No, no, sociology surely doesn’t need more putting people into ethnic categories, let alone racial. People, race in humans is just a pseudo-scientific ranking, it has nothing to do with biology. It doesn’t exist.
If so, then the OP should say so.
And even if so: the cultures of, say, an Old Order Mennonite and a coastal-city WASP office-job professional don’t have a hell of a lot in common. And there are a lot more cultures in the USA than that.
I get what you’re saying scientifically, but in casual non-scientific use, there IS some overlap between genetics, geography, culture, and history, and those overlaps are often used to describe the temporary social constructs of “races”.
Maybe a few generations from now, terms like “white” or “Asian” will seem as dated as “red” or “Mongoloid”.
But I’d also argue, on the other hand, that taxonomy is never simple in any organism, whether it’s a race or a species. The science of genetics is way more complicated than the Linnean system presupposed, and classification by appearance is not an accurate way to group either humans or flowers. But neither is the idea of species or subspecies. These are all loose, after the fact approximations of complex phenomena. Scientists describe things one way (even then it’s imperfect), but far below that, in everyday use we sometimes just need grade school non-jargon terms to describe things.
By and large people are not scientists, and don’t think or speak scientifically, and their eyes are telling them that people do look different. Race may be the symptom rather than the cause, but it still has some meaning.
Maybe it won’t to our kids’ kids, but for now, people do see it, and as long as they do, we need words for it…
Have you ever seen a black man who dresses professionally, works a 9-5 office job, has a wife and children, speaks properly, goes to church? I have. I’m describing a person I used to go to church with some years ago, but he represents a type. Do you know how black people tend to describe this guy? “He acts white.” Black people know that there is such a thing as white culture. Self-hating white Americans are the ones who think there isn’t because you think culture has to be something different from what you’re used to, because you’ve lived your whole life in a society that’s constantly worried about celebrating everyone else’s culture. White culture in America is hamburgers, hot dogs, movies, cars, pop music, and much more. You think “but that’s American, it’s not just white”. But you know that hip hop comes from black culture? Even though the most lyrically gifted and financially successful rapper of all time is a white man. Even though hip hop is the biggest genre of music in the world right now thanks to white people. In the same way, others participate in our culture because our culture is wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t white culture anymore, just as hip hop is black culture even though non-blacks participate. America is also a majority white country so of course American culture and white culture have a lot of overlap.
I strongly disagree. No, we don’t need words for it, and we should teach people not to see “it”. And race is not a symptom, but a made up construct by racists. European racists.
I, too, would like to see that world. Colorblindness would be nice.
But in the current flawed world that we live in, where race and racism are an everyday experience for many people, in many different countries and cultures, it’s hard to simply ignore it.
I can tell someone “you know, you actually share a lot of genes with this other person, even though your skin colors are different”, but that doesn’t really change the fact that one of them will be treated quite differently in jobs, schools, dating, by ICE, etc. “Race isn’t a thing” is a nice thought to strive for, and I hope someday it will be reality, but it won’t match up with the lived experiences of many in our current time, myself included. Even if it’s not a useful biological and scientific measurement, it’s still a meaningful (and sometimes dangerous) social construct.
Hey @bigdawg99, and welcome to the Dope 
We don’t see many newcomers these days.
I’ve heard similar things from all my non-white friends in the US (both that there is a “white culture” and that someone can “act white”, regardless of their actual ethnicities or cultural heritage).
My “white” friends, on the other hand, would probably be pretty evenly split about whether there is a “white culture” or just a “dominant American one”.
I think it goes the other way, too. “Oriental” would sound strange to someone who’s Korean or Japanese, even though it was a common term used by non-Orientals not that long ago. It’s always easier to see and use these words from the outside of that group, I suppose.
How is it for black or native peoples, I wonder?
Quite right.
Which is why a lot of white people here, including me, have struggled with the idea of defining a “white” culture. Which some folks upthread (or is it in one of the spin-offs?) described this difficulty as “dancing around”. Nope. It’s genuinely difficult, bordering on meaningless to come up with a culture honestly labeled “white”.
Generic middle class suburban American? Sure; that’s fairly easy to lay out the indicia. Any specific member of which is, ref @bigdawg99 just above, about 90% likely to be white, but could be any other ethnicity.
IOW, the members of the culture are predominantly white. But it isn’t really their skin tone that defines the features of the culture. It’s much more economic, social, educational, and religious than it is racial. Whatever the hell “racial” even means in a planetary civilization.
