This IMHO thread got me wondering what is American White Culture*? I can see Italian-American culture and Black American culture and any ethno-religious-US-population-subset culture, but a distinctly American White thing?
The problem, as I see it, is that America is not a “white” nation and never has been. From the beginning it has been an English, Indian, Black, Spanish, Netherlandian thing and American culture has grown directly out of the mish-mash that was the early United States.
Yet it seems many whites (and blacks and other ethnicities too) think that there is a distinct American White culture that I’m just not seeing. I have not made an academic study of this and I would like to be enlightened. Is there an American White culture and if so, what are it’s characteristics?
*Yes, I’m using American to mean United Statesian. And putting -ian at the end the name of a country whether it belongs there or not.
I don’t think so. There may have been a WASP-y ideal once upon a time, where the mothers all dressed like June Cleaver and the fathers all smoked pipes and dispensed wise words to their well-behaved offspring, but IRL…no. Cracker Culture is radically different from Back-Bay Culture, which is different from Lake Woebegon Culture, which varies from California Culture (No, that isn’t an oxymoron!). We all come from too many places to have a monolithic culture.
You’re not seeing it, both because you’re inside it, and because it’s the dominant majority culture in the US. But of course it exists – and it’s different from Hispanic American culture, and Black American culture, and Anglophone Canadian culture, and White British culture, and all the other cultures that interact with it. Equally, given that there about 200 million people in this culture, there’s a lot of variety within it, on many dimensions, just as there are in other cultures covering large populations.
Culture is easier to see in the “small” things than in the bigger things. For instance, at Thanksgiving time, I always ask people what they eat. Nine times out of ten, white people will say, “turkey, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, and pumpkin pie.” I’m sure most Dopers are reading this and thinking that’s “normal”. But that’s not normal to me. Where’s the macaroni and cheese? Where’s the sweet potatoes? WHERE THE HELL ARE THE COLLARDS!?
Is that a Black Thanksgiving thing or a southern Thanksgiving thing? BTW, my mother always made sweet potatoes, too. That’s a New England thing, AFAIK. I won’t even get into what people eat for Thanksgiving out here in CA, although artichokes have been known to be on the menu. Artichokes!
I’ve got no “European American subculture.” My ancestors obviously came from a European country at some point long ago, but my family has been in the midwest as long as anyone remembers, and we have a very common name (i.e. hard to research). So my culture (such as it is) is pretty much “midwestern whitebread smalltown.”
Whether that constitutes a culture or not can be debated surely, but to simply say that White Culture = European-American culture is simply wrong.
It could be a Southern thing, although several white Southerns have looked at me strangely when I mentioned macaroni and cheese. And interestingly, when I lived in NJ, the few black people I interacted with all had mac n cheese, instead of mashed potatoes, and collards (not turnips, lawd no!)
While I was raised in the South, my mother–whose Thanksgiving dinners are legend in my family–is from the Great White North. That’s why I’m think it’s more a black people thing than a Southern thing (but I could be wrong).
Got it. It took about 5 readings, but I did get it!
I’m sure that being a minority, and a long oppressed one at that, makes for a certain sense of a shared experience, and therefore a shared culture. But I think the truth is that Black cluture and White culture have been merging for some time-- probably at an accelerated rate in the last few decades.
If there is one – and if “there can be only one” – it’s got to be the lumpen-Scots-Irish Protestant diaspora, source and target market of many things “Celtic.”
But where was the person from who made the holiday dinners of her childhood? It would be interesting to see a Thanksgiving menu by race and region though (both of your menus seem off to me. Never heard of eating greens of any kind or potatoes for Thanksgiving, and neither list the two staples of cranberry sauce and stuffing/dressing).
Couldn’t most American holiday traditions be considered part of white culture?
Tha’ts probably closer to the truth than you think. Black culture is not a function of race, it’s a function of African American heritage brought down from the time of slavery. It does not include newly immigrated Negroes from Africa.
There is no litmus test I can think of that aspires to “white culture”. I can’t think of any Caucasians (except maybe KKK members) who think in terms of a white cultural identity. I’ve never heard a mindset or benchmark for being white. It might even be said that white culture is the absence of intended culture. But then, maybe I’m not white enough.
