Should Americans pretend to be Canadian while traveling abroad?

Seems like every time I was forced into a political convo, it happens in hostels while their drunk. I stay far and clear from those.
Some (by some I mean almost none) friendly educated political talk is okay but when does that ever happen?

I pretended I was Canadian to passing acquaintances or in larger crowds when I first traveled to Egypt during the Bush administration. When I visited again after the Obama election, I was proudly and openly American. I wore the Obama Hope button and was amazed how many Egyptians knew that it represented the Obama campaign. The mood was very different in the Arab world after the election.

I've been traveling for 10 months now, and every time I see a Canadian flag sewn on a bag I start asking some questions. You see, being a Canadian, I've heard this story as well and wanted to bust some people especially since I have a great ear for North American accents. Unfortunately I was just greeted to the same old Canadian big smiles, talk of the -30 celsius weather and our melting igloos. Very few Americans. Though it's been agreed that in these times of global warming, there is a market for selling ice to eskimos.

But really, democracy does mean the government and it's policies are an extension of the people and wishes that they serve. For the people, by the people and such. The U.S. of A extends their might socially, economically and sometimes forcibly throughout the world effecting billions of people. A lot of these people don't have access to our levels of education or free press. Of course they're going to ask you questions. Much like we ask about the Pyramids, Wats or others cultures. You never know, maybe some of these conversations will resonate and open you up to some new ideas. That's the point of travel, isn't it?

Haha, I love your note at the bottom. It is funny how people perceive the American/Canadian relationship. People think we are from the States all the time and when we say no, we're from Canada. They always apologize profusely for the misunderstanding. They think that we will be offended, which we are not. We love Americans! and some of the best people we have met on our travels have been from the States.
For an American, I think it is tough being at the top, the whole world is always judging you. Canadians don't get any flack from people because we aren't even a thought in their minds. Half the time when we travel (and I am not exaggerating) people don't even know where Canada is. In Sri Lanka a guy was sure that San Francisco was a part of Canada. Others in India thought that we were located near Germany and many people think that we are part of Australia. It is easy to be loved when nobody knows anything about you:-)
I agree, don't pretend to be someone you are not. If somebody is judging you by where you are from then they are not worth hanging out with.

Well exactly. Curiosity is perfect and I love when people ask me questions about my country and where I live. It's a great topic and I find most people are extremely interested in what I have to say about USA being an American. But there are a 'few' (very few) who have a strong opinion about what USA is and I'm lectured on how horrible 'WE' all are. Those I tend to walk away from.

Hm interesting. Did you feel you were treated differently as a Canadian? Did you try as an American first before switching to Canadian? Any events caused you to do this?

I definitely agree Michael, I hate the idea that people would try to hide or disguise their nationality. As Americans we may be subject to more comments or prejudices (although in my experience this is greatly exaggerated) but we also have a responsibility as ambassadors of our country. Stereotypes about dumb loud Americans are never going to change if we all hide behind the Canadian flag. I am not *always* proud to be American but it's a part of my identity and to hide it is a huge cop-out.

….

I’ve had quite a few people be surprised when I tell them I’m American. “You don’t look like an American” has been said many times. I think it’s funny.  I have no idea what it means though.

One thing I’ve noticed is that some travelers feel insulted that I don’t know certain things about their country, when they know everything about mine. I have to explain that everyone knows everything about America because it’s in the news & conversations non-stop throughout the world. 

If I ask them about specifics on some other country (like Japan or China), they’re usually just as clueless as I am about theirs.

To Hell with Good Intentions
by Ivan Illich

An address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968. In his usual biting and sometimes sarcastic style, Illich goes to the heart of the deep dangers of paternalism
inherent in any voluntary service activity, but especially in any international
service “mission.” Parts of the speech are outdated and must be
viewed in the historical context of 1968 when it was delivered, but the entire
speech is retained for the full impact of his point and at Ivan Illich’s request.

IN THE
CONVERSATIONS WHICH I HAVE HAD TODAY, I was impressed by two things, and I want
to state them before I launch into my prepared talk.

I was impressed
by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs
mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by
what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness
to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin
America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as
such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the
gift.

I was equally
impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you: by the hypocrisy of the atmosphere
prevailing here. I say this as a brother speaking to brothers and sisters. I
say it against many resistances within me; but it must be said. Your very
insight, your very openness to evaluations of past programs make you hypocrites
because you – or at least most of you – have decided to spend this next summer
in Mexico, and therefore, you are unwilling to go far enough in your
reappraisal of your program. You close your eyes because you want to go ahead
and could not do so if you looked at some facts.

It is quite
possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. Intellectually, you
are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate volunteer action
overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968.
“Mission-vacations” among poor Mexicans were “the thing” to
do for well-off U.S.
students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered. poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to
much worse poverty at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual
insight into the difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the
spirit of Peace Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.

