An instructive case: I am a tradesman in Yerushalayim, I dress in fairly shmattish clothes, and wear my tzizis in so they don’t get exposed to heavy dirt. I also generally wear a wide brim cloth hat to keep the sun off me. When I work in Hareidi housing projects, the children take me to be an Arab, they whisper and point, and steer clear of me. My long whitening beard is no match for their conception that nobody chareidi (or even Jewish) works, and in their short experience and limited exposure, you can’t really fault them for that line of reasoning.
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