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.
If I’m understanding you right — and that’s a big if, since I had to look up many of the words you used, so please correct me if not — you’re saying that:
- People in many different cultures self-identify
- Some systems forbid this sort of self-identification
- There is a difference between observing that such hierarchies exist, vs excusing them as an acceptable tradition
But if that’s right… isn’t the idea that “self-identification is morally superior to structural hierarchy” (my paraphrase) itself a moral, cultural judgment?
e.g.
In the West, sure, but in other cultures, it’s not necessarily the case that the individual’s self-definition is more “important” or more “moral” than the structural hierarchy’s definition of them. A “resistance movement” from one perspective is a “terrorist insurrection” from another.
(And I’m not saying I agree with that classification, but that’s the way it seems to me in those cultures.)
Emphasis on this part:
Yes, exactly. But in some cultures, that domination IS the dominant status quo, and doesn’t really need to “justify” itself any more than the idea of “personal liberty” needs justification in the West. What gives sociologists the right to say one approach is more or less correct or moral than another?
I’m going to use a very flawed animal analogy here, because I can’t think of a better one… but let’s say we look at ant colony and see queens and workers. To us the queen might seem more autonomous and free while the workers just do her bidding. Are the workers oppressed and in need of liberation, or are they working together as a cohesive whole with different roles? And according to who?
Of course people aren’t ants, but I hope that question makes sense. It seems that “people want and deserve personal autonomy and self-definition” (again my paraphrase) is itself a cultural value that not every society shares. Here it’s the norm; elsewhere it may be the “resistance movement” that’s trying to change the culture around them… it’s a subculture within their greater culture, no?
I think I share the same struggle as Eonwe about this part. What is a (or the) “proper” way to speak about culture… is there one?
Sociologists study it and analyze it and name it. Insofar as being able to describe phenomena they’ve observed across cultures, certainly they’ve got the rest of us lay people beat. But when it goes from descriptive “how things are” to a prescriptive “how they ought to be” moral judgment… do they have more moral authority than anyone else? I guess that would be a moral relativism argument, but it seems to me that “a group of very smart sociologists making persuasive arguments based on excellent data” would only be convincing to a certain group of people to begin with (like pro-science, pro-empiricism cultures). Elsewhere they’d be ignored in favor of, say, religious leaders or divine monarchs.
And unlike in the harder sciences, it’s harder to point to an objective “this is culture” or “this is moral” piece of evidence in a lab. They may narrowly define terms to make concepts fit within those terms, but those terms don’t necessarily match the typical usages and understandings of those words outside of academia… if we are to insist that sociologists’ views are the more correct ones, isn’t that in and of itself a cultural value judgment?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, still. Please explain, if so?
The suggestion that there’s a “proper way” to talk about culture is the exact opposite of the part of my quote that you posted, in which I suggested there are multiple ways.
But the one wrong way is to assume that culture is always tightly aligned to race, ethnicity, or tribe. That’s very uncontroversially not correct. Being part of a culture doesn’t even mean agreeing with it, or having conscious beliefs about it, it’s just influence.
As a different example I already mentioned, gun culture includes the behaviors of people who are influenced or affected by guns. Contrast with a popular definition that might more limitedly assume it’s just about gun owners, rather than the whole universe of gun-related behaviors. Using the broader lens helps us not be shocked to know that white people participate in Black culture and vice versa, culture isn’t necessarily locked down by tribe.
Ah I see, sorry for misunderstanding! Thank you for explaining.
I do provide handy links as a starting point for the theory…
Not exactly. The dominant incumbents in the system attempt to forbid.
No. It’s definitely moral, but not cultural - since we already showed that it develops cross-culturally.
Hence the culture itself is morally neutral on this, since both framings exist within that culture. The Dalit movement is as much part of “Indian culture” as acceptance of caste is. Culture is not a monolith.
Sociologists don’t. That would be piss-poor science.
The moral judgement is mine alone (as all our moral judgements ultimately are) - informed by awareness of the science but not beholden to it. Nor to my cultural milieu (which is definitely not the “White culture” we’re discussing, anyway, as I’m neither White nor American)
No. hard disagree. Because…
So it exists within that culture. This is field theory in a nutshell- you seem to think a culture is a single list of attributes, but it’s not. It’s a dynamic system that arises from the interaction between all its human agents, not just its dominant incumbents, as you’re insisting.
I think the difference is that someone can do all that stuff, and nobody on the white side cares. Meanwhile, if I go “act Black”, all hell is going to break loose among the Black people who are around me.
I feel like there’s an element of exclusiveness that has to be there for it to be a culture in the way I’m conceiving of it- I can’t go be Thai, Cajun, Mexican, or even Canadian. But I can’t think of specific “white” stuff that someone from another culture can do that would make most white people (not racists or white supremacists) upset about them doing “our” stuff or stealing our culture or whatever.
That to me is the distinction- the very absence of an actual culture means that people can “act white” without materially offending white people, but it doesn’t work the other way around.
Historically what happens is that the “acting white” is viewed as an understandable (if not always welcome) form of adaptation, or even just “social etiquette”, but in the end you still don’t “become white” you are acting . The dominant culture does not feel a threat of appropriation because it is the dominant culture.
Does “white culture” exist? No.
I am Zimbabwean, South African and British. And white.
Each nationality has quite large variations; the only real similarity is that English is the common language.
I could argue easily for “white priviledge” as I have benefited from it, but not a single “white culture”
I mean, do I share some cultural artifacts from the Dutch, and Hugenout French who settled South Africa and were very influential in the new creole language Afrikaans. And their ancestors eventually moved into the then Rhodesia, but Dutch and French culture are different.
Rhodesia made it’s own culture, white people in Zimbabwe inherited that to a certain extent. I was massively counter-culture in my late teens
I think if you were to ask elderly white British people about their culture I suspect what you’d get is a proud definition of ‘white culture’.
I expect they’d leave out all of the back-of-the-head assumptions of their version of British culture.
Because the thing about those assumptions is that they’re the ones that aren’t consciously thought about; it’s just taken for granted that everyone thinks that way.
Just FTR, is anyone actually arguing that “white culture” exists in some sort of global sense? That’s absurd, in that many predominantly white cultures exist, but are very separate from each other. I mean, Germany, Poland, Scotland, France, Italy, South Africa, and so forth all have distinct cultures and identities.
I think the thread’s implictly about white culture in the US.
Sure. But is an Amish woman part of “white culture”, an New Yorker, a Wisconsin farmer?
The idea fails because even amongst those with pale skin there is so much diversity. There is no uniform “white” culture, any more than there is a uniform “black” culture, it is way too diverse.
Not this one!!
And to the extent the US has a common culture (and i think it does, despite a lot of regional variation) it’s not “white”. That culture has gained a lot from the other ethnic groups in the US, especially the “black” descendants of enslaved people.