I really like the Venn diagram approach to this whole question. Any particular person’s/family’s/community’s culture is a mishmash of different overlapping factors that quickly creates thousands or millions of distinct variants. At some point drilling down too deep into the minutiae becomes counterproductive, but backing up a bit can let broader patterns that might be more useful come to light.
The Venn diagram approach also poses an interesting question. If there is a distinct “Black American Culture” and a distinct “White American Culture”, which it sounds like most people agree that there are, does that mean there must also be a distinct upper level category of “Black Culture” “White Culture” and “American Culture”? I agree that there’s an overarching “American Culture” but I’m still not sure about the other two. So we’re back to the original question. Maybe “Black Culture” and “White Culture” aren’t high-level categories in the Venn diagram but they’re instead subsets that only exist within the broader “American Culture” or “South African Culture” or “English Culture” etc. So it’s flip-flopped essentially. I haven’t thought that all the way through but food for thought.
Another point that helps give me some clarity when thinking about all this is the idea that what many white people (specifically in the US, and most likely also racist white people) think of “Black Culture” is actually “Thug Culture”. Clearly gangsta rapper types do not represent all black people, and thug types include (to greater and lesser degrees) Italian mafiosos, British chavs, and Russian gopniks. I forget who first posed that comparison, but I do find it compelling. Yes there is a lot of overlap with “Black American Culture”, but it’s not exclusive by any means. Also, which particular feature is the overarching one and which is the subset?
Yep - like I said, it’s probably specific to the type of place I grew up but two of my friends had parents born in Germany about another five or six had Italian born parents , one friend was himself born in Serbia , another had parents born in Hungary and one had parents born in Norway. And those are just the ones close enough for me to know and remember all these years later. I was one of a very few people I knew who didn’t speak another language at home- because the most recent immigrants in my family were one set of grandparents.
But there are so many foreign born people here (about 40%) that you end up with a constant flow of new immigrants - my grandparents were the most recent immigrants in my family , but my husband’s parents ( and his older brother ) were immigrants and my son-in-laws father was an immigrant. They were all from different countries but had they all been from the same country, that would have perpetuated the culture.
Part of the problem around “culture” is that much of it is created as a commodity, that is, as something to be bought and sold, and so reflects the needs and logic of the market rather than genuine expressions of experience and culture. Another chunk of “culture” is fabricated by the state: salute the flag, celebrate military exploits, respect law and order, etc. In both cases, much “culture” is foisted on us to meet the needs of others. And many factors–race, gender, class, to name but three big ones–shape how we experience and react and respond to these imposed “cultures.”
Since you can always go on a regular dating site and swipe in the negative direction (my wife and I started dating just before these apps became mainstream so I can never remember which is which) for anyone who isn’t white, I imagine the main thing you are selecting for is other people who want to be offered exclusively white partners.
Minor disagreement, but it speaks again to the fact that not all white = white in general. Growing up Jewish in a town with a tiny population of our faith, there was absolutely the sense that you may pass as “white” but you aren’t culturally “white”. There was a constant low level dissonance, probably not helped that Las Cruces was majority Latino population, so (in a bit of a twist) white’s were a minority there.
Now, it greatly helped that the mass media (growing up in the 80s) frequently included Jews, or bits of Jewish culture, certainly more than most Black, much less Latino influences, so there was mitigation, but don’t leave out the “You’re white-ish, but NOT one of us”.
So, in terms of “white culture” as applied to most of America it’s White & Christian culture that’s the default norm, and explicitly so for the large overlap of White Christian Nationalists that are so much in forefront these days. They are ever more carefully selecting who will be the cultural master race all others must defer too, even if the laws (when enforced) say otherwise.
[ please note, that I am saying many, large numbers, etc. - there are lots of ‘white’ people who take pride in their heritage without knowingly perpetuating harmful myths, and many (here for example) take pride in their ancestors accomplishments while also noting their individual or social failures - it is not a blanket statement ]
Fair enough. I had compared it to Russian culture and that is based on my own experience living in Russia in the 90s, there really were Russians just gobsmacked that people were pulling down statues of Lenin, just like there were whites gobsmacked that everyone didn’t love Robert E. Lee.
I went with some Russians to the KGB museum in Moscow, the guide was retired KGB and we saw Gary Powers flight suit stuff like that. A few months later, the same group was in Estonia where they had a KGB museum completely staffed by political prisoners of the USSR, the described their treatment and crimes, things like printing an underground newspaper, writing a poem, etc. The Russians stormed out. It just wasn’t true, none of it could be true to them. Last year I was at a Trea Crowder show (the Liberal Redneck) some people stormed out of that.
Jews are in an interesting position in they are often considered white and other times non-white, sometimes dependent on what’s most convenient for the observer at the time.
And hardly the only ones. Putting aside past generations when various non-Protestant Europeans were considered out-groups (largely a thing of the past now), you still have examples like some Cubans who consider themselves white in an American context and their next door WASP neighbors who privately (or not) wouldn’t agree.
