Awkward conversation or unfortunate generalization?

I like white people; I have to. But there comes a point in all my mixed-race friendships… I like white people; I have to. But there comes a point in all my mixed-race friendships where we have to have the conversation. Well, not in all of them but enough for me to memorialize it in this column. Let me explain.

With my close friends, the topic comes up after a couple months as they get more and more comfortable with me and my brownness. The close-friend versions of these conversations are fine, I guess. But the worst is that I am also forced into this conversation with another type of person.

You know that guy or girl who’s friends with your roommate and is over all the time – over enough that you, by virtue of living in the apartment, have hung out with him many, many times.

You don’t really like him; he’s OK, you guess, but you’ve made it clear that he’s your roommate’s friend, not yours – or so you thought. Before you know it, he has assumed a certain closeness between the two of you and is attempting to have a deep conversation of a personal nature.

If you and – we’ll call him Randy – are both white, it’s about speed skating or picnics. But if you are brown like me – or some other part of the rainbow – the conversation invariably includes what I call the “please defend or at least justify these 12 wacky things I’ve heard or seen about your people, and is it part of your religion or something?” theme.

For me it is always about Bollywood films or why we love cows; sometimes it concerns blood pressure or identification of rashes – although, nowadays it’s more and more about tech support.

Other shades of brown get these same questions and perhaps some sober and serious inquiries about terrorist attire and facial hair. Asians are asked about that conga line with the dragon puppets and – in two-thirds of these conversations – why they are so irritated that their “Randy” didn’t recognize that they weren’t Chinese.

As far as I’ve seen, black and Latino people don’t get this conversation imposed on them as much because their heritage has a long-enough history in America, but I’m sure those are fun, too.

I understand the impulse; knowledge is power. But, when I don’t know the answer to your question or have no idea what ritual includes “the red thing on your chest or something and the white paint with the dancing,” keep your disappointment to yourselves. And for the record, I don’t know why Indian directors insist on having three costume changes during the opening verse of the song or why she’s wearing that “dress-thing” and how she teleported to that snowy mountain – I’m only half-brown, man.

But I digress; all I’m trying to do is get the message out there for you, the reader with one or more ethnic friends – or one or more ethnic people you assume are your friends.

See, it is more important than ever that you don’t pelt the new brown guy in your hall with questions about the accuracy of Aggrahbah in Disney’s “Aladdin,” because he might be one of the 7,000 Iraqi refugees about to enter our country.

And they don’t need any additional trauma – surely they can do without the fatigue of being interrogated by another American:

“So, Mohammed, um, you’re Iraqi right?”

“Yes.”

“Cool, cool. I bet you like America, am I right? Ha ha.”

“Yeah, it explodes less often.”

“Well, I heard that’s your guys’ fault. But about that, I was just wondering, and tell me if this is offensive – I don’t want to be offensive, but – why, given that Iraq has a population of about 25 million, are 2 million of you guys fleeing the country according to the Associated Press? Is that part of your religion or something?”

“You mean, why are me and ‘my guys’ trying to get out of a country during a bloody war between three sides and innumerable factions within each side?”

“Yeah. Well, like, don’t you guys get television or something out there? Like haven’t you heard that there’s cause for optimism, and I don’t know what part you’re from, but, like, there was a school built in one of those parts of Iraq. Don’t you want to wait around for democracy to bloom? I don’t know