Does "White Culture" Exist?

But that isn’t the culture of all white people. If isn’t even the culture of all white people in the USA.

Don’t a lot of white supremacist groups go on about “white culture”?

I agree that denying that one’s got a culture is, just like denying that one has an accent, a way of thinking ‘what I am is normal, it’s everyone else who’s weird.’ But I don’t think that means that the culture such people have is a generic “white” culture; I think it just means that they share the (possibly unnamed) culture of most of the people they spend time with; probably the one I tried to describe, but couldn’t find a good name for, a little earlier in this thread.

And not just male, but males of a particular age.

True. I mean - KISS, FFS? My eyes could only roll so far.

It’s like @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness 's example. What we call “white culture” is a sort of generic default culture of suburban Americans who are disproportionately white.

The example I provided was more specific to male culture, specifically early 2000s GenX/Millenial male culture of the time.

But I will stand by my statement. There have been enough “culture shock” films over the years of white people and people of other races learn to adapt to each other’s cultures (usually to comic effect) that they wouldn’t make sense if there wasn’t a “white culture” that audiences could identify. When the Fresh Prince of Bell-Air makes fun of Carlton for “acting white” with his cardigan sweaters and Polo shirts, everyone knows what he’s talking about.

It doesn’t have to be. No culture of any kind is the culture of all people of that kind.

Yeah, not one of those things spoke to me, and i pretty much grew up white in America. (Jews are sometimes white and sometimes not white, but where and when i grew up, we were usually white.)

I think there’s a lot that can be called American culture, even if subcultures are probably more important to many Americans. But a lot of that shared American culture came from enslaved Black people. (Particularly obvious in music.) It’s possible there’s white culture that I’m blind to, like a fish to water, but it’s hard for me to see anything.

So, not the same thing. Bad example. Worse than useless, even.

“White”, there, means WASP and preppy WASP at that. He’s certainly not joking about Carlton doing keggers and wearing KISS t-shirts…

Are you saying WASP culture (which I’m happy to say exists) is the White culture you’re talking about? That’s not the same thing as an overall White culture, I’m afraid. It’s just a triviality to say that that exists.

Oh, there’s definitely WASP culture. And my grandmother was extremely good at faking it. My upper class WASP friends who met her often commented on how very WASPy she was.

Interestingly, the Starbucks chain started in Seattle as a merger of an eponymous coffee bean wholesaler with a cafe called I Giornale, inspired by and imitating the coffee bars of Milan. Are Italian urban coffee bars “white culture” in general?

Nope, ISTM that Starbucks is a classic example of American consumer culture, in which some feature of some non-American culture(s) (in this case, drinking non-shitty coffee in specialty restaurants in European and South American countries) is adapted to a tightly constructed “proliferation” business model. This allows clones of the original establishment to spread regionally and nationally, catering to the American consumer’s taste for familiar uniformity rather than unpredictable local variation.

But there’s nothing particularly “white” about that phenomenon. (For example, the Madam C.J. Walker line of beauty salons and hair-culturist training with hair care products marketed specifically to Black people in the early 20th century used basically the same idea.)

As others have pointed out, Starbucks’ cultural placement is not “for white people” but “for middle-class American consumers” (and subsequently, for consumers elsewhere who like or tolerate American chain stores). Just because historically most of those people have been white doesn’t make Starbucks “white culture”.

ISTM part of the deal is “White American” is itself a cluster of very different ways of being and seeing the world. Preppy WASP vs Alabama Redneck / Utah LDS / Bay Area TechBro / Charleston Old Families / Bayou Cajun / Boston Irish / Iowa farmer / Portlandia Hippie / whathaveyou. We have then to reach for an impression of common “White American” culture in the averaged-out lowest-common-denominator portrayal in mass media but the question becomes, how real is that?

The same can be said for Black or other cultures as well. Southern Baptist / East Coast Urban / West Coast Urban / my Black friend from the UK / etc.

So I suppose the question is when does any sort of “culture” because identifiable and useful? Maybe if you are marketing a TV show to a broad American audience or moving to a new community and want to fit in.

My sneaking suspicion is a lot of us are uncomfortable with “White” culture because so many people who talk about it are white supremacist. Nobody wants to be associated with those jerks. I feel as though many of the arguments against the existence of a White culture apply to Black culture as well.

I’d happily agree there also isn’t one Black culture in the USA.

OK, now what do you have?

Can’t say I’d blame anyone for wanting to distance themselves from that.

I’m white, from the whitest place that ever whited…

And that list means absolutely nothing to me.