Today, the
existence of organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. I wanted to make this
statement in order to explain why I feel sick about it all and in order to make
you aware that good intentions have not much to do with what we are discussing
here. To hell with good intentions. This is a
theological statement. You will not help anybody by your good intentions. There
is an Irish saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this
sums up the same theological insight.

The very
frustration which participation in CIASP programs might mean for you, could
lead you to new awareness: the awareness that even North Americans can receive
the gift of hospitality without the slightest ability to pay for it; the
awareness that for some gifts one cannot even say “thank you.”

Now
to my prepared statement.

Ladies and
Gentlemen:

For the past six
years I have become known for my increasing opposition to the presence of any
and all North American “dogooders” in Latin America. I am sure you know of my present efforts
to obtain the voluntary withdrawal of all North American volunteer armies from
Latin America – missionaries, Peace Corps members and groups like yours, a
“division” organized for the benevolent invasion of Mexico. You were aware of these
things when you invited me – of all people – to be the main speaker at your
annual convention. This is amazing! I can only conclude that your invitation
means one of at least three things:

Some among you
might have reached the conclusion that CIASP should either dissolve altogether,
or take the promotion of voluntary aid to the Mexican poor out of its
institutional purpose. Therefore you might have invited me here to help others
reach this same decision.

You might also
have invited me because you want to learn how to deal with people who think the
way I do – how to dispute them successfully. It has now become quite common to
invite Black Power spokesmen to address Lions Clubs. A “dove” must
always be included in a public dispute organized to increase U.S. belligerence.

And finally, you
might have invited me here hoping that you would be able to agree with most of
what I say, and then go ahead in good faith and work this summer in Mexican
villages. This last possibility is only open to those who do not listen, or who
cannot understand me.

I did not come
here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and
hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.

I do have deep
faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good
faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy.
By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the
middle-class “American Way
of Life,” since that is really the only life you know. A group like this
could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it -
the belief that any true American must share God’s blessings with his poorer
fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all
times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that
they could help Mexican peasants “develop” by spending a few months
in their villages.

Of course, this
surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would
have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction – except a much
stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves
of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American
society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal
schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or
unconsciously – “salesmen” for a delusive ballet in the ideas of
democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven’t the
possibility of profiting from these.

Next to money and
guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in
every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the
community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders.
Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently
wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or
“seducing” the “underdeveloped” to the benefits of the
world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring
home to the people of the U.S.
the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough
to be shared.

By now it should
be evident to all America
that the U.S.
is engaged in a tremendous struggle to survive. The U.S. cannot survive if the rest of
the world is not convinced that here we have Heaven-on-Earth. The survival of
the U.S. depends on the
acceptance by all so-called “free” men that the U.S. middle
class has “made it.” The U.S. way of life has become a
religion which must be accepted by all those who do not want to die by the
sword – or napalm. All over the globe the U.S.
is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority
can afford. Such is the purpose of the Alliance
for Progress of the middle-classes which the U.S.
signed with Latin America some years ago. But
increasingly this commercial alliance must be protected by weapons which allow
the minority who can “make it” to protect their acquisitions and
achievements.

But weapons are
not enough to permit minority rule. The marginal masses become rambunctious
unless they are given a “Creed,” or belief which explains the status
quo. This task is given to the U.S.
volunteer – whether he be a member of CLASP or a
worker in the so-called “Pacification Programs” in Viet Nam.

The United States
is currently engaged in a three-front struggle to affirm its ideals of
acquisitive and achievement-oriented “Democracy.” I say
“three” fronts, because three great areas of the world are
challenging the validity of a political and social system which makes the rich
ever richer, and the poor increasingly marginal to
that system.

In Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S.
opposes China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it
any better than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to
stop the Chinese from “taking over” as it is usually put in this
country, and; forcible re-education of the so-called “Pacified”
peoples. All three of these efforts seem to be failing.

In Chicago, poverty funds,
the police force and preachers seem to be no more successful in their efforts
to check the unwillingness of the black community to wait for graceful
integration into the system.

And finally, in
Latin America the Alliance
for Progress has been quite successful in increasing the number of people who
could not be better off – meaning the tiny, middle-class elites – and has
created ideal conditions for military dictatorships. The dictators were
formerly at the service of the plantation owners, but now they protect the new
industrial complexes. And finally, you come to help the underdog accept his
destiny within this process!

All you will do
in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you
can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is
self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you.
At worst, in your “community development” spirit you might create
just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends_ and you rush
back to your middleclass neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about
“spits” and “wetbacks.”

You start on your
task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each
corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against
culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate
poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?

In fact, you
cannot even meet the majority which you pretend to serve in Latin
America – even if you could speak their language, which most of
you cannot. You can only dialogue with those like you – Latin American
imitations of the North American middle class. There is no way for you to
really meet with the underprivileged, since there is no common ground
whatsoever for you to meet on.

