If you have been reading us for a while, you know how we feel about “Nationality Experts”: these are amateur genealogists, ethnologists, anthropologists, racists, whatever you want to call them who live in Chicago and think “What’s your nationality?” is an acceptable question to ask a stranger in a bar.  

Our nationality is American.  None of us here are the children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren of immigrants.  All  of our grandparents were born in this country.  All of our great-grandparents were born in this country.  We have no emotional connection to any country other than the United States.  We have relatives and friends in many different European countries, but when you ask where our families are “from”, the answer is “Ohio”, “Pennsylvania”, “Texas”, etc.  

But, for some reason, in Chicago there’s an obsession with white and Hispanic men to know your “nationality” before they decide whether they want to ask you out or not.  There are literally millions of things you can ask a stranger upon first meeting him.  There are also about five things someone can say to one of us that immediately makes us shut down and not want have anything whatsoever to do with that person.  This “nationality” garbage is the primo date-quasher in our books. 

This nonsense happened again last night, with a guy one of us actually really liked.  His name is Jim, a French teacher in Chicago Public Schools.  He is smart, funny, had the dark hair and eyes one of us goes for, held an interesting conversation about both France and how well Ron Huberman was doing as Chief of the school system (Huberman is the first openly gay man to run the city’s schools, and is also Mayor Daley’s chosen successor for when Daley retires).  

But, then he had to do the “What’s your nationality?” thing.  We answered, “American”, like we always do.  Then he did the thing that really vexes us and pushed it, saying, “No, where is your family from?”, and we did the “America.  My family is from America” thing we do.  The frustration bubbled up in us and we ended the conversation, told Jim it was nice meeting him, and wished him a happy birthday (as he told us it was next Tuesday).  We started to walk away and he realized he did something wrong — but didn’t know exactly what — so he said, “It’s just that I’m really interesting in people’s nationalities…”  

Honestly, cute as he was, there’s no way in Hell we are wasting any more of our lives talking to these racists.  

What does it matter where relatives of yours lived 300 or 3,000 or even 30 years ago?  If you were born in this country, you are an American.  If you studied hard, worked your fingers to the bone, and passed your citizenship test, you are an American.  If you have no loyalty to any other country and would happily lay down your life for the United States if this great nation ever needed you, then you are an American.

No public school French teacher has the right to define you as anything else if that’s how you define yourself.  

In days past, we used to get into it with these clowns about how stupid it was to ask that nationality stuff.  We’d go on about how they should ask questions about who a person is, what they like to do, what they think about the news, what books they read, etc. instead of asking where dead relatives of theirs are buried overseas.  But, life is too, too short to spend any of it on these liberal fools.  

One thing we did realize last night — and this realization is the only reason we bring this stuff up again here — is that it is STRICTLY a Chicago phenomenon.  After the business with Jim happened, we all decamped to another part of Sidetracks and talked about it, mentally going through a list of all the guys who have asked one of us “The Nationality Question” over the five years we’ve lived in this city.  Here’s what we found:

* Only white males and Hispanic men have asked “The Nationality Question”

* No black person has ever tried to define us this way, no Asian either

* Only white men who were raised in Chicago or its suburbs ask this

* For Hispanics, it’s mainly Mexicans who ask this; people from Puerto Rico, Argentina, Guatemala, etc. don’t ask it

* Guys who grew up poor or working class are more likely to ask this than guys who grew up with professional, well-off parents

* Liberals ask this sort of thing, but conservatives don’t; Democrats ask it, Republicans don’t

It’s a total class thing unique to Chicago.  What it feels like is that these guys grew up in families where the “Italians” wouldn’t let their kids play with the “Irish” or the “Puerto Ricans” or whatever, so they were constantly asking kids what nationality they were to see if they could be friends on the playground.  If you answer wrong, you can’t be my friend.  As adults, these guys now keep the nationality question alive in the first three things they say to a stranger…now using it to determine if the person is dateable instead of just friendable.

As we’ve said before, we’ve never encountered this in any other city we’ve lived in.  Just Chicago.   And, it seems, just from guys who grew up in Chicago. 

The one caveat is that we did get this from an obnoxious, random woman in Ft. Meyers, Florida once.  She was the receptionist at an art gallery one of us worked a charity benefit at.  Right in the middle of an unrelated conversation, she just blurted out, “What’s your nationality?” and didn’t settle for the American answer there either.  Turns out she, too, was originally from the midwest but we don’t think it was Chicagoland.  

She, so far, is the only female to have ever pulled this.