Agreed.
Similarly, since the vast majority of listeners to rap music are white I think we can safely classify rap as part of “white culture.”
Not really.
I think that this thread has suffered from a sort of all-or-nothing approach on a number of responses. When we think of French culture or German culture, most people would be quite comfortable recognizing that hearty partying Bavarian Catholics and more somber Prussian Lutherans could each have a subculture that we still recognizable as German. Parisian diners at haute couture establishments can still share a French culture with jovial farmers at a village bistro. While there are certainly enclaves of separate subcultures within the U.S., there can still be larger cultures building toward an “American” culture.
I doubt that there are enough Americans (of any ethnic background) who enjoy rap to make it an “American” trait. This is not to say that it is not a legitimate part of several American subcultures, but I don’t think that claiming it as “American” furthers the discussion.
I agree with just about all of this. I probably should have made it a bit more obvious, but my post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek since suspect most people see rap as more a part of “black culture”.
In The History of White People, Painter makes the argument that for centuries, the “whiteness” construct hasn’t so much denoted ethnic origin as much as it’s subconsciously denoted power, beauty, and social acceptance. This explains why Irish, Italians, Greeks, and eastern Europeans were at one time not regarded as white, and thus considered inferior to those whose whiteness was unquestioned. And yet all these groups were considered white at some time before they were considered not white; their categorization shifted according to the politics of the time. So I do agree with the OP in that you can’t talk about white culture without appreciating all the small and large ways it has been shaped by privilege.
For instance, a lot of people think speaking “proper” English is a white cultural artifact. We don’t see speech as simply a means of communication; wrapped up in it are assumptions about one’s education level, socioeconomic class, and sophistication level. When you speak American standard, then you are seen as “speaking white” and not coincidentally, more likely to be seen as educated, affluent, and sophisticated. I’ve heard white people describe Obama as speaking like a white person. But why? Because they hear an educated, socially refined man speaking and immediately register his speech as “white”.
That said, things that I consider to be articles of white culture are simply things that are practiced and enjoyed overwhelmingly by white people. Country music, for instance, is white. The style of dress you see on golf courses and country clubs is white. Bandanas around Golden Retrievers’ necks is white, and pets with human names (like Chelsea) is white too. A certain kind of dressed down, flip-flop-wearing, ratty jeans-having fratboy aesthetic common in college towns and the Pacific Northwest, I’d also consider white. I’ve also noticed that “white speech” is fairly static in terms of slang and idioms. Culturally, whites do not exhibit the same kind of creativity that blacks do in casual speech, and they hold on to once-popular forms of expressions a lot longer. In the year 2013, a white chick will unironically say “all that and a bag of chips”, for instance, even though that came in vogue 20 years ago and is no longer something black people say.
Just like with black culture, not all white people have to engage in these things for it to count as white culture.
I’m confused. Are you saying that there should be no discussion about white privilege in this thread at all? I thought you were only saying one can’t deny it’s existence, which I didn’t.
I’m merely pointing out that you have no evidence that your thesis is actually true. The evidence you have produced doesn’t support it.
It isn’t “nitpicking” to ask what actual basis there is to believe, as a generalization, White people deny they have a particular culture. If all you can point to is annoyance at “stuff White people like”, you don’t have a very good case, is all.
In America, there are traits which are recognizably “American” and there are traits which vary by group, in some cases by ethnicity and in others by class and region.
I’d suggest that the variations by class, ethnicity and region are sufficiently great that they tend to overwhelm any similarities by racial grouping.
In anthropology, there is a term for this: “situational ethnicity”. The point is that one has multiple categories of belonging, and the one that is significant varies by situation and by contrast.
For example, a person may self-identify as “American” when in a room with a German and a Frenchman; he may self-identify as “Virginian” when in a room with a Californian; he may self-identify as “Jewish” when in a room with a Catholic priest; he may self-identify as “urban, upper middle class” when in a room with a hillbilly; he may self-identify as “White” when in a room with someone who is Black.
The issue is, does this person have cultural traits of “Whiteness” that are more significant than his cultural traits as American, Virginian, Jewish, Urban, Upper Middle Class? Would he have more, or less, in common culturally with a Black man who also happened to be American, Virginian, Jewish, Urban, Upper Middle Class - as opposed to a White man who was (say) a Californian Baptist rural hillbilly - who was White?
The one thing that they share is America’s peculiar ongoing history of race relations, and dealing with that may be their major “cultural” point in common.
Yes. And to build on that, people participate in many cultures, including those they aren’t a part of sometimes. Many black people learn “proper” or “standard” English in school, which of course just means white English, while also knowing “black” English. They may speak or write it when necessary, which they need to do to deal with the dominant, white culture. And you even see the reverse, with white people participating in black culture when it suits them, such as with music, and adopting slang or more. Cultures overlap, mix, and influence each other.
