"Real whatever"

I've actually been told many times that I am not a "real American". People who said that did not usually mean "a real US citizen" (which I am) or "a real native-born US citizen" (which I am not), but "a person that fits my idea of what Americans are". For example "Americans can't even find their country on the map" - "I can." - "Well, you are not a real American, then." Duh! No wonder Americans can't find their country on the map if you define Americans as the subset of US citizens who can't find their country on the map.

The probelm is certainly not unique to Americans. I've heard people being told that they are not real men, real women, real people of whatever nationality or religion or ethnicity, real adults, etc.

The most incredible case was when I was in a bar in Boston with Sangita once. Some perfectly normal-looking guys came up to talk to us. They asked us where we were from. (WTF do I answer to that, BTW? "From right here" is sort of true but leads to additional questions about the accent, etc. "I am American but I was born in Russia and I usually live in Finland but now I am living here for a while" would have been perfectly true at the moment but tends to overflow most people's short-term memory buffers.) Anyways, Sangita said that she was Norwegian, which was true, and the guys started explaining to her that she couldn't possibly be a Norwegian. I was amazed at their nerve. I could understand some Norwegian racist saying that since her ancestors were not a part of native Norwegian population she could never be a real Norwegian. I could also understand some researcher on influence of genetics on the levels of cholesterol in different regions of Norway saying that she is not a Norwegian for the purpose of this particular research. But these were otherwise perfectly normal American guys, and what they were saying, in effect, was that she cannot be a Norwegian because everybody knows that Norwegians are tall, blond, blue-eyed and have Norwegian names, as opposed to being small, dark-skinned, black-haired and brown-eyed and being called Sangita. They did not understand that they were being somewhat bad-mannered, at least not until I pointed it out to them by asking whether they similarly doubt the americanness (americanity?) of the Americans who have somewhat darker skin color. At that point their own skin color was approaching that of beet soup. Sangita said that she gets that all the time and that she understands that they don't really mean anything bad but are just being stupid. I was amazed, again.