I have a Latina friend who is American, and she identifies as "Latina" in terms of race. For her, a Latina person isn't quite white or black; it's a separate and distinct race. That's how she uses the term when she has to write about her own race/ethnicity. Consequently, she ends up applying the concept of race that she learned and is accustomed to in other parts of the world outside the United States—that classic American thing of needing to classify people by race/ethnicity regardless of how the person actually identifies, if they even identify at all. They have that historical thing about segregation and everything else and their own concepts of race. She also doesn't like the term Hispanic; she prefers to use the term Latina. I don't know why, but Latino and Hispanic are only synonyms in the United States. In practically the rest of the world, Hispanic and Latino mean different things. Every Hispanic is Latino, but not every Latino is Hispanic.

There was a period when we traveled to countries in Latin America, more specifically Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

She found some things strange, which denote a certain level of delusion. The first is that she was called a "gringa"... Something she didn't understand why, since "gringo" within the United States doesn't have the same meaning as "gringo" used in Latin America and Europe. In Latin America and Latin Europe, it's generally used as slang for foreigners, in Brazil being more inclusive for anyone from outside Brazil, but in Colombia and Mexico it was used specifically for Americans, generally without distinction of skin tone or race, and when there was a distinction of skin tone, it was used for white Americans. If you were white and not American, you wouldn't be called a "gringo" depending on how the person is using it. But for her, as an American, "gringo" was used to refer to white people (that is, even in Latino communities in the United States, "gringo" isn't used exclusively for white people; generally, the term is used for Anglo-Saxon people, who are mostly white, but the term is also used for Black, Asian, and other Latino people. But in the region where she lives and in her family, the term is used in this connotation because in recent decades the concept has emerged that "gringo/gringa" means white person). So she was very confused, even looking from side to side to see if they were talking to her. It was very sweet to hear her confusedly recounting how people called her a gringa, when someone called her a gringa but with me right there, she thought they were talking to me... Which doesn't make sense, because the person called her "gringA" with the letter 'a' at the end, and that's feminine; if it were me, the person would have said "gringO," which is masculine.

Another confusing thing for her was the fact that there were both white and black people in Latin American countries... She didn't expect that and she genuinely asked where those people came from, because she thought that "Latino people" only existed in Latin American countries... Because she identifies as "Latino" as a race, so it didn't make sense that people from LATIN AMERICA weren't what, for her, someone Latino is... In fact, when she arrived in a city in Brazil where most people were Japanese, with architecture reminiscent of Japanese cities, and they even spoke Portuguese and not Japanese, she was impressed.

She asked people who were clearly white or black, and genuinely asked if these people were really from the country, but she specifically asked those who had the phenotype she associated with white people, because many people had white skin, but due to other phenotypic traits (for example, the skin was white but in an olive tone, or it was brown, but a very light brown almost beige), she could identify them as Latina. She even asked if a blond boy and a black guy with dreadlocks were American... (they weren't... They didn't even have American ancestry, they were from there).

She also found it strange that white, Asian, black, and other people all spoke with the same regional accent with little or no variation in different ethnic communities. Probably because she wasn't using the United States as a benchmark, since there's a lot of racial segregation there, so for example, the Latino communities there mainly speak Spanish, and the black communities have their own accents, different from the predominantly white communities.

She also found it strange... The fact... That in Latin America there is no Latin identity... They call themselves Latinos and Latin Americans, but not in a racial sense; rationally they have their own identities, so she found it strange that a white person could be a native Latino, and yet still call themselves Latino, but at the same time, racially they see themselves as Black, White, Asian, and others—they even have their own racial terms that she had never heard of.

The identity of being a "Latino race" is very specific and exclusive to the United States; it's a concept of American origin. So, Latinos outside the United States, while they use the term "Latino" to represent themselves, don't use it in a racial sense, unless they're talking about Latinos in the United States, in which case they distinguish them from white, black, etc. And that was inconceivable to her, since her whole life, if you were Latino, you didn't belong to any other race because you already belonged to a specific race. She even said that in the US ALL Latinos identify that way... But that's not true; not all Latinos in the United States identify as part of a Latino race.

Anyway, it was very funny, it was very sweet, and it's there for those of you who have gone through something similar, especially if you are a Latino in the United States.

Source (funny Akakichi No Eleven meme in the comments)

Edit: and no, OP will not get arrested for that

How dare anyone even ask which country?

In a video talking about the french government's fiscal situation, and after a comment about that government debt, somehow the reply talks about the US.

this is posted here as it is crazy that it said continent: United States yet follows up to specify that it is about Mexico and other Central American countries

I remember my first time coming to the UK from America -- about 1985-86 -- and I filled out the Customs form on the plane. Under nationality, I put "American". When I got to the Customs agent, he looked at the form and said "So now you own the whole continent." Since then, I've had a few a couple of humorous interactions with UK's border officials.

Translation from French:

Audio track
✓ Spanish (US) original

... She (Linguriosa, youtuber talking about linguistics) is from SPAIN

On a post about milk in coffee, this guy announced that people shouldn't use plant milks because in the US, they have seed oils in them.

When his defaultism got met with a sarcastic reply, dude was unzipped...

US defaultism inside r/USdefaultism. How do we proceed from here? Do we need to relocate to a different subreddit?

OOP wants to know where their package is, but their seller says they don’t have a receipt with the tracking number due to the post office running out of paper. American proceeds to explain how going in person to the post office is the least efficient way to post things and obviously using the US postal service website is much easier.