Except energy drinks and keg parties… But based on observations here, anyway, their popularity seems to be based on an age demographic, not an ethnic one.

Coming into this thread late… I think I read all the posts and major points, but forgive me if I missed something or am repeating points already made.

As someone who is not “white”, I want to offer a hopefully less-loaded perception of “white culture”. Not in a strict sociological analysis sense, just in an everyday lazy shorthand sense, like two friends might use to make fun of each other.

Growing up in Asia, “white” people were often lumped together and stereotyped in various ways, a mix of their often-European ethnicity, genetics, cultures, etc. As with any culture, this is probably a lot more visible from the outside. For example, in my experience, white peoples and cultures:

  • Tend to like wheat-based food products as a base carb in most meals (as opposed to rice or corn), e.g. cereal or pastry for breakfast, bread with lunch, pasta for dinner
  • Tend to like dairy, especially cow or goat, with most meals (whether it’s milk, cheese, cream, yogurt, etc.)
  • Probably not used to eating spicy food
  • Tend to order individual meals instead of sharing “family style”
  • Tend to eat with forks and spoons instead of hands or chopsticks
  • Tend to like competitive team-based sports (as opposed to, say, martial arts and cooperative group exercise like tai-chi or yoga)
  • Are more likely to speak & write a European language that uses an alphabetical writing system, probably Roman/Latin-based, along with Arabic numerals (as opposed to ideograms, non-alphabetical languages, and native numerals)
  • Are likely religious and monotheistic, most likely an Abrahamic religion or a close offshoot (as opposed to nature or ancestor worship, or polytheism)
  • Likely have stronger (relative to East Asians) body odor (due to sweat glands and genes, I think) and may frequently use deodorant, especially if they are American, and perfume or cologne before sexualized social meetings (dances, parties, etc.)
  • Likely have a different kind of earwax and so use different tools (irrigation, candles, etc.) to get it out (as opposed to ear picks for people with the harder kind)
  • Likely to have full-body hair, and if American and female, will want to shave it on the arms and legs
  • Likely to place a stronger emphasis on remembering someone’s hair color, e.g. blonde or brunette or redhead (not really a thing in much of Asia since almost everyone has black or very dark brown hair)
  • They are likely more individualistic, value personal achievements, don’t live with their parents, and want more personal space (as opposed to multigenerational familial shared housing, collectivism and a desire to not stand out)
  • Tend to prefer direct and explicit communication (High-context and low-context cultures - Wikipedia)
  • Tend to value by-the-clock punctuality
  • Tend to think of cats and dogs as pets & family members rather than food or nuisances
  • Etc.

Now, these are of course just generalities and stereotypes, and you will definitely find many white people who don’t fit several of them, and also non-white people who do. (Indeed, I like many of those things, and have been jokingly told “You’re so white” on more than several occasions… including being mistaken for white here on the SDMB.) But I think generally speaking, a white person is more likely to score higher across many of these.

Some of these are more apparent when looking at white people from the East Asian perspective, where they are typically minorities (and sometimes subject to racism too — Chinese has the pejorative 白鬼, or “white ghost”, and where I grew up, white people were often made fun of, bullied, and excluded from cultural events).

Of course, once I moved to the US, a lot of these just became part of the “dominant American culture”. And in that context, many of those groupings would become altogether invisible, to instead be replaced by the differences within “white”: how the Jews and Irish and Germans and Polish, etc. are different from each other.

As others have already said, “white culture” is often a Venn-like diagram, it’s not always precise, it’s sometimes US-focused, WASP-focused, middle-class suburban male, etc. And it can shift depending on not only the observer but the situation/context the observer is currently in. Imagine if, instead of neat little Venn circles, you had amorphous blobs:

If each colored droplets were a race, a proximal grouping of them could form a culture, but redraw the grouping just a little bit wider and you have several overlapping cultures. Maybe it’s not so clear when you compare the reds in the upper left to the reds in the middle left, but they are probably pretty different compared to the oranges on the right, or maybe the blue-inside-red. Then you have that giant red-green-blue-purple-orange puddle in the middle, which is kinda like the US in that there is a lot intermixing going on but still some distinct pockets within the greater whole. And if you ask ten different people, you’ll get eleven different groupings of those same colors — one guy will change his answer a few minutes later after he thinks about it some more.

To me this doesn’t mean that “there is no white culture”, but that white culture is, again, just a lazy shorthand like any other culture. When we say “Black culture” or “Native American culture” or “Asian culture”, those words do convey stereotypes that may be situationally useful for communications, even if they are never terribly precise or accurate.

