This reminds me of a story.
In high school me and another kid (he was black) were supposed to do a dramatic skit about the history of Islam. We decided we were going to portray two Muslim NBA players in their old age, reminiscing. He was Hakeem Olajuwan, and I was Mahmoud Abdul Rauf.
And this other dude's mother said we couldn't do that because Abdul Rauf was a Black Muslim, which is an offshoot of Islam, and not the same thing. I asked the teacher, and she thought the kid's mom meant black Muslim as in African-American, and that I couldn't do it because I was white. So she went off on a tirade about racism and called up this kid's mom and bitched her out about racism.
In the end, we did it with our intended characters, and nobody picked up on the humor except me.