One of the strangest things about traveling as someone who is racially and ethnically ambiguous is realizing that other people can decide who you are before you ever open your mouth.

Sometimes I am read as Black. Sometimes people assume I am Latina, North African, Middle Eastern, Indian, or something else entirely. Sometimes people know immediately that I am American, although I still have no idea exactly how.

The assumptions themselves do not always bother me. What has stayed with me is realizing how much those assumptions can change the way people interact with me.

I noticed that particularly clearly in Italy.

In Italy, My Hair Seemed to Change How People Saw Me

I had just come from Tunisia, and my hair was in braids. Between my complexion, my features, and the braids, I looked more visibly African than I sometimes do.

The difference in how I was treated was difficult to ignore. People seemed colder. Some interactions felt openly rude.

Then I took the braids out and changed my hair.

I still had the same face, skin, passport, personality, and reason for being in Italy. But the pattern of interactions seemed to change too. I stopped experiencing the same level of hostility.

There is no clean way to prove what caused that difference. I cannot interview every person who was rude to me and ask whether race influenced the interaction. I also do not want to erase what I noticed simply because I cannot prove someone else's intent.

My appearance changed. The way I seemed to be treated changed with it. I can say that without pretending I know what every stranger was thinking.

Sometimes People Do Not Believe I Am American

This started long before Italy.

One of the questions I kept encountering abroad was some version of, "But where are you really from?"

I could say the United States. That did not necessarily end the conversation. People wanted to know where my parents were from, then where their parents were from, until I gave them an ancestry that made more sense to whatever picture they already had in mind.

I encountered this even while applying for a teaching job in Thailand, when part of the interview became a discussion about my background and where my parents came from.

At the time, that could be frustrating. I knew where I was from. I was American whether or not I matched someone's mental picture of an American.

Over time, I became less interested in treating every version of the question as the same interaction. Sometimes it was intrusive. Sometimes it was curiosity. Sometimes I could tell that "American" had not answered the question the person was actually trying to ask.

That does not mean I owe anyone an ancestry lesson. It does mean I understand the question differently now than I did in my early twenties.

I wrote more about the way race and belonging affected my day-to-day life in Living in Thailand as a Woman of Color.

Morocco Was Almost the Opposite

Morocco gave me almost the opposite experience.

Moroccans themselves generally seemed to read me as foreign very quickly. I still cannot tell you exactly what gave me away.

Other travelers did not always read me the same way.

At one point, I met up with an old friend who was traveling with a woman from Malta. I ran up to my friend and started talking. The woman listened for a moment and said, "Wow, your English is so good."

I do not know exactly what she assumed about me. What I do know is that she apparently did not expect English to be my first language.

In my early twenties, I probably would have been offended.

By my late twenties, I found it funny.

I told her, very seriously, "Yes. My parents paid a lot of money to make sure I learned English."

Then I kept the bit going until my friend finally stopped me.

What still makes me laugh is the contrast. The woman from Malta seemed unsure where to place me. Moroccans generally seemed much less confused: I was foreign.

That experience made me more careful about treating every wrong assumption as an insult. Sometimes an assumption tells me more about the categories someone is using than it tells me about myself.

Myanmar Taught Me That Curiosity Can Feel Completely Different

Myanmar gave me another version of being visibly different.

When I was leaving the country, two female immigration officers pulled me aside. I thought something was wrong with my passport. Instead, they were comparing my passport photo with my curls and finally asked, "Is that your real hair?"

I experienced that moment very differently from Italy. The words alone do not explain why. Their expressions, laughter, and the context around the interaction made it feel curious rather than hostile.

I tell the full story in my Myanmar travel essay.

Curiosity and Racism Are Not the Same Thing, but Neither Should Be Ignored

After years of travel, I have become more careful about assigning intention to people I do not know.

Staring is a good example.

In North Macedonia, people stared at me a lot. I noticed it immediately. I also never felt unsafe or unwelcome.

It felt more like, "Who is she?" But that is still my interpretation. I cannot know why every person looked.

The same is true of questions. Someone asking where I am "really" from can be irritating. A comment about my hair can cross a boundary. An awkward question can also be exactly that: awkward.

Those situations are not all the same.

If someone is disrespectful, aggressive, or makes me feel unsafe, I do not need to explain it away in the name of cultural understanding. But I also do not want to assign hostility where I do not have enough information to know it was there.

I pay attention to what happened first. I am much more cautious now about pretending I know why a stranger did it.

Being American Abroad Complicates Race in Ways I Did Not Expect

One thing travel disrupted for me was the idea that racial categories move cleanly across borders.

I can be Black, mixed, and American at the same time. A stranger may notice one of those things before the others, or use categories that do not map neatly onto the ones I grew up with.

In Morocco, people generally seemed to pick up on my foreignness. In Italy, appearing more visibly African seemed to change my experience. In Thailand, people sometimes wanted an explanation for how someone who looked like me could also simply be American.

None of those readings cancels out the others. They are part of what made me realize that identity may travel with you, but the meaning other people attach to it does not stay fixed.

I Pay More Attention Now to How People Are Reading Me

I do not travel expecting racism everywhere. I also do not pretend it does not exist.

What changed is that I notice more before I decide what something means.

I notice when an interaction shifts after someone hears my accent. I notice when people seem surprised by where I am from. I notice when my hair becomes the center of a conversation. Sometimes the moment is funny. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. Sometimes it is hard to interpret at all.

After 42 countries, the part that still interests me is how unstable the categories can be.

The person I am has not changed every time I crossed a border. The version of me that other people thought they were looking at sometimes did.

Race travels with you. The categories do too. They just do not arrive unchanged.