But if we can have a Black History Month or an Asian American Heritage Month or an Indigenous People’s Day… well, none of those are a single country, ethnicity, or culture, either, but they are still a chance to partake in the experiences of those who look, live, and love differently from you might.

Yes, it’s unfortunately very true that white supremacy has largely co-opted “white culture”, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that white culture doesn’t exist (any more than any other loose meta-culture doesn’t exist). There is a cultural line you can trace from Greece to Egypt to Rome to Europe to the Americas that does give most Western cultures, including Europe and North America, a shared heritage distinct from an Asian, Arab, or African one. Of course it’s all muddied quite a bit thanks to conquest, imperialism, trade, globalization, and of course the Internet now, but they are still not only useful but interesting groupings of behaviors and customs.

Part of what I loved about moving to the US at first was discovering all those “white people” activities and foods, everything from line dancing to camping & hiking & rock climbing to baguettes to Unitarian Universalism to CSAs to fancy cheeses to drum circles to bumper stickers. It’s a hodgepodge of ethnic and cultural traditions from Europe and Africa and beyond, but they’re still largely “white” things that you would more rarely find in a non-white household. Heck, I used to have a copy of the “Stuff White People Like” book that I would use for inspiration, finding new things to try :slight_smile: My white roommate at the time was both a bit amused and offended by that book…

This was especially true when I first moved here (early 2000s), vs now when there are more 3rd-generation+ post-internet immigrants who have borrowed more from the white people. When I first moved here, I was almost always the only “person of color”* doing those things amongst a sea of white people. I didn’t always know the ethnic lines of those white people, and yes, some — but not all — of those are Americanisms and not white-isms, but some of them are a white European thing. Modern mountaineering, for example, took on a pretty different form after Edmund Hillary, even though certainly the Sherpas and the Japanese and the Tanzanians had their own tall mountains.

I think whenever you move abroad, the dominant culture there will be quite the shock compared to your home culture. But if you visit a few Asian countries, you’ll find some similarities between them (especially the majority Chinese-Japanese-Korean areas). If you visit a few European, especially Western European countries, you’ll find some similarities between them. And in the US, where we’re, eh, maybe not so much a melting pot but a salad bowl with some melted cheese on top, well… there are certain traditions enjoyed by that melted cheese which aren’t so much shared by the croutons and lettuces :sweat_smile: That’s all I’m saying.


* Side note: I don’t know how I feel about being considered a “person of color” — I feel like that’s a power difference designation originally meant to protect people of African descent, but whose protections often ended up accidentally benefiting East Asians at the expense of white people, e.g. in affirmative action. I certainly do not share the same experiences of race and racism, and in some ways, I am quite a bit more privileged than your average working class white person. I get very little of the racism usually targeted at black and Latinx people, and yet enjoy all of the legal and social protections that they (and well-intentioned white people) fought for. I’m just kinda along for the ride. But that’s another discussion for another day…

You may have to rethink that. First, Egyptian culture developed millennia before Greek culture (and yes, the Greeks adored and built on the Egyptians), and second, where is Egypt again? Yes, in Africa.

Of course. But within the to-and-fro mixing-and-matching, certain inspirational cultures and time periods will resonate more, and last longer over the eras, to a given people.

Today much of Europe has Greco-Roman roots with Egyptian influences. Much of Asia has Chinese-Mongolian-Confucius roots. That wasn’t always the case in the past, and probably won’t be the case in the future. And is also not the case in some areas in the present. “Whiteness” itself is different from time period to time period, same as “Asia” was an European term of otherness. These groupings always change with time and by observer.

These things are necessarily not an exact science, but a complex, ever-changing soup… if we go back far enough, I guess we’re all African. But within modern and near-modern times, the casual groupings, imprecise though they are, still do offer some useful shorthands.

I don’t think so. The list you gave for what whiteness (whatever that is) stands for would be quite offensive for every other ethnicity, and I as a white person according to the American perception don’t agree at all with it.

There is nothing special about my list. It is just one person’s list for one possible grouping, and it won’t be right much of the time. You can ask any person to list random things about any grouping of people, and it’ll likely be quite different from anyone else’s groupings or list. They’re stereotypes.

My “what I consider white” and yours and anyone else’s would likely all be quite different, which is why sociology proper needs much more precision.

It almost goes without saying that the “white culture” referenced in the OP and by most subsequent posters is really “White USAian culture”. That’s what we’re discussing, or trying to.

Not some hypothetical planet-wide Caucasian culture.