While it’s true there is no such thing as a white culture, there is also no such thing as an Indian culture or a Chinese culture. There may be cultural factors that are widespread in any of those groups, but nothing that is even near universal. Not religion, not language, not economy.
Anyway, in my opinion:
The reason why “white” culture, by which I gather you mean western culture, is “unassailable” is because it settled into a period of self-criticism in the reformation/enlightenment, and it has kept going unabated ever since.
Of course this self-criticism has gone hand in hand with individualism. For 400 years western intellectuals and artists have made a name for themselves by pushing teh boundaries of bad taste and finding sacred cows to slaughter. And as the wanna-bes and trendies follow them, they also adopt an anti-establishment and mindset and expression.
At this stage anything that anybody could possibly insult about my culture has already been insulted. We’ve gone about as far as we can go. I can see sculptures of Jesus in jars of urine in the local museum. I can find images of Mickey Mouse sodomising a goat in seconds on Google.
Basically, western society has passed through the fire and been baked hard. We’ve been forced by our own membership to defend our own sacred beliefs, and anything that wasn’t rationally defensible has largely been swept away. Everything that is left that we value can be defended rationally, and we know this because we can be damn sure that it has been attacked and criticised repeatedly over the last few centuries.
So sure, we hold some things to be important, such as democracy or individual liberty. But outsiders can’t offend us by attacking those things, because we have *already *attacked them ourselves, form the inside. I won’t feel any more offended if an Indian attacks the lack of family values in my society than I felt when I read some white woman attacking in the newspaper last week. And i will defend my society against those cristicisms from an Indian the same way I will defend it against an attack from a white woman.
So yea, you are largely unoffendable as a white person, because anything that you hold sacred you had seen belittled and criticised and in most cases defiled by the time you were twelve. And you were taught that you had to accept that as the price of living in a free society. You were taught tolerance.
Non-western societies haven;t had that experience. They haven’t been subject to self-criticism, and the criticism handed out by imperialists was never actually open to challenge, so the societies never had a chance to test their beliefs and reject the weak ones.
And as a result, a lot of people have never learned that you need to accept criticism, that you need to be able to defend against criticism with argument. Or that you should reject beliefs that are indefensible, or indeed that rejecting beliefs is even an option.
You aren’t unoffendable because your culture has no “detractions”. You are unoffendable because you have been forced to confront all those flaws before.
Your country has a hideously high murder rate. The very existence of your country is based on land theft and genocide. You live in an incredibly wealthy society that has an entrenched, impoverished underclass, and nobody gives a shit about them. Societal cohesion has all but ceased to exist.
Those are all massive flaws in your culture. But they aren’t news to you. You have heard it all a thousand times before. You can’t be offended by somebody saying that because you have been desensitized.
And no, western culture certainly does exist in a positive and definable way. It’s not just an absence of anything else. It is democracy and capitalism and individual freedom and power with control from the people and social security and a whole heap of other things. A lot of “non-western” societies have also adopted those thing of course That is largely what “Westernised” means. That trend towards ever increasing freedom and government by the people and checks on the power of the ruling class is very much a western cultural phenomenon. Western culture may seem like a background to you, but go live somewhere where it doesn’t exist, even somewhere as westernised as India, and you will realise just how real it is.
And of course other cultures do try to criticise western culture. A lot of the Indians i work with seem vaguely appalled about the lack of family values in the west. And they have a point. But i can’t be offended because i have heard it before, and I can defend it as a price paid for individual freedom. The Soviet Union frequently criticised the inhumanity and decadence of capitalism. And again, they were right. And again, we had heard it all before and were able to defend it.
So it’s not like Western culture cant be attacked. It’s just that it’s hard to offend a westerner because we’ve had to defend our beliefs every day of our lives, so we don’t find a challenge to our beliefs to be particularly offensive.
