I don’t wish to dispute anything you’ve put here, in fact I need to think about it all a lot more, but I think if I was given that list without context and asked ‘what culture is this?’, I’d have said LinkedIn.
Yeah. I’ve said at least once here and in many other threads that American culture is much more about the economy than it is about the society. And much more about humans as workers & consumers than humans as thinking & feeling social beings.
That list totally embodies my idea. It claims that culture is defined by buying into a set of economically useful beliefs. And non-economic beliefs are notably absent from the list.
There is nothing inherently white about an economics-first approach. It certainly seems that a hefty fraction of post-Deng Communist China has embraced an economy-first model of culture too.
The fact that a) most Americans practice an economics-first culture and b) most Americans are white (and more so in the past than the future) sure makes it easy to decide that whiteness is what matters to the understanding of that culture. It isn’t.
I think you got it pretty well with this statement.
Also hanging around other low income minorities I would hear the phrase “thats white people stuff” but given context it was meant more like being able to be bored and worry free about the world and your place in it. Versus; I need to get a job asap/will I be able to eat today.
Also one I can’t relate to but would hear often as ‘things white people do’ was be mean and aggressive to their parents.
That’s white supremacy as an ideology, a belief that whites are better and deserve more. There is also the concept of white supremacy as a culture and as a system, the collective behaviors that serve to keep white people in the position of most privilege (greatest legal protection, highest social status, best opportunities, etc).
It doesn’t require white people to support it or even be aware of it, in fact it’s more durable if it’s seen as the natural state of things, not race-related at all. The role of white supremacists is to draw attention away from that and toward themselves, so the rest of us can say “we’re not like them.”
As I said above I am hesitant to say that there’s any such distinct thing as “white culture” and I would not suggest that most white people are white supremacists. But if we are to draw a circle around something that can be called “white culture”, it’s those supremacist attitudes.
This is a pretty common stumbling block with understanding the concept of culture in general. It may be centered around certain people and behaviors but can also include the responses to those behaviors. For example, active-shooter drills at school are about as far as you can get from being pro-gun, yet they are a part of gun culture.
Just… no. This is a total misreading. There’s no part of the article that even remotely said any of that. There’s no suggestion that white supremacy invented “discomfort with emotions and feelings.” These are just a collection of behaviors that tend to cluster around white supremacy and help reinforce it. There is nothing especially white about punctuality or attention to detail in isolation, but when they’re seen as prevalent and emphasized for no particular reason, that’s a cue to take note of whether there are potentially other elements and systems of white supremacy in the organization.
Or there are ways of talking about culture that you’re not accustomed to, or something about this article has prompted you to define it in comfortably narrow parameters.