Why is this labelled “White” culture? What has been described is mostly “Middle Class Culture”-its really about people who are striving to better themselves-this has nothing to do with race or ethnicity.
This is what I mean in my previous post. Why is standard American English considered “white” rather than just mainstream? I do not consider mainstream synonymous with “white”, just like I don’t consider hamburgers as white or a suit & tie as white. When I speak, I use the rules of grammar and syntax that were taught to me in school, but that doesn’t mean I’m partaking in white culture.
In my experience, whites have a tendency to see certain things as “theirs” when really they are just being ethnocentric. Admittedly, I can see why it’s difficult to tease these things apart because whites are the dominant demographic group. But still, it can be obnoxious to see American culture–which has been developed through the interactions of many cultures and is embraced by many ethnic groups–treated interchangeably with white culture.
Of course mainstream English is white English. It’s the English whites spoke, and therefore became the standard. There’s nothing better about standard English than black English. It’s standard because it’s white. No other reason.
That’s a fair point, but in this case, I’m simply acknowledging that standard English is standard because it is white, not because it’s somehow the best kind. I’m validating black English or any other kind. I think that’s a good thing. Yes, standard English isn’t entirely “white,” and never was, but it reflected what whites considered proper and rejected what they didn’t.
How about this formulation - White People have culture (indeed, everyone does), but they have precious little culture that is inherently specific to them being White, that they share only with other Whites in common (and not with, say, folks who are not White but otherwise resemble them).
Rather, White people have culture that is specific to their unique ethnic heritage, religion, social class, etc. - which is of course also true of people who are not White. In some cases, people who are White and not White may have much more culturally in common with each other than with their respective racial communities - because they share location, class, religion, political affiliation, etc.
There really is only one area of culture that is unique to Whites as a group (and unique, on the other side, to non-Whites), and is not by its nature shared: and that is those aspects of culture specific to the history and currency of racial relations. Which is more or less of a big deal, depending on where you are.
Well, even that isn’t shared. There are plenty of whites who had, or still have, really tense relations with other races, and others who don’t.
I’m not referring to individual relations here, but to cultural expressions.
Even then, I’d say it goes to far to declare that whites share, well, whatever you’re saying they share.
Look, if we define “White culture” as “Things white people do that no one else does” then we’re gonna have a pretty short list. And I think that’s silly.
Nobody looks at what Black people are up to, and decides that it’s Black if and only if no White people do it. I mean, sushi is part of Japanese culture, it doesn’t stop being Japanese just because white americans start eating sushi.
To a very large extent “White culture” is the same thing as “American culture”, just minus the black people. Of course you can’t scoop the black people out of American culture, because it seems to me that black Americans are more quintessentially American than white Americans.
So “White American culture” is weird, analogous to “Non-Parisian French Culture”. Yeah, it can make sense sometimes to talk about how Paris has a particular culture that’s different than the rest of France, and therefore all of France outside Paris has some commonalities. But it’s also going to look weird, because Paris is an integral part of France.
And on the third hand, “White people drive like this, and black people drive like this” is kind of dumb. But so is maintaining that there’s no such thing as white culture. I mean, if there’s no such thing as black culture or French culture or Mexican culture, then whatever. But if we stipulate there’s such a thing as America, and such a thing as white people, then there’s such a thing as “White Culture”. And SWPL culture is just a tiny subset of white culture, white redneck culture is just as white as SWPL culture.
Just goes to show you that someone can be technically wrong and still be correct in context. What the heck! This is a forum, so we all already know that!
All the same, thanks for that. 
I agree with this statement, but throughout this thread we’ve adopted a pretty broad interpretation of what “culture” is. “Stuff that people do” isn’t culture. Culture is music, art, movies, literature, etc. I suppose tradition and folklore can be mixed up in there, but for the life of me I can’t think of a single tradition that is universally “white”. There have been black people in American government almost since the country’s inception. There were blacks at virtually every recorded event in American history. So, how is anything of American culture solely “white”? Just because people have adopted the erroneous belief that blacks weren’t active participants in our country’s founding, struggles, and history doesn’t make it so.
Yeah I think your instructor was a moron.
It’s too simplistic to say there is a “white culture” as though it’s a monolithic culture, anymore than there is a “black culture” or “Asian culture”.
That said, there are probably some features of culture from Europe that have obviously been brought over or continued in the US. The language for starters. Then you have the relatively individualistic rather than collectivist culture. It seems that the rise of Christianity, democracy with rule of law & nuclear family formation has been continued to some extent. It’s probably also shaped some of the propensity for relatively high social trust. See for example Frost:
Also, Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations
That shift to greater individualism and altruism/empathy to non-kin (universalism) may in part explain the concern for the environment, animal welfare that are features of ‘white culture.’
Also, for a satirical look at your question I’d recommend the site 'Stuff White People Like’. Although the white people the author has in mind are relatively educated ones, probably what David Brooks would describe as Bobos.