No. This is some Black people saying “White” when they mean “Middle class” (which is dominated by White people). That’s just a failure of class consciousness on their part, doesn’t mean they’re suddenly all sociologists. A clear category error.
Whites don’t have to be the dominant demographic for the dominant culture to be a White one.(which is not the same as saying White culture is the dominant one) . That’s kind of the point of hegemony.
In fact, i think you are looking more at “Christendom” than at “whiteness”.
Sorry, I just got lazy (after earlier posts). You’re right though. And even “East Asia” isn’t really fair to the other cultures in that area. It’s mostly just the CJK derivative cultures.
Fair.
Well, in that one sentence, yes, but add in German or English speaking and increased milk consumption and there are additional signals. None of those are exclusive to white people, but enough of them together increases the chance that the person is white.
Someone who “merely” doesn’t drive a car and has spirituality, for example, probably wouldn’t statistically be white (maybe Indian, probabilitistically?). What the WASP and Mennonite share is European heritage plus Americanness. Christianity itself wasn’t so globalized in the distant past, and its spread kinda intertwined (especially later on) with the spread of white cultures.
I think what I’m really getting at is the idea that cultures can be relative to one another, depending on context, kind of like how the same color can be orange in one context and brown in another, depending on what other colors are adjacent to it. It would stand out a lot more in a sea of blue than among yellows.
Similarly, while you’re in much of suburban US, white culture is largely invisible because it’s the mainstream. Once you step into certain cultural enclaves though (like various parts of California or certain neighborhoods in bigger cities), then white culture becomes more visible, like the one odd shop amidst the “ethnic” restaurants. That effect is also visible overseas in non white dominant areas that have a designated or de facto “foreign quarter”, for example, where people of European heritage often congregate and start businesses and cultural things.
And I guess directly related to that would be the question of whether cultural identity or race is something that someone can only self-prescribe, or if another person can ever “force” that description upon them against their will.
If a “white” person doesn’t feel “culturally white”, but other people label them as such… are they necessarily wrong? And I’m not talking about accidental misidentification, but deliberate groupings where the other person goes “No, I think you’re _____ even if you think you’re not.” That other person could be a random bystander, a government bureaucrat, a racist, a pseudoscientist, a misinformed scientist, an activist, whatever. Should their say matter at all, or is it solely up to an individual’s self-identity? (And I’d bet that this question itself is a cultural artifact, as in it would likely be asked and answered differently in different cultures.)
Yes. You don’t get to override someone’s identity just because you can name their background.
What you’re seeing in them is more something like habitus than cultural identity. Culture can stick to you even after you reject it — but that doesn’t give others ownership over your identity. That’s just boundary-policing.
It’s OK to say “you behave like an X in many ways”, that’s observation. It’s not OK to say “You’re an X even if you think you’re not”, that’s assigning identity. And the “I think you’re _____ …” formulation is closer to the latter than the former.
Further to this - for example, if someone told me I was culturally White, I would deny it, while laughing uproariously in their wrong-headed face. Even though, outside my ethnicity, there is absolutely nothing about my disposition that doesn’t align with what proponents of a White culture say that is.
Even if white supremacists start out with a slightly more inclusive selection, they would get around to excluding others later on in an escalating ‘purity’ drive, because ultimately, it’s never about inclusion and togetherness even though it may try to present itself that way.
The Nazi regime in the 1930s, initially ‘tolerated’ some groups it would later select for destruction, because that was convenient at that stage.
I ran across this article that I’d forgotten about titled “White Supremacy Culture”. If there’s anything that can really be called “white culture”, then it’s what this article describes.
People aren’t going to like the equating of whiteness with white supremacy, but I would maintain that these things are inseparable. A claim of whiteness is a claim to privilege whether knowing or unknowing.
Anyway, I think the article is not entirely perfect, but on balance I think it does a good job of capturing what whiteness really is. Link to pdf, and here’s the summarized form:
No doubt some are going to take exception with this, but I think it’s the most true representation of “white culture” that I’ve seen.
If “you” are part of it, anyway. It’s very visible if you aren’t.
And again, it may be mainstream suburban USA culture. But that doesn’t make it white culture. A white culture, I’ll give you. But not the white culture.
I’d go a little further or different.
Yes, a claim of whiteness is a claim to privilege whether knowing or unknowing. But it turns into white supremacy only after the person says or thinks “… and that’s exactly how it should be; because I/we really are superior”
IMO there’s no white supremacy until / unless people make that next jump.
