Is it food quality? Healthcare? Wearing shoes inside?

What commonly-held misconception or stereotype bothers you most?

37 comments

  1. The healthcare stuff is annoying but understandable, it’s genuinely quite different than many other systems.

    The inability to separate movies and YouTube videos from reality is inexcusable. Just a complete lack of critical thinking skills.

  2. That somehow everyone’s at constant risk of getting shot. *Mexico* isn’t like that(in some areas anyway), and they’ve got a third of our population and the territorial integrity of Syria in 2015.

  3. Lots of food related ones that are really out of date like the beer is all weak lager and we don’t have decent bakery bread but all eat Wonderbread or something. Or that “American food” is the same thing as packaged, processed junk food.

  5. Not a specific one. But, anytime someone who has never been to US, who then definitively states that the US doesn’t have or only has XYZ.

    I love when Redditers clap back with receipts proving the poster wrong.

  6. That people go around worrying about getting shot day in and day out. It’s ridiculous how people interpret the news they see and think we live in a war zone.

  7. Their complete inability to understand what nuance is. This can be applied to pretty anything US related

  8. The food thing.

    All of our bread is sweet, you can’t get real bread here, our beer is trash, everything is fried.

    You know, someone who flies into Orlando and spends a week at Disney World but cheaped out and stayed in an off-resort hotel that’s on a busy highway so their only food options are a gas station and whatever fast food outlet is within 500 feet of their hotel and used that as their example of how we have no fresh food and terrible restaurants.

  10. That we’re collectively bad at languages and geography. And that’s we don’t travel outside the US.

    The reality is that we’re a continent sized country and there’s no practical need to learn languages that aren’t really needed here. Same with geography and travel. Most Americans don’t need to be able to identify Kosovo on a map. And there’s a lifetime of things to do and see within North America.

    Really the angst is because we don’t focus on their language(s) and geography and we don’t travel to their countries.

    FWIW, I’ve studied 4 languages, I’m a geography nerd and well traveled outside the US. I do this because I enjoy it. But there’s no practical reason to do to live my life.

    ETA. Don’t even get me started on wood frame house, shoes and electric kettles.

  11. That they think tv and movies are an accurate portrayal of the US and use them to form their opinions of us.

  12. That European ideas of race and ethnicity are directly applicable to a continent that was colonized and then populated by immigrants. We don’t have a rigid system built from first principles that can answer any question to everyone’s satisfaction.

    The idea that things get mixed up and messy because of how we got here is so intuitive it’s hard to explain how things are just different here in the Americas.

    The kicker is that the difference is we haven’t had over a thousand years of people sorting into groups after migrations.

  13. Oh! How they don’t understand a lot of our laws are set at the state level. So you’ll often hear X is illegal, or Americans don’t have Y. But often the reality is X is illegal in some states while legal in others.

  14. “All American chocolate tastes like vomit.”

    American chocolatiers win awards with the good chocolate.

    “I mean the chocolate that’s easy to get.”

    So you…think that’s all we have? Why’d you say all?

    “Well your beer tastes like watered down piss.”

    Americans win awards with our good beer, it goes so far beyond the stuff we mass produce.

    “American cheese and cheese in a can is gross, why don’t you have…”

    America has international award winning cheese, especially from Vermont and Wisconsin. We also import good cheese and it’s easy to find.

    “Well then, why can’t you get good fresh vegetables and fruit?”

    Do you think we live in a desert or a bombed out nuclear glassed hotzone or something?

    “Says the person who sleeps in their shoes.”

    Why are you like this?

  15. Honestly it’s the public transportation stuff. And it’s always from Europe.

    Go to NYC or LA and you will find decent public transportation. But the US is gigantic, the vast amounts of empty land surrounding the cities is not suitable for public transport, hence why we use cars.

    Also they complain about our lack of passenger trains, but make no mention of our insane freight rail system. It’s why we can get our packages in a couple of days.

  17. About 90% of the questions on this sub.

    ​

    EDIT: a big one for me is the “Americans can’t buy fresh vegetables!!” You visited Miami for a week and only stopped at the 7-11 next to your hotel expecting to find fresh kale.

  18. The one that I’ve been seeing a lot recently is that we don’t have butter. That one doesn’t make sense to me.

    Edit: also, the butter on sandwiches thing

  19. There is a YouTuber who made a blog about how trash the food was here and she mentioned all the restaurants she visited: McDonald’s, Burger King, subway, etc.