Very true. In that specific time/place/culture, we were generally considered “white” because, well, honestly, many of the white transplants living in Las Cruces were not-so-subtly defensive against Latinos, and thus we were allies of sorts. Because we mostly looked white, or white enough. This was a time when more than one friend of family member of my folks questioned why we were leaving Massachusetts to “live in another country”.
Before I sound too cynical, Las Cruces (I visit at least once a year because my folks are still there) is more diverse and accepting (well, at least as long as you have money, like much of the US) than it was 40+ years ago, so things can change, and cultures can adapt.
Around here we have a lot of Old Order Mennonites. And we have a lot of people who are members of families which have been in this rural area for a couple hundred years, interwoven by marriage and friendship with each other and of course with people not originally part of those families. And we have a lot of retirees stereotypically from New Jersey, but in practice from various much more urban places with much higher housing costs. And we have a scattering of people like me, who don’t fit in any of those categories.
Nearly everybody is, by modern standards, “white”. But we are not all the same culture. At least, unless you count the bit of local culture, still holding pretty well, which says that we all try to get along and act like good neighbors; but I don’t think that can reasonably be considered to be a part of anything to be called “white culture”, since plenty of people who aren’t white do it and many of the people claiming “white culture” don’t want to do it.
Yeah. Not only in the USA either. My father was a child in Poland. But being a Christian in Poland and being Ashkenazi in Poland were very definitely not the same thing.
And when I started first grade (in 1950’s USA) I had a batch of other little girls asking me “What are you?” I kept saying “I’m American” and they said “We know you’re American, but what are you?” So I went home and asked my mother where we were from, and she said “Tell them you’re Jewish.” I said “that’s not what they want to know” because I didn’t yet know where we were from but I knew that a country wasn’t a religion; and she said “that’s what they want to know.” She was right.
I really wanted to make a joke about Jewish folks being Schrödinger’s white people because their status depends on the observer / observation. An even better joke if Schrödinger himself was Jewish.
Turns out his parents were Catholic & Lutheran but he embraced atheism. Oh well.
My late aged MIL was born in the USA 100+ years ago to then-recent immigrants from Italy. She used to talk about finally become white around age 40 when she moved from the US northeast to the US southwest.
When the name hadn’t been changed to erase any such evidence of ethnicity. “White culture” is the result of decades of effort to erase everything else and crush people into uniformity. The fact that people don’t even remember that “white America” used to be a lot more multiethnic and multilingual shows how systematic it was in that erasure. Street names were changed, personal and family names were changed, languages suppressed, cultures suppressed.
Which is one reason I consider there to be such a thing as “white culture” all that suppression was about replacing people’s identity and culture with something.
My husband’s grandparents are/were Sicilian immigrants. They are one of several very large Italian families in the area. They remember a time when Italians were discriminated against and his late grandfather was very sensitive even when anyone joked about the Mafia, because he was working to build his business through a time when Italians were criminals in the eyes of the general public. He was very adamant that people knew he came by his money honestly.
What’s interesting to me is how culturally distinct the family has remained. Most of them are still marrying other Italians, often from the same few families. The few non-Italians like myself are assimilated immediately into that culture, and it’s a bit overwhelming (especially for an introvert.) You are immediately a part of the family and expected to do what they do. It’s very much a When in Rome situation, and I have learned to appreciate it over the years. Especially now that I have an ethnically Sicilian child (who has my blond hair, lol.) I am fully assimilated.
I would have never thought of Italians as anything other than white if I didn’t have this direct experience. I mean my husband considers himself a white guy and he’s 75% Sicilian ethnicity and largely he is just a suburban white dude. But when they are all together there is a very distinct difference between this and garden-variety suburban whiteness. I’m not sure they know anyone who isn’t Italian that they talk to on a regular basis. Maybe some old business partners.
Maybe you can be white in some contexts but not in others. (Not me. I’m definitely white in all contexts. I’m not particularly concerned with my ethnicity, it isn’t even cool like Irish, it’s English and German, blah. I have a lot of people in my family obsessed with their ancestry and I don’t really get it.) Or maybe there are just a lot of ways to be white that aren’t the suburban stereotype.
A lot of that depends on when and where you grew up. Immigrants to America have forever been torn between maintaining their ethnic identities (to the point of being clustered into distinct neighborhoods) and assimilation that discouraged even different tastes in food or music.
My father attended Fenger High School in Chicago’s South Side circa 1930. He would reminisce about the variety of ethnic slurs being tossed by members of the many, many European ethnic groups who attended at each other.
30 years later when I was living in a very Southern Baptist section of Dallas, my mother had to be careful about letting our neighbors know we were Catholic.
There is no such thing. Have you spent any significant amount of time across Europe or Asia? Yes, people can partake of multiple cultures and yes, cultures are fuzzy, but no, both those areas (and Whiteness) are so broad that there are no common practices across them.