Chocolate Bear

If you take a quick glance over at my picture you may notice that I am not white. You may also notice that I do not exactly look black either. Yes, I said black. Not African-American, because you could be a white dutch guy from South Africa who came over to the U.S. and be more African-American than most black people.

But anyway, the point is, being neither black nor white, people often ask me what ethnicity I am, or where I'm from, or however they may decide to phrase it. And rather than just honestly telling them that my mother is from Illinois and my father is from so and so, I found several years ago that it is a fun little game to tell people something different everytime I get asked.

It started simple enough, saying that I was Mexican, or Latino, or Native American, and everyone I told believed me. So I started branching out a little bit, getting a little more exotic. I would tell people I was Phillipino, or Somoan, or one of my favorites Polynesian.

This spring I went to Trinidad where I found that I looked exactly like the local people. Naturally I just let people assume that I was a native son, which they did. Now one of my go to answers for my origin is that I'm Trinny (I'm not sure if its Trinny, or Trinnie, but I know that they use the shortened version because Trinidadian is quite the mouthful). It was kind of funny because as basically the only non-white member of a 50 person group, I gave everyone else instant credibility. If only they knew where I was really from.

To this day there are people I go to college with who I told during freshman year that I am Polynesian that still believe that to be true. And I suppose it could be, but you'll never know. As for my close friends though, they don't care where I'm from, they just take a line from Scrubs and call me their Chocolate Bear.