  20. That we are stupid and the country is dangerous. Most of us are ok and there’s only a few places that are actually dangerous.

  21. Complaints about sales tax. Your purchase will be a few cents more at checkout. Get over it. That’s how we do it.

  23. Not understanding the difference between heritage and nationality. It may irritate some of them, but we’re a diaspora, that’s what happens.

    Not understanding we’re fifty little democracies existing under the umbrella of the Federal government with different laws (like sales tax, age of consent, marriage laws, driving laws, gun laws etc) and that there are regional differences. I know to an outsider we might all ‘look’ and act the same but believe me, Boston is very different from Tucson (disclaimer-lived in New England and the desert Southwest). For this reason, it should be understood we’re not a monolith. People in Wisconsin will do things differently from people in Wyoming.

    We have 54 million Spanish speakers….

    Oh, and we natives haven’t been exterminated. We’re still here.

  24. That the US has no history. Because the Americas existed in a vacuum with no people on it until, you know, colonization.

  25. That our houses are made of cardboard. We’ve been building houses for some time now, I think we’ve figured out what works for us.

  26. There are sooooo many, but here’s a few that come to mind:

    a. American women are promiscuous and are “easy” to get. This one annoys me so much! Women in the US are probably more outgoing, and easier to talk to (compared to most of South East Asia/Middle East), but that doesn’t make them promiscuous.

    b. That US didn’t have a culture/unique identity: Being a melting point of multiple cultures ***is*** what makes the US unique. The US defies the very idea that being a cultural monolith is the only way a country can succeed.

    c. Everyone in the US is racist: While there might be a small fraction of people who are racist, an overwhelming majority of the people are genuinely nice to one another, and mean no harm.

  27. That we all go out to get our mail barefoot, then put our shoes back on as soon as we get inside the house (if you know, you know)

  29. >What commonly-held misconception or stereotype bothers you most?

    That they believe what they see in the movies.

  30. People seem to not understand that just because it’s not required at the federal level doesn’t mean something doesn’t exist.

  31. That America has shit beer.

    I hate the term, but I am considered a beer snob by a lot of people. Truthfully, I just enjoy good beer, but I’ll never turn one down or judge anyone on their preferences. And I’m willing to travel / pay for good stuff. I’ve centered plenty of trips, solely around getting good beer. Most nights out at home are focused around a couple good craft beers to start or finish with. And I’ve had the good fortune to travel and get good beer all over the world.

    I’ve had best bitters and pints of plain all over England, including a night with the RAF boys in their London pilot house. I’ve had the mothers milk as fresh as it comes in Galway. 3 days in Okinawa, a month in Seoul, Venice, Athens, Paris, Mannheim, Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam, fuck I drove 6 hours just so I could say I had a Westy 12 at the Abby. Ive had some pretty great experiences traveling, and some fucking killer beer.

    But the craft movement in America is ahead of the curve. Traveling up and down the West coast, and all over New England, I’ve had beer that absolutely blows my fucking nips off, and there’s nothing even close to it out there. To say America has bad beer, is a disservice to beer itself. The greatest beer in the world is brewed here, and it’s made by guys who just have a passion for good shit and laid everything they had on the line to make it.

  32. That there is Zero native American anything and all our culture is just stolen from the English which as someone part native American is aggravating and a little insulting.

  33. It’s not so much the misconception itself but rather the way the person reacts when they’re told their assumption is incorrect. If an American were to spout some ignorant stereotype about any other place and then arrogantly double down on their wrong opinion, that American would get ripped to shreds. It’s the double standard that annoys me.

  34. That we are a 3rd world country with a first world dress.

    We have a 25T economy with 360M people. The next closest is 18T but with 5 times the population. Yes, they have a ton of brand new buildings because they have all been built the past 25 years. But that doesn’t mean that the US is a 3rd world country.

  35. Regardless of which trope they’ve chosen, I just get bummed out to be hated and pre-judged. The *why* of someone who knows nothing about me thinking that I’m beneath their contempt really doesn’t change the *what* of it. I don’t let it bother me too much but I wish it weren’t like that.

  37. Not really just one thing, but the seemingly complete lack of understanding that TV and movies aren’t real life.

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