Thoughts on Race and Nationality on the Eve of MLK

I was sitting in a cafe yesterday afternoon, enjoying a cup of tea and working on some schoolwork. More precisely, I was correcting the English grammar of an engineering student's Masters thesis. Why Austrian engineering students insist on writing their theses in English is beyond my comprehension. This one looks like someone used Babelfish to translate directly from German to English without bothering to proofread the result. It's a grammatical disaster. But I digress.

In the cafe, I was sitting at a long table across from a Pakistani student who spoke perfect Austrian German, as I found out when he answered his cell phone.

We were both working intensively as a woman approached the table to borrow a chair. "Ist der Sessel frei?" she asked the guy. He looked up and without even waiting for him to respond, she repeated in English, "Is this chair free?" He nodded his head: "Ja, yes" and she took the chair.

The guy and I glanced at each other and laughed at what had just happened. Even though he spoke perfect German, the woman addressed him in English because he looked foreign. "It happens to me all the time," he said. "Better get used to it." I shook my head in disbelief. I've witnessed similar situations more times than I care to count. People address me in German because I am white and don't always stick out as a "typical American", while others who speak better German than I do are addressed in English because they have darker skin or look otherwise foreign. Granted, we all know that there are worse things that could happen based on one's skin color, but that doesn't make this particular situation any less annoying.

I wonder when will certain Austrians ever understand that the people of their country are not all blond-haired and blue-eyed and that not all German-speakers are fourth-generation Viennese?!