I wonder if it would have felt more different to me if my primary internal identity was "white" rather than "Scando." One of the oddest things about living in California for me was that most of the white people I encountered seemed to have white for an ethnicity, not just for a race -- so most of the white people I encountered had vastly different cultural assumptions than mine, and seemed to assume that they wouldn't have.

The difference between race and ethnicity is being really interesting around here right now: for a lot of African-Americans, I think "black" is both their race and their ethnicity. But in the Twin Cities in the last 10 years or so, we've had a large influx of Somalis, so now there's not just "black" there's "American black" and "Somali black." Which is how it is for most Asian-Americans I know -- they think of themselves as Asian but also as Korean-American or Chinese-American or whatever specific Asian ethnicity they have. And it's the case for some white people but not all. Very complicated.