5 Oddly Specific Lies We Believe About Foreigners

Most of us are self-aware enough to know that our own country is different from the way it's portrayed in books or on TV shows. We realize that television -- even news reporting and "reality" shows -- is full of biases, inflated drama, and unrealistically sculpted abs. And yet despite this knowledge, we often unconsciously assume that our television screens are telling us the truth about other parts of the world. And thanks to America's worldwide cultural dominance, this kind of pretend-knowledge is especially bad when it comes to how people think about the USA.

For example, growing up, I knew that my home country of Australia was not like it was on TV. But then I travelled to the U.S. for the first time as a teenager as part of a crocodile-wrestling scholarship, and I immediately noticed that most people were hanging out in groups that were segregated according to race. Furthermore, the majority of menial jobs seemed to be done by non-white people. Holy crap, racial discrimination was still around? Teenager-me was completely shocked.

See, I'd grown up watching North American young-adult television, and it had informed me that American people hung out in healthy, multiracial groups who looked past their skin-deep differences. I was naive, yes, but this sort of error is common. Non-Americans are the first ones to laugh when Americans express their ignorance about our home countries, and yet our idea of America often remains a vague, TV-influenced blob.

BigAndy9 wrote:"See, I'd grown up watching North American young-adult television, and it had informed me that American people hung out in healthy, multiracial groups who looked past their skin-deep differences. I was naive, yes, but this sort of error is common. Non-Americans are the first ones to laugh when Americans express their ignorance about our home countries, and yet our idea of America often remains a vague, TV-influenced blob."


I know - they lie on our TV shows too - they over-do the gay thing, gotta have a gay in a wheelchair, a Pakistani gay in every show.

You are NOT allowed to have too many whites together without an ethnic.

It's called "normalisation" - they believe if we see it more and more we'll "get used to it" and "accept it" as normal.