Voting for someone because he's black is just as bad as NOT voting for someone because he's black.

[SecretaryofEvil]

@Nzinga_Seated

What do you mean, ‘I’ll bite’? He already fed it to you. Spit it out or chew. He said white people group off in sub cultures ( Italian community, Irish community,etc.) while black people tended to cleave together… The atmosphere of being poor, oppressed, disenfranchised and excluded created a culture of food and music and art that reflected that environment. Of course you may not agree with that, but to me it seemed clear what Big T was saying.

I suppose I was thrown because that doesn’t seem like a particularly accurate way to describe American society.

Just because one could make a distinction between Mexican-American culture and Salvadorean-American culture doesn’t mean it’s ridiculous to speak of Latino-American culture. Just because white subcultures are plentiful in America doesn’t mean one couldn’t make a valid argument that a concept known as “White-American Culture” exists. Also, BigT’s assertion seems to be dismissive of the existence of different sub cultures within African American culture.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@BigT

There is no white culture. There is a black culture. The black culture came about because its members were discriminated against and banded together. The same thing happened with white people, but not all into one basic group. The different minorities became their own cultures, losing the other distinctions between them. The only real “white culture” is amongst white supremacists, who are, of course, a minority.

There’s absolutely a white culture. It creates things like NBC, ABC, Fox, the WB. It creates things like Disney and Pixar movies. Schools celebrate black history month and white history eleven months.

One of the great things about thinking about white privilege is how you can see that what you take as default is actually your culture: it’s just that your own culture is so dominant that it starts to look like background, like the natural state of things, instead of being obviously a particular, specific culture.

[alindallas]

@typoink

Actually, the belief that racism is a white-owned thing is a disagreement about the definition of racism.

There’s a recently-popularized definition of “racism” within pop sociology (eg tumblr) that only allows the term to apply to society-level, institutionalized discrimination. In short, “racism” can only refer to things that impact racial minorities. Racial majorities could be impacted by “stereotyping” or “discrimination,” but never “racism.”

I disagree with this definition, but it’s been catching. That’s the meme you’re fighting here.

This. A living language tends to have flexible and changing word meanings. “Racism” is one of those words with lots of baggage in the U.S, more variation from Webster’s than most words.