Let me explain
this statement, and also let me explain why most Latin Americans with whom you
might be able to communicate would disagree with me.

Suppose you went
to a U.S.
ghetto this summer and tried to help the poor there
“help themselves.” Very soon you would be either spit upon or laughed
at. People offended by your pretentiousness would hit or spit. People who
understand that your own bad consciences push you to this gesture would laugh
condescendingly. Soon you would be made aware of your irrelevance among the
poor, of your status as middle-class college students on a summer assignment.
You would be roundly rejected, no matter if your skin is white-as most of your
faces here are-or brown or black, as a few exceptions who got in here somehow.

Your reports
about your work in Mexico,
which you so kindly sent me, exude self-complacency. Your reports on past
summers prove that you are not even capable of understanding that your dogooding in a Mexican village is even less relevant than
it would be in a U.S.
ghetto. Not only is there a gulf between what you have and what others have
which is much greater than the one existing between you and the poor in your
own country, but there is also a gulf between what you feel and what the
Mexican people feel that is incomparably greater. This gulf is so great that in
a Mexican village you, as White Americans (or cultural white Americans) can
imagine yourselves exactly the way a white preacher saw himself when he offered
his life preaching to the black slaves on a plantation in Alabama. The fact that you live in huts and
eat tortillas for a few weeks renders your well-intentioned group only a bit
more picturesque.

The only people
with whom you can hope to communicate with are some members of the middle
class. And here please remember that I said “some” -by which I mean a tiny elite in Latin America.

You come from a
country which industrialized early and which succeeded in incorporating the
great majority of its citizens into the middle classes. It is no social
distinction in the U.S.
to have graduated from the second year of college. Indeed, most Americans now
do. Anybody in this country who did not finish high school is considered
underprivileged.

In Latin America the situation is quite different: 75% of
all people drop out of school before they reach the sixth grade. Thus, people
who have finished high school are members of a tiny minority. Then, a minority
of that minority goes on for university training. It is only among these people
that you will find your educational equals.

At the same time,
a middle class in the United
States is the majority. In Mexico, it is a tiny elite. Seven years ago your country began and
financed a so-called “Alliance
for Progress.” This was an “Alliance”
for the “Progress” of the middle class elites. Now.
it is among the members of this middle class that you
will find a few people who are willing to send their time with you_ And they
are overwhelmingly those “nice kids” who would also like to soothe
their troubled consciences by “doing something nice for the promotion of
the poor Indians.” Of course, when you and your middleclass Mexican
counterparts meet, you will be told that you are doing something valuable, that
you are “sacrificing” to help others.

And it will be
the foreign priest who will especially confirm your self-image for you. After
all, his livelihood and sense of purpose depends on his firm belief in a
year-round mission which is of the same type as your summer vacation-mission.

There exists the
argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight into the damage they
have done to others – and thus become more mature people. Yet it is less
frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of their
“summer sacrifices.” Perhaps there is also something to the argument
that young men should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that
sexual love is most beautiful in a monogamous relationship. Or that the best
way to leave LSD alone is to try it for awhile -or even that the best way of
understanding that your help in the ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to
try, and fail. I do not agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers
do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t
have been volunteers in the first place.

If you have any
sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the
coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and
how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you
fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at
least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly
unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so
linguistically deaf and dumb that you don’t even understand what you are doing,
or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when
you define something that you want to do as “good,” a
“sacrifice” and “help.”

I am here to
suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an
American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly
give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am
here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your
incapacity to do the “good” which you intended to do.

I am here to
entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look,
come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not
come to help.

Ivan Illich is the author of Deschooling
Society and other provocative books. Thanks to Nick Royal, Tim Stanton, and
Steve Babb for helping to find this speech.

This is lame. I will always tell people where I am from. That being said I always aim to be a good representation of real Americans. Anyone who thinks a nation of 320,000,000  are all idiots, is an idiot in turn. Luckily, I have never received any flack for my nationality throughout my travels. 

Having grown up in San Francisco area, i just tell people i’m from California as most tend to know it.  Obviously i’m American, but saying the state just rolls of a bit easier and people start talking about Hollywood and baywatch or what not.  sort of funny.  And i have no problem letting them know i’m from the U.S as i can care less if they have negative things to say about it or me.  Something i don’t stress about.
On another note and also fun to do when you have some one bugging you, trying to sell you something or walk with you just being annoying as you are walking along and when they ask where i’m from and they are expecting me to say America, i come out and say, ‘Oh i’m from Chad’.  They of course are like, ‘Oh Where is that?’  I respond with, ‘It’s in central Africa, you haven’t heard of Chad (acting all amazed that they haven’t)’  From that point on they have nothing clever to say about the handful of popular travel countries they are familiar with to try and communicate even more.  I’ve only really done that like twice, but was funny when i did, because well, no one knows anything about Chad (including me) to know if i wasn’t telling the truth.