You know that awkward feeling when you think you see your friend, but as you get closer, you realize that it’s just a random stranger who happened to remind you of your friend? So yes, mixing up people happens to almost everybody. There are also quite a few stories about teachers mixing up students; well, to be more specific, school staff thinking that people who walk through school territory are students and they have to stop them from skipping school.

More info: Reddit

Not everybody who goes through school territory and has Asian roots is an exchange student 

Image credits: Norbert Braun (not the actual image)

Person shares their story after being mistaken for a runaway exchange student, which led to missing their bus

Image credits: u/Universal_Winter

Person was grabbed by school staff after they kept walking to the bus stop

Image credits: Stanley Morales (not the actual image)

Image credits: u/Universal_Winter

Image credits: Keira Burton (not the actual image)

The word got around about the incident and the school wishes to make things right

A few days ago, a Reddit user shared a story to one of the communities sharing their personal story after they got mixed up with a runaway exchange student when passing through a high school during its orientation week. The story received a lot of attention and discussions as after 7 days it got almost 12K upvotes and more than 750 comments.

The author starts the story by introducing that they are a 20-year-old college student with Asian roots. In order to reach the bus stop, OP has to walk through the high school, which is having its orientation week for exchange students. One day, the author was walking past as usual, but heard somebody screaming to come back and listen to the teachers.

The author turned around to check what was going on there and then realized that the woman was waving and screaming at them. OP informed the teacher that they do not go to this school and kept sprinting towards the bus stop as it was approaching. However, then the author felt an arm grabbing them from behind that turned out to be the same woman.

Now, the situation was already uncomfortable. In addition to this, OP had to show a student ID to prove to the woman that they really were not a student there. Moreover, the author didn’t even receive an appropriate apology and missed their bus. The author ended up Ubering to college instead. Additionally, OP added an update that the school found out about this incident and wants to make things right.

Image credits: Joey Lu (not the actual image)

Folks in the comment section shared their suggestions on how to solve this situation: “Send a passive aggressive letter to the school with an invoice for the Uber,” one user started. Another added: “I wouldn’t even be passive aggressive. Just a simple ‘here is what happened, I’d ask that you reimburse me because your staff caused me to miss my bus and I incurred a $30 Uber ride.’”

For context, the “cross-race effect” or “own-race bias” has been the subject of extensive research, and work by psychology professor Brent Hughes at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied cognition for more than ten years, supports this. Simply put, research demonstrates that people are more likely to recognize their own race’s looks than those of other races.

Additionally, the research contends that as soon as we see someone, our prejudice against persons of different races manifests itself. “You process someone when you see they belong to another group; you determine their racial group membership. At that point, you sort of stop processing,” according to Hughes. “People lack the desire to consider an individual more thoroughly.”

Now, Pew Research Centre analysis based on Asian-American participants states that they named “Where are you really from?” as a question that they are most asked when meeting new people. Even if they are citizens of the United States, were born in the country or are longtime residents, this question implied that people think they are ‘foreigners’.

Moreover, participants noted that this implied that people had a preconceived notion of what an ‘American’ is supposed to look like, sound like or act like, which was probably even more hurtful. One Chinese woman said that White Americans treated people like herself as outsiders based on her skin color and appearance, even though she was raised in the U.S..

So, from the story and the research, it is clear that Asian people still to many individuals look like ‘foreigners’, thus, in this case, the author was assumed to be an exchange student. Additionally, an interaction like being mixed up because of one’s race and being grabbed by the arm, to most people, would be really offensive.

Commenters discussed with the author and shared their stories

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