying I'm Mongolian on their second guess.

Although this troper is pretty much whitebread Anglo-Celto-Germanic Australian (and there may be a hint of Polish somewhere given his mother's ancestors came to Australia from Danzig, now Gdansk, his mother's family was in the Bendigo area during the Gold Rush and a former Israeli took his eyes to look slightly Chinese Eurasian. However, while this troper is pretty much as White Australian one can get without too much of any convicts (as far as he knows), his first-time lay who was a ChristmasCake ten years older than him (this troper was 21, the woman was ''30 going on 31'')had a roughly Asian-shaped face ''but Caucasian-ish skin, green eyes and auburn hair'', claiming descent from a strange relationship between a Chinese guy and an albino woman - perhaps that grandmother was an EvilAlbino as said first lay was just using him. On the other hand, although a very good friend of this troper with whom a JustFriends relationship was present (though at least for this troper not without a certain amount of UnresolvedSexualTension in spite of her being seven years older than this troper - at time of entry he is 23, but she is 30) looked slightly Norwegian due to her English father (whose own father had emigrated from Norway either during or after the SecondWorldWar, given away especially by her very blue eyes, due to one of her grandparents on her mother's side she is technically a Maori, and ironically enough, given this troper's self-hatred at times, the other non-Maori grandparent was originally ''from convict stock in Australia's first fleet''. CrystalDragonJesus help this troper if said {{UST}} gets even close to being ''resolved''...

This troper is mistaken for Mexican out West, and was mistaken for Middle Eastern quite a bit after 9/11. The irony of being mistaken for Mexican is when somebody tells you to go back to your own country. Except the U.S. doesn't recognize it anymore, and it's full of uranium tailings.

I know a Romanian girl who looks very Arab/Middle Eastern.

Several examples at This Troper's school: the tan-skinned girl who hangs out with a predominately Asian crowd, but is actually Trinidadian, the half-black half-Filipino girl who doesn't look Asian ''at all'', and the one Nepali girl who gets this mostly because she's the only Asian girl in our class who isn't East Asian, and has mostly black friends. (There's also a Vietnamese girl who seriously looks Hispanic.)

This troper has a friend that could be referred to as "Vaguely middle-eastern/indian. Even he's not quite sure what he is. When school pictures came in, he was declared the racially ambiguous Jonas Brother.

To this troper, pretty much everyone else is AmbiguouslyBrown. I have the ''hardest'' time telling the difference between races, to the point that unless someone is extremely dark-skinned (African ancestry?), has very obvious East Asian features (couldn't begin to tell you what country!), or as pale as the moon (European somehow!), I flat-out refuse to guess. It doesn't make it any easier that I have a very AmbiguouslyBrown family. While I'm 100% European, as far as I know (mostly German and Scottish), I have partially Lebanese cousins who can pass for anything between white, Middle Eastern, or even Hispanic. The oldest was even mistaken for a Mexican by a Mexican while in Mexico! My Venezuelan uncle is also an interesting case; while he looks very Venezuelan, his family is quite mixed and he actually has blond-haired, blue-eyed relatives, which possibly contributed to why he and my German but dark-haired aunt ended up with an extremely pale blond-haired blue-eyed daughter after their two more ambiguously brown sons.

This troper is part Puerto Rican, caucasian, Spanish, and possibly African-American. His skin color is similar to {{Rosario Dawson}}'s, as well as having dark hair and eyes. When I moved to the midwest from NY, most people believe he is one of three things (1) Mexican, (2) Half-white, Half black, or (3) A white guy with a really good tan.

This troper lives in a brown to dark brown skin country and light skinned Chinese. I have much lighter skin than most and different features. My mother's half-Malaysian with Arabic, Indonesian and Singaporean blood. Her father is pure Bruneian. She's been confused as a British or an American because of her strong advance English accent.

A girl at this tropette's school is like this. She's not black, but she's not entirely white, but she's not hispanic... I don't know.

I have a friend who looks Latino and is always assumed as such, to the point that actual Latinos are disappointed he doesn't speak Spanish. Turns out he's white but a quarter black. His diluted African features being the cause of his olive skin and curly black hair.

This troper was described as, "Racially ambiguous enough to be interesting" while at the same time was described as "Black enough to be the resident TokenBlack". She's not sure whether or not to take offense.

This troper had been identified as an arabian one, a brazilian, an indian, even an italian and a malgach one. Though I'm only an afro-european mix.

This troper's cousin is Filipino and black, though most people can tell that she's mixed (because she has dark skin but Asian eyes). Her daughter, however, is Filipino, black and white, and people havve guessed that she is anything from fully black to Latino to Asian.

This troper has olive skin, dark brown hair, and grey eyes. She's been taken for: Native American, Arab, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Mexican, Indian, and Puerto Rican. She's actually a Jew.