That list does seem more like a subset of white culture, specifically the white supremacist or elitist part of it. I’d argue that actually helps differentiate white supremacy from white culture(s) and peoples. There can be more innocent aspects to white culture(s) that aren’t based on their relationship to power and achievement.
I think I understand what you’re saying, that there are many white cultures and not just one? But if so, don’t the various white cultures share some similarities with each other? They comingled and codeveloped in close proximity with one another for thousands of years, and it seems odd to treat them as disconnected. Distinct, certainly, but also related, no?
Yeah, exactly. There is white privilege, sure, and structural oppression. And there is white supremacy culture. But there are also white culture(s) that are not supremacist, even if some of their members are.
Those cultures are as special and interesting as any other world culture and don’t deserve to be politically corrected into oblivion because of a few white supremacist assholes…
Isn’t this (the idea of individual self-defined identity) itself a part of “white culture”, or at least Western individualism? It is not so, for example, in caste systems?
I mean, as an American I agree with you: It’s not my place to tell someone else what they are and aren’t. But not all societies work that way, as far as I know.
Without getting into the weeds about individual items on that list… I think that document is not very useful in understanding white culture. From the top of that article:
Because we all live in a white supremacy culture, these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us - people of color and white people. Therefore, these attitudes and behaviors can show up in any group or organization, whether it is white-led or predominantly white or people of color-led or predominantly people of color.
So, all of these characteristics of white supremacy culture can show up in any community, even communities of color. How did they identify these as white supremacy culture, but other behaviors as not-part-of-white-supremacy-culture? Are we taking as a given the statement that “the characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group”? Does that feel like a reasonable definition of damaging cultural characteristics? There seems to be an implication that only in white supremacist culture are there norms and standards that we inherit as opposed to actively choose? Is that a reasonable or supported position? When the article says “[characteristics of white supremacy culture] are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking”, doesn’t that tautology ask for some more examination?
There’s also an undercurrent of “noble savage” or “magical negro” attitude to this list- an implication that all of these things are an inherent imposition of whiteness, and that without white people no one would, for example “respond to new or challenging ideas with defensiveness” or have “discomfort with emotion and feelings” or have organizations that prioritize writing things down. There’s a perfect world to be had, if only white supremacy wasn’t standing in its way.
I feel like if we can say “white supremacy culture is the same as white culture” and “people of color practice white supremacy culture”… then we either haven’t defined culture well, or we are not accurately or usefully describing specific cultures.
This document does a great though imperfect job of listing behaviors that can get in the way of healthy organizational or community culture. It also presents as an unexamined truth that all of these things are the consequence of white supremacy culture.
Well said.
No. The fact that an idea emerges in a particular historical context doesn’t make it the “culture” of a racial group, nor does it invalidate the claim when used elsewhere. This is almost genetic fallacy territory.
Plenty of non-white societies articulate strong claims to personal autonomy within or against collective systems. You can look at Ubuntu in Africa, or the within-caste resistance movements like the Dalits. Or the various Asian ascetic traditions which explicitly reject caste, family and clan.
The fact that caste systems deny self-definition doesn’t show that self-definition is culturally parochial; it shows that some systems are organized around coercive ascription. Saying “some cultures don’t allow self-definition” isn’t an argument against respecting it, it’s just an observation about hierarchy. Otherwise any form of domination could justify itself as “cultural difference”.
Treating autonomy as “white culture” erases centuries of non-white resistance to ascriptive systems and quietly naturalizes domination as tradition.
In any case, in modern sociology, field theory already accepts that institutions ascribe identities regardless of consent. My claim here is that analytical description doesn’t grant moral licence. You can name someone’s background without owning their self-understanding.
No, it’s still White supremacy even if they go along with it unthinkingly.
Agreed. There can be argument or disagreement over whether X or Y is or is not an expression or reflection of WS (*) but it cannot really depend on everyone consciously noticing. The unaware individual is not necessarily culpably “being” a supremacist but the phenomenon is happening. (Reminds me of the SDMB “attack the post, not the poster” rule)
( * I seem to recall a thread some time back about the subject and arguments about how come such values as punctuality should be labeled as WS )
Does “White Culture” Exist?
If you are referring to White American Culture, then yes.
It consists entirely of Un-buttered Toasted White Bread, Diluted Root Beer, and Mitch Miller records.