I was at the Irish pub for quiz night (trivia they call it), and I got into a bit of a discussion with this bloke and I think I managed to offend him while being entirely friendly. He had been hitting on my friend for about 20 minutes - she was pretty drunk, but her boyfriend works behind the bar and he's also built like a brick shithouse, so I figured it wasn't my responsibility. Anyway, he didn't know that, so he came over to me and my other friend to smooth the waters and check he wasn't treading on anyone's toes.
As soon as I opened my mouth, I got the usual "Hey, where are you from?", and I readied myself for one of the three standard responses:
1) "But where are you from, originally?" (translation: but you are black and this does not compute with my notion of Englishness)
2) "Oh that's so cool - I'd love to go there / went on vacation in Europe once etc."
3) "Where in London?"
Now when you get answer no. 3 you know you are probably dealing with someone who has lived in London, or spent enough time in one or two areas to think they know their way around (a bit like living in Manhattan lol). Anyway I'm always interested to find out an informed American's opinion on English culture and this guy wasn't shy about volunteering his:
"Oh the damn class system there, it's so messed up etc. We don't have that here"
I 95% agree and I told him so, but I also said that there are some posh americans, that money was the governing class factor here because America was founded by rich men, and that the racial divide is just as bad as the class divide in England.
Now he didn't agree. Obviously he said he did - liberal white americans are generally really scared to confront race or say something which could make them seem racist, but I could tell there was something eating away at him which made him not really agree with me. It turned out, after much beating around the bush, that he had been tried to join an English gentleman's club when in London - he had the money so he thought, as an American does, that this was all he needed to buy his way in to 'class'.
Oh no no no no.
Oh no no no.
No.
That's the thing about the gentry - they hate new money. They associate it with cheeky upstarts trying to gain favour with them. You really can't break into those sorts of places unless you, and about four generations before you, went to the right school (Eton or Harrow), the right university (Oxford or Cambridge), and you talk like the Queen of England (not the King, he's just a racist Greek).
So anyway he had paid his dues to one such club, and was in attendance at one of their parties. He was not having a good time and was about to leave, I think because he found out they were all right wing toffs who didn't share his lily-livered liberal philosophies, when one of the toffs stopped him in his tracks.
"You are not a real gentleman, and therefore you may only take the ladies exit."
How humiliating. It's no wonder he has a problem with losing an argument with an English person - there is clearly an inferiority complex going on there.
So anyway - what's the trouble with being English? It's that everyone has their preconceptions of who you are and how you view them, and they're usually wrong. So this guy now dislikes me (I heard him telling my friend), I think because I'm not posh but I still owned him in a disagreement about the House of Lords vs. the Senate.
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