This troper gets mistaken for Asian, but she has a biracial (black and white) father and a Native American mother.

My dad, a New York (read: Eastern European in origin) Jew, has fairly skin and curly black hair, and doesn't like talking to other people unless he has to. Because of this, my kindergarten teacher assumed that he was from another country and asked if he would like to talk to my class about his homeland... at which point my dad answered " ....You mean the Bronx?" Also, because of his appearance, we joke that one day he's going to get stopped at an airport for looking middle-eastern, which is kind of plausible considering that our last name got bastardized at Ellis Island into a somewhat common Arab name.

This troper has a friend who just so happens to be the most badass person he knows. He looks like he could be some form of Latino, though no other feature of this shows this; everything else pointing to Caucasian. For years he called himself black. It was later discovered that he was lying. No one believed him anyway.

this troper is only a quarter Thai (but looks full), and a mix of Scottish and other European ethnicities, but she gets mistaken for Mexican, Indian, or Jewish frequently. She also gets asked if she is adopted, as her mother is white and her classmates don't see her father often.

This troper has a friend where it's easy to tell he's asian but which one specifically he is. His mother looks black/vietnamese while his father looks chinese but at some times will look like a light skinned Mexican. Doesn't help that his cousins are practically every color of the rainbow.

This troper has three friends who fit this perfectly. One is half-black, half-Caucasian, yet she hangs out with plenty of Asians and thus appears to look Filipino or Burmese (she's rather cheeky as well). Another is Puerto Rican, but she's been mistaken for being a Filipino on a few occasions. Another is half-Korean, half-Mexican. Her theatre teacher is also half-Filipino and some-part black, although she's not really mistaken for any ethnicities. Her Chemistry teacher's son also looks like a swarthy-skinned Jew despite coming from two very Caucasian parents.

In addition, the same troper's boyfriend is half-Italian, half-Japanese. He doesn't have any Asian features in his face (unlike his brother), and she first mistook him for a swarthy Jew. Her mother mistook him for Indian.

This troper (and several of her friends, due to the region we live in) has mixed Asian and European ancestry. They are all frequently asked "what they are", to their chagrin.

This troper is ambiguously brown. I'm African American (probably with a dash of Creole) on my dad's side and Caucasian (German and Swedish, specifically) on my Mom's side. I've been mistaken for Asian, Native American, Mexican, and Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean. An ex thought I was Native when he first met me and didn't know until I told him that I'm not. In an acting class an Asian girl asked if I was Asian as well. My boyfriend's sister and Mom (the latter of which spent part of her life in the Middle East) thought I looked Mediterranean until I said otherwise. (It's understandable, since I've met an Italian girl with darker skin.) In a Crowning Moment of Funny, I went to Arizona with my mom to visit my Grandma and we decided to go to Mexico for the day. While coming back from Nogales, mom and I were stopped at the border by a guard who thought I was a Mexican kid that Mom was trying to bring back to America. I'm not even making this up. Also, one person told me I look like Shakira, and my last boyfriend--who's mentioned below--has said I look like Rosario Dawson. A friend of mine has confirmed the comparison to Rosario Dawson. I see the resemblance to her, but I don't think I look like Shakira at all. Usually people who are black or who have grown up around a lot of black people can guess my mix correctly. A pen pal from Indiana, for example, could guess cuz he's white but his younger half-brother has the same mix as me--white mom, black dad.

Same Troper as Above: This trope is also subverted with me, as my boyfriend is blonde and green-eyed, and looks totally white. I didn't know until he told me that he's also part Cherokee. Now that he's tanned for the summer, though, he's darker than me. The two of us tend to joke about this, since before the summer I was the darker of the two. Also, my last boyfriend was half-native and I didn't know until he said so, since he looks totally white as well.

This troper is ambiguously beige. She's Native American, Scottish, English, Jamaican, and African-American. I've been mistaken for white, Latina, Filipino, Middle Eastern, Indian, and, most bafflingly, Japanese (though, to be fair, those people had probably never even seen a Japanese person outside of television). People used to laugh at me when I told them I'm black, even though that's what most of them would call me, based on my ethnic makeup and the dreaded one drop rule.

This troper is ambiguously beige/pale olive, due to being half white cornish and half {{Roma}}, with a little slavic thrown in. I also tan easily, meaning that in winter I pass as white, in summer as arabic.

This troper is more on the pale olive side due to not liking the sun, but with a tan fits this very well. She's Puerto Rican, Venezualen, Taino, Spaniard, and Irish. People often mistake her for white, but they can't seem to put their finger on what makes her look not white at the same time.

This Troper is a lifeguard at a public pool. I play "guess the ethnic" with the patrons when bored.