I also usually see it used to challenge racism by inviting white people to consider the fact that “that’s just the way things are done” is actually the way a lot of white people do them and not objectively the superior way.
There’s nothing you could call white culture that’s exclusive to white people. You can say white college girls like pumpkin spice lattes and it doesn’t preclude anyone else from liking them. But can anyone really deny that Friends is a pretty white show?
I think the idea of white culture is not always problematic. It can be useful to step outside of the air you breathe and try to look at it from the outside in.
I have a playlist I found on Spotify called Songs That Excite the White Folk. Journey, Billy Joel, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can’t deny there are some real bangers on there.
It might help if we define what a culture is to start with just so we’re on the same page. From Anthropology 101, culture is made up of customs, shared values, history, artifacts, etc., etc. that are passed down from one generation to the next. Is this an acceptable definition to work from?
I don’t think “white culture” really exists. It seems to be largely an American concept (and one many Europeans find difficult to relate to), because “white people” is a racial category, not a cultural one. Treating it as a cultural unit erases the enormous diversity found across both the Old World and the New World.
Scholars never speak of a unified “white culture.” Instead, they refer to Slavic cultures, Romance cultures, Germanic cultures, Anglo‑American culture, Nordic cultures, Balkan cultures (to which I belong), Mediterranean cultures (which I know well after living in Spain and Italy), and Post‑Soviet cultures (which include large Slavic populations in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia). Skin color is irrelevant when discussing any of these cultural traditions.
If anything, the only context in which one might talk about a constructed category like “white Americans” is within the United States itself. It is a society shaped by successive immigration waves from places such as Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Poland. But even then, the U.S. operates within a racial framework that shapes identity in ways Europeans simply do not experience.
I disagree; “white” is a cultural category, not a racial one. As demonstrated by how groups have throughout history been arbitrarily added to and removed from it.
Anthropology distinguishes race from culture. Race is understood as a social and political construct, not a cultural system. Etnicity, not race, is what corresponds to cultural traditions. Because race is socially constructed, cultural groups are defined by shared practices, language, history, and collective identity, not by skin color.
No anthropological typology uses the term “white culture.” The concept of “whiteness” appears mainly in the United States, where it is used to analyze white privilege, racial ideology, and social structures, not to describe a unified cultural tradition. Even within whiteness studies, scholars do not claim that a coherent “white culture” exists.
I think white American culture exists, I don’t think some kind of global white culture exists.
I’d define white American culture as aggressively capitalist and built on borrowing elements from other cultures, but sanding the edges off those elements to make them less threatening to the status quo. The British Invasion is the perfect embodiment of white American culture: taking black American music, removing its edges and having it performed by white people from the UK made it safe enough to be consumed by white America, later that same music is used to sell white America things in television commercials.
I thought about this some more when I was walking my dog.
I think that people don’t perceive white American culture because it so hegemonic in the US in the same way that Russian culture was hegemonic in the Soviet Union. A lot of white American culture just isn’t noticed, especially in a place like the Dope which is predominately white.
That hegemonic culture results in things like the show Seinfeld, which was a huge number one hit in America, especially among whites, but was 50th in the ratings for black households. There weren’t even any black people on the show except for a few incidental characters here and there, but because white culture American is perceived as American culture (especially by whites), Seinfeld is perceived as part of American culture at large.
White is the default in American culture and as such it can seem that it doesn’t exist as a distinct culture. It’s having monuments to confederates a full century after the Civil War and not even stopping to consider why and what that says. It’s insisting that America is a melting pot, and living at the end of a cul de sac in an all white neighborhood. It’s pretending that the death of four white students at Kent State is the worst thing that has happened to this country and can be brought up as a counter argument that there is a rise of an authoritarian regime here.
As someone mentioned up thread, it’s casually othering non-whites by insisting white American culture doesn’t exist and that they like the same things as we do and suggesting there is something wrong with someone who doesn’t like what ‘everyone else (meaning white people)’ likes and getting indignant at the suggestion that someone doesn’t like Tom Hanks or Friends.
Scrolling through the entries at that blog, it seems to me that it’s about a very specific subculture of white people – liberal, reasonably well-off but not wealthy, college-educated with cultural tastes that are, I guess, sort of upper-middlebrow? Most people at a Trump rally are white, but, with the exception of “America” and maybe :”camping,” I wouldn’t expect them to like any of that stuff. Conversely, there would never be a Stuff White People Like blog entry about sorority rush at the University of Alabama, even though it is a thing that is liked, almost exclusively, by white people (and ones with plenty of disposable income, at that).
