"Where are you really from?"
It seems innocent enough, just like that ubiquitous Cincinnati question on high schools appears to be.
However, we all know the answer automatically lumps us into a particular group in the asker's mind.
CNN recently asked Americans to share their experiences with that origin question, which "can make people on the receiving end feel like they really don't belong."
The answers they collected under the hashtag #whereimreallyfrom run the gamut from a woman asked about her ethnicity on a job interview to a man told to go back to his own country, which was easily achieved since he was American.
"As a darker skinned Hispanic man from California, being from California is never an acceptable answer when I travel," 36-year-old Dave Covarrubias. "Even when in California, the fact that I don't speak fluent Spanish seems to be a problem with many people. Yet a majority of people of other ethnicities don't speak their ancestors’ language (German, Italian, Swahili, Gaelic, Mandarin, Farsi, etc.)."
Samantha Geovjian Clarke, 27, of Portland, Oregon, said she's of mixed Syrian, Armenian, Scottish and English heritage. She added that she doesn't mind talking about her race.
"It's a big part of my identity and my activism and I enjoy it, but I wish people would just ask me. Sometimes I think they feel like it's more polite to ask ambiguously "where are you from?" or "what are you?" because they're afraid to say race, ethnicity, heritage or nationality," Geovjian Clarke said. "They end up being hurtful and displaying deep-seated biases about race by implying I'm not really from America if I'm brown, even though I was born here."
Check out CNN's interactive feature here for more of what they discovered.