Nothing special, but quite wrong, since a number of things on it are not culture.
Thanks for the welcome. I was looking for something on Google and found a post dated to 2001. It brought me here. I love old message boards, brings me back to the wild west web. Back before everything centralized on half a dozen extremely moderated websites. Back when we could have real conversations like this one and it wasn’t just people trying to be mean to each other for more likes. Just normal people with normal opinions.
Fair enough, but…
Is it really that clear-cut? Sometimes biology affects culture too, like with the body odor and earwax things. The biology may determine the sweat glands, but the resulting cultural aspect might be the widespread use of communal locker rooms with group showers for post team sport cleanup, for example. It was really weird seeing one of those for the first time. And earwax plus monopoly capitalism gives rise to boxed ear irrigator bulbs at strip mall pharmacies, something you don’t see in other cultures.
Or were you referring to other things?
Well, most of us, anyway.
Are tampons a part of woman culture?
They’re part of culture for some women, sure. Different cultures used different methods to deal with their periods?
It also bleeds (no pun intended…) into environmental concerns too. Some of the women I knew spent a lot of effort investigating reusable and/or natural alternatives. Certainly that’s a cultural thing (not necessarily white though).
Maybe not to each other. But from the outside, surely there are still similarities. They are both Christian, for example, which is somewhat correlated with “white” European missionaries and Manifest Destiny and all that. There is a cultural dependence on cow’s milk as a staple food. Their languages (modern English and an German dialect), despite being unintelligible to each other, are still more related to each other than many other world languages.
That said, though, however many similarities they share, surely there are just as many if not more dissimilarities. To an outsider, maybe they’re both “white” (or not, depending on who you ask, when), but one or the other may be much more similar to a foreign culture despite their skin color.
To use a computer analogy, cultures can be “tags, not folders” — as in each culture could overlap with other ones, and there’s no limit to how many cultures each person can have and how many people (of what kinds) can fit into one culture.
And even if any of these cultures-by-color were ever truly based on skin tones (probably they were not, but skin tones were just used as a shorthand), certainly they are no longer exclusively so today.
IMHO a reason we still struggle with these (and hence why this is a GD and not a FQ) is that mass-scale human migration is still a relatively recent phenomenon, and our traditions, languages, and religions haven’t really fully caught up with the reality yet.
The Venn diagram of geography, genetics, and culture used to be much tighter. A lot of what we now consider “culture” may have at some point in the past been more closely related to skin color, insomuch as skin color is a function of distance to the equator. Tropical peoples developed tropical cultures and tropical levels of melanin, for example, and over time the more violent and breed-happy among them coalesced into nation-states that defined entire continents or hemispheres.
And in some areas of the world, some nations are still extremely homogeneous, such that their nationality and ethnicity/race (if you will) are one and the same… that’s much more complicated in a heterogeneous mix like the US. Someone can be white and American or black and American, but it’s much rarer to encounter a white Japanese or other Asian Japanese as opposed to a “Yamato” Japanese.
And in places like California, terms like “dominant culture” aren’t really fair to use either, when whites are no longer the dominant demographic, yet the white and Hispanic populations there do often have pretty different (but overlapping) lifestyles.
Which is why I’m saying there’s no such thing.
The white people saying they don’t have a culture have one, of course. They have a whole lot of assumptions about how people do and should live, about what “work” is and who should do it, about what’s an acceptable range of clothing to be worn when and where and by whom, about what religion is, about what is and isn’t acceptable food, about when to show up when somebody invites you over for dinner — I could go on. And on. Hell, they’ve got assumptions about how often people should take showers. They just don’t notice those assumptions, because they’re swimming in them and they’ve never noticed that not everybody else is.
And yes, in the USA the people who do this are usually white. But that doesn’t mean that the culture they have without recognizing it is “white culture”; because there are dozens if not hundreds of white cultures.
Welcome, and hope you stay around. But just a fast note — this is very definitely a moderated website. You may fit into it well enough to barely notice the moderation; and many of us, me included, are very glad for the moderation; but it’s certainly there.
Your conception of “Asia” seems to mean “East Asia”.
Thanks. How do i delete my account?
Thanks for the heads up. How do i delete my account?
Moderating:
We do not delete accounts or posts outside of extremely rare circumstances. You are free to stop posting, or you can request myself or another mod suspend your account so that you cannot login, but it’ll remain in the system. If you have additional questions, feel free to message me, another mod or request additional assistance in ATMB (About This Message Board).