Dear Prudence,
I am a British man of West African extraction, living in the eastern United States. I am reasonably educated and not impoverished. I work for a mid-sized regional law firm. I lived a pretty unremarkable life until about a year ago, when my Nigerian father died. As my mother was already dead and I was an only child, it fell to me to set the estate to rest. As I was doing so, I discovered something uniquely hilarious. I know this sounds remarkable, but as it turns out, I am in fact a Nigerian prince by birthright, though nobody in my family has held any true title to nobility for several generations.
It gets worse: My family fortune is lying unclaimed in a bank in Zurich, under sanction dating to a 40-year-old diplomatic dispute involving smuggling diamonds and a coup-d’état. Not that this pertains to my problem at all—I don’t want the money nor could I get it if I did. No, my problem is that my life is now an ironic spam email; my ethnic and familial identity is reduced to a stale meme. I have not told anyone in my personal or work circles about this development in part because of my fear that I will not be believed, or will become the butt of jokes. It is already hard enough being a Black bloke with a heavy British accent in America. And yet I don’t know how to process this newly-revealed disclosure into my personal background. I asked my therapist, who did not believe that I was serious until I provided written documentation to substantiate my claims. This is exactly indicative of the problem.
—Reluctant Scam Prince