IMO, no, there’s no “white culture” because it’s not specific enough. There are plenty of majority-white cultures, and some exclusively-white cultures, but they all have some unifying factor beyond being white, and for any given subculture, there are large numbers of white people who would find it completely alien and alienating.
I should be clear: I believe (and witness) how white people in America have maintained a white-centric narrative of our history and culture through violence and oppression. And all the things.
I’m mostly pushing to try to understand what those who say “yes, all that bad stuff is true, but there is also some culture that is uniquely white that doesn’t have anything to do with that, and I want to express that I like those parts” are talking about.
And when I try to imagine what those things might be on my own, I can’t conceive of what they are in such a way that a person on “only white people” dating sites would be able to find amongst each other more reliably than from among a more representative sample of the population (btw, I assume that most “generic” apps are already predominantly populated by white people anyway).
I always figured that “white culture” was a construct of bigots/white nationalists. Non-crazy “white people” generally identify with one or more ethnic or religious groups, not skin color.
I do like Kraft macaroni and cheese and taking the dog to Dairy Queen, so there’s that.
I’m not going to say no one feels that way - but I suspect an awful lot of it depends on where you live /grew up. I don’t think there’s a white culture , but I also don’t believe there’s a default “white culture” and other non-white groups add their own culture on top of it. There might be a base “American” culture that all other groups (including white groups) add to, or there might be multiple white cultures, but both of those are different from “a white culture”
I suspect that I have that view in large part because of where I live and grew up - I don’t know anyone who when asked their ethnicity would just say “white” or “American”. They’re German, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Greek , Norwegian, Icelandic, whatever. And they go to Italian butchers and German delis and Polish bakeries. Most of the people I knew growing up knew at least some of their immigrant ancestors - some were the immigrants themselves. At my family’s holiday dinners and events, we have everyone from 3rd generation born in the US on one line of descent to the immigrants themselves. And the immigrants are all from different countries.
I also don’t think there is such a thing as “black culture” - maybe there is in some places, but there are at least three different ones here. Africans have a differnt culture than West Indians who have a different culture than the descendants of enslaved people. And there are probably actually many more , because chances are that each country has its own culture and I just don’t see the difference because I’m on the outside.
I think we’re using “Culture” as a catch-all for a combination of ethnic identity, actual “culture”, and the like.
The way I’m conceiving of it is as the whole of the history, shared values, personal names, foods, songs, stories, clothing, viewpoints, attitudes, etc… that make someone part of some historical “people”.
I mean, there’s something that sets a black kid raised by a black family within the black community, from a black kid adopted from Africa at birth and raised by a white family (actually know a couple of kids like that IRL). They may look substantially the same, but the other stuff I’m talking about is what sets them apart from each other. The first kid is “Black”, while the other kid is essentially a really dark-skinned white kid, albeit subject to whatever prejudices and hatred the outside world directs toward them for the color of their skin.
What I’m saying is that there isn’t really a “white culture” in that sense, at least none that I can perceive. The closest thing I’ve got is “Texan”, and that does have a lot of what I’m talking about, much like Cajuns have this abstract concept that I"m talking about, but white Kansans do not.
Are they though? That’s my point. The only white person I know of who can legitimately claim any sort of national status is a friend of mine who has a father who immigrated from Greece. The rest are like me- “German”, “Scots-Irish”, etc.. but at a 100+ year remove. We’re all American mutts, and any sort of claim on our Old World ethnic heritage is a rather desperate grasp on having that sort of continuity and identity that we don’t actually have.
As a counterpoint, where I grew up, white people were just white. Nobody identified as German or Polish or whatever. Ethnic shops and ethnic neighborhoods simply didn’t exist. At least not for white former Europeans. The most anyone seemed to know was the general ethnicity of the father’s last name. Substantially everyone I knew as a kid had non-immigrant parents and grandparents. Of my 4 grandparents, one was a child immigrant, and of the other three, all their parents, my great-grands, were US born.
Lotta variety of circumstances around this vast land of ours.
And here:
I spent most of 2024 with an Afro-Caribbean GF. Who’s still a good friend. I learned a lot about that along the way.
The various Caribbean islands each have distinct cultures. Depending on which European power controlled it the longest, more or less of that country’s culture got mixed in with the native’s cultures. So there are elements of commonality between the islands now speaking Spanish, or French, or Dutch, but elements of difference between the language groups.
They are all pretty adamant that African American culture is not theirs and vice versa. Very different.