For several years when I was younger, after Austin Powers in Goldmember came out, the first thing anyone, anyone would say after learning I was Dutch was to quote this fucking caricature of a Dutch person who sounded German, not Dutch, saying "shmoke and a pancake?" This character who was clearly made by people who barely had a surface level understanding of what the Netherlands was or what Dutch people look, act, and sound like.
It got old after the 3rd time but it went on for years and it just got so incredibly grating to have this thing be the shitty proxy for my culture. And this wasn't even dangerous or destructive, just kind of stupid and irritating. It wasn't going to put me in harms way or make me discriminated against in society at large. Just a silly little joke that made me grit my teeth. Imagine if there were lots of things like that, all the time, and they were all orders of magnitude worse and actively harmful, and they didn't fade into obscurity after half a decade, but people kept laughing about it anyway and acted like it's just some silly little joke, no big deal.
Wouldn't that be awful?
Anyway, just something I've been thinking about given the discourse happening lately.