32 percent of ethnic Norwegians won't consider you Norwegian unless you're ethnically Norwegian.

in other words: you can be born in this country and have a Norwegian passport, but unless you're white, 1 in 3 people will still not consider you Norwegian.

as a non-white in Norway, expect to be asked which country you're from a lot. even if you speak, dress and behave like a Norwegian.

it's not really possible to reach 100% native status. you'll always be an alien. we're a bit like Japan in that way.

@thor Im kinda on the fence between this being offensive and also perfectly nomal.

I mean on the one hand its perfectly normal for race and nationality to be seperate identities. A racially non-norwegian is in one sense (nationality) a norwegian, in another sense (race) not a norwegian... no issue there.

What worries me is it sounds like you are implying they equate race with nationality... they assume a non-racially-norwegian must also originally from another nation... that is troublesome if that is the case.

That said at the same time asking "where are you from" to mean "where is your ancestry from" would be perfectly ok.. i know int he USA if someone says that they usually are asking ancestry and not using it to imply they were imported... but even then not always.

@freemo the United States is in a special position there, because it's such a melting pot. most countries aren't so ethnically mixed.

i do think there's a sizeable number of people here who do equate ethnicity and nationality. historically speaking, this would've been entirely correct too, since the country was virtually devoid of any other ethnicities, and to the extent that other races were discussed, it was always in the context of other countries.