Danes are “the Italians of the North.” Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen is one of the most fun places to visit.
I think this is an important and illuminating distinction. Civic nationalism is theoretically the founding principle of American democracy and mostly the lived principle of most first-world democracies. It has built into it the principle of the aforementioned shared fundamental values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights.
Ethnic nationalism, which has crept into the American zeitgeist in the age of MAGA, has built into it the fundamental principles of bigotry, intolerance, and appeal to the old doctrine of white supremacy. Even if the intention is benign, it’s a strong catalyst for people demonizing “the other” – anyone and everyone who are unlike themselves.
Why not. After all, “Fifty Ways to Ignore the Facts” seems to be a raging hit at the moment.
I think it’s somehow more fundamental and simple than that. We don’t have a distinct culture that’s distinctly its own, unlike Black people, Mexican-Americans, or any other -Americans. And what we do have is basically what comedians make fun of, or it’s the common cultural heritage that ALL Americans share and are part of. There’s nothing that’s specifically ours, and not something that a say… Native American in Montana, a Chinese-American in California, or a Cuban-American in Miami can’t also legitimately claim. It’s why so many people are like 1/16 Irish, but claim to be Irish-American, for example.
So there’s a sort of inchoate desire among a lot of us for that kind of thing. And I feel like a lot of the MAGA types are trying to define that in terms of saying “this is ours, and not YOURS” about a lot of things, or maybe “YOU can’t be part of this.” to brown people. They’re trying to define what it means to be “white American” by making a package deal, and excluding others from it.
That’s not a new problem; this has been a long argument running all through American history. I sometimes put it that the history of the United States can be seen as a long and sometimes violent argument about exactly what it means to say “All people are created equal.”
And @bump: lumping all Black people in the country, let alone all Native Americans, into one identical culture is just as inaccurate as saying that people living in rural Kansas, or Santa Cruz, or Manhattan haven’t got a culture, Everybody’s got a culture; some people just assume theirs as automatic background noise, that’s all. And, again, what America is is this mix of cultures, individuals moving among them, ideas and food and music made up of their meeting and mingling. That is our common culture, and all of us can have it.
I’m reminded of Lenny Bruce’s contention that if you live in New York City, you’re Jewish, even if you’re Catholic; but if you live in Butte, Montana, you’re goyish, even if you’re Jewish.
Beautifully said. And much more politely than I might’ve.
Accents are the same way: “I speak normal ordinary English; you folks from elsewhere in the country all have funny accents.” Yeah, riiiight.
I wasn’t trying to imply they have the same culture, just that there are Native American cultures, just like there is to some degree a shared black culture.
And while I agree that there is indeed a shared American culture, it’s not specific to white Americans. People who descend from 18th century Spanish immigrants to San Antonio and people who got off the boat yesterday can equally share it.
Its not surprising that some white American people might want their own specific culture that isn’t shared, and that’s what I think may be happening - attempts to define that.
That could be. But I think that would end up with one of two things. One would be defining “white” culture as something that non-white Americans wouldn’t want to participate in, like redneck culture or hillbilly culture. The other would be to claim that there exists, as you say, some sort of generic American culture, and defining that culture as white.
Just stopping to in to say that the things posted about Japan here are as meaningful as the seven blind men describing an elephant.
But carry on.
Of course it isn’t.
All of them have one. They just can’t see it, because it’s what they think is “normal”, and they define culture as something that stands out.
My uncle used to claim that people from Omaha, Nebraska, where he grew up, had no accent in English. Yup, same thing.
As someone who rather likes Japan, it really is amazing just how toxic the culture can be. Work culture, school culture, relationships regarding immigrants and foreigners, and so on. “JP ONRY” is a meme in areas of multiplayer gaming for a reason.
I guess I disagree with Jasmine in some ways and agree in others. What I do find annoying from parts of the left is this insistence that countries that are inherently multicultural from their foundings aren’t doing enough to be even more so while ignoring more monocultural countries. Nobody ever says there’s not enough white guys in anime, for example.
Half the time I’d be hard-pressed to tell you if any random (non-Black) character is a white guy or not…
Hardly helpful. Why are those things incorrect and what is the wider view?
White American culture is just American culture. It’s the default culture of all Americans who live in a white-majority nation, regardless of their ethnicity. We only notice things like Black culture or Jewish culture or Hispanic culture because they aren’t the majority culture.
Japanese have a racial superiority complex, and it’s not just against other Asians. They pretty much think they’re better than everybody, though certain nationalities are admired more than others.
Social progress has always come with a backlash. It surprises those who have hereditary power (racial, gender, money, whatever), but after a period of disarray they go back on the offense, and it can end up in a prolonged regressive period.
But it would be wrong to take away the lesson that this is due to change moving too fast. The only way change can ever happen slow enough to please regressives is when it’s slow enough for them to shut it down.
So realistically, there’s no path to progress that doesn’t involve the risk of partial setbacks or even complete reversal of fortune from time to time. You can’t ask the incumbents to please share a little of their power, you can’t take it slowly enough not to spook them, so it’s got to be a cycle of frontlash and backlash, of grabbing some power and having some of it taken back.
No, it just seems that way to White Americans.
Who is the “we” you refer to here?
Once could san the same of Han Chinese. And (I suspect) just about every other ethnicity.
None of which makes that a good thing. Just a common bad thing.
Most ethnicities have some sort of pride and preference for themselves. After all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t last long as distinct ethnicities, because they woudn’t be preserving their own identity, they’d just adopt whatever one they saw as superior.
However I would disagree that every ethnicity is outright chauvinistic. While most ethnicities do have a tendency toward “I like being XYZ, I’m proud to be one, wouldn’t want to be anything else”, it’s not universal to feel like “XYZ is the best, everyone should want to be XYZ, and if they don’t, they’re defective and need to be fixed.” It exists, it’s distressingly common, but I don’t think I’d say most ethnicities are like that.
And there’s the confounding factor of historical white-supremacist racial hierarchy. In America, for many years the category “white” was essentially defined by what it was not. I.e., it was fundamentally built on a principle of exclusion, and over time some originally excluded groups (Irish, Italians, Jews, some Latinos, etc.) got incorporated into it, while others (Black, Asian, etc.) did not.
So American “white pride” (unlike the more organic ethnic pride of many racially-white subgroups, such as Scots or Norwegians or Swiss or French-Canadians) has traditionally never been about being special or distinctive in any pluralistic manner (“this is our bizarre food and our ancestral language and our unique traditional dress, and we like it that way! There are many others but this one is ours!”).
Instead, it’s been about being normal and ordinary and being entitled to be considered the default and characteristic group of our whole country, because we’re the people who are doing “normal and ordinary” right. Unlike all those inferior “ethnic” weirdos.