'Whiteness' Chart at the Smithsoniam Museum

Great Debates
182

Dismissing it as irrelevant IS sneering, whether you intended it as such. Even in this country, we are not all bound to the rhythms of the Victorian factory anymore. Some are, some aren’t, so the notion that this way is the only possible “right” way is absurd.

(Also, if you go back to the original post, the Smithsonian chart’s references to time were “Follow rigid time schedules” and “Time is a commodity.”)

See, here’s another example of Victorian morality: you get to take leave (vacation) only if you can also make sure your work gets done. Other cultures may have different ideas of work-life balance and obligations to family, but in this country your first obligation is to your employer. If you have to choose between getting your work done and going to the parent-teacher conference or your child’s school play, you get your work done. If it’s the end of the year and you haven’t taken your vacation yet, but the work is piling up, well, you don’t get a vacation this year. If your employer gives you more work than can reasonably be done in eight hours, you work late, because your employer takes precedence over your personal and family life.

183

Right, so we are back to the guy in India can get away with it and be successful, but HERE you run the risk of not being as successful…

This isn’t a hard concept to understand but first you have to let go of the mentality that the rest of the world holds relevance when we are talking about the USA, and only the USA.

No one said it was the right way either, again. What I have continually said was the there ARE ways that correlate to success. Calling it right, wrong, or in between matters not at all.

184

Your earlier quotes in this very thread were not so accommodating even of the possibility that you could be successful without following the rigid time rules.

Reflexively dismissing the rest of the world, as though they have nothing to offer us or teach us because our way is the one true way and can never be improved, is a textbook example of what the original Smithsonian exhibit was trying to convey.

185

Sure they were, you just didn’t understand them as written. Don’t feel bad, lots of folks here respond to the words they hear in their heads instead of the ones that written in the post.

In any event, since we are having trouble understanding each other, you can win. If you want to correlate success to things that happen in other parts of the world and wonder why people doing them here doesn’t result in the same success, wonder no more! Just go talk to slash2k he will set them straight!

186

I responded to exactly what you wrote, even quoting you. Perhaps you meant to say something a bit differently?

You seem unwilling to acknowledge that there even can be different definitions of success. For example, in the United States for a very long time it was the default that if Dad worked very very long hours and never even saw his kids, but made a lot of money in the process, then he was “successful.” For a lot of people, making money and getting promotions is still the only definition of success that matters. For others, having a good work-life balance and good family relationships are as important to success as a big bank account. The “others” includes not just other parts of the world but also other people in the United States. Can you at least agree to that, or are you dead certain that the “path to success” (singular) is correlated only with patterns of behavior closely tied to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition as espoused by the Victorians?

187

That is what I responded to, and no you must not have read them for clarity otherwise you wouldn’t be stating that I wasn’t accommodating to the idea of changes that could be successful.

188

Success for yourself can be measured in very different terms than for the populace at large certainly. But what that does, is gives you the choice AND the repercussions of choosing as you do.

What we are seeing now is that people want to make those choices but not be affected by their own choices.

Maybe an example will help: You choose to work only 30 hours a week so you can be family rich (times with kids or wife etc), but you don’t make as much money as Joe down the street putting in 60 hours.

189

The whole point of this thread and the chart at the Smithsonian, however, are what society and other people value: the implicit assumptions of what the dominant culture considers standard. If you choose to work only 30 hours a week and are able to have a rich family life while still maintaining a decent standard of living for your family, are you still considered a success, or is the word reserved only for Joe down the street who has a much higher standard of living but barely knows the family members living under his roof?

Traditional WASP culture, of course, said Joe was a success and you weren’t, because money was the sole measure: wealth = worth. If you could work more hours to have more money and chose not to do so, that meant you were a slacker, a failure, not doing your duty to your family. However, even a lot of people in the US today, never mind in other cultures elsewhere, say oh hell no, that there is more to life besides your job, because (assuming a baseline standard of living–we’re not talking abject poverty here) a life outside the job is more important than maximum wealth with no life.

Can you respect someone who makes that choice, or are they necessarily a lesser being because the dominant culture, your culture, values only money?

190

Respect really has nothing to do with it but yes, I can respect anyone for any choice they make. But then they should not expect to be as successful by different measures.

191

Respect has EVERYTHING to do with it. This whole debate is about what has historically been regarded as standard, normal, proper, the “right” way to do things, the way things are supposed to be, with the implicit and sometimes explicit understanding being that if you live your life by other rules or values or definitions of success, then that is by definition nonstandard, abnormal, improper, wrong, and inferior.

We are getting to the very heart of one of the underpinnings of white (especially white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) supremacy: our traditional values are superior to these other nonstandard values, which means we as a people are superior to the people who hold these other values. We don’t respect their values, so we don’t have to respect them as our equals. Those others have “island time” or “colored people’s time,” but the norm and standard is work before play and rigid adherence to time schedules, with time as a commodity to be measured and valued.

For several hundred years, the man who worked 60 hours a week to make his family wealthier was treated as morally superior to the man who worked 30-40 hours a week and had a happier family, because money was more important than family life. That has been baked into the American WASP world-view for 150 years anyway, and the Smithsonian’s exhibit was an attempt to get people to think about how much of what we regard as “normal” and “proper” is just our ingrained cultural perceptions.

192

Everyone I know seems to value a nice balance between making a decent living so their family can live reasonably comfortably and spending time with family and friends.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say the culture we live in values only money. I think the people that value only money are the exception.

193

No, I don’t believe that it is about what the proper or right way to do things. In fact, I don’t see that interpretation as even close.
I have said, and continue to say. There is no right, wrong or in between way to do something. There ARE ways that correspond to success, these values will change with what you want to be successful at.

You, among others are turning it into a race relations thing. The whiteness chart is incredibly racist, in and of itself but you wouldn’t say so now would you? I wonder why not?

In America (the world too but the valuations might be different), those values will change over time, but there will always be things and actions that correlate to success.

194

This has been a relatively recent shift, however, really only in the last 40 or 50 years at most (and somebody upthread noted that the Smithsonian’s chart owes much to the 1950s Ozzie-and-Harriet world-view: husband as breadwinner and head of household, wife is stay-at-home mom, Christianity is the norm, steak and potatoes is the standard dinner, your job defines who you are, and so forth. It’s an interesting debate about how much of the shift away from these values corresponds with or is merely coincident with the decline of legislated white supremacy and the percentage of the population who define themselves as non-Hispanic whites.

195

You can say that, but if a minority person complains about being denied equal treatment, you can bet that someone will come forward and say “you didn’t show sufficient dedication to the job.”

Hell, it happens right here on these boards when people say things like “the wage gap can be explained by women choosing to put their careers on hold in order to have children” or “the wealth gap can be explained by the failure of minorities to maintain stable two-parent nuclear family households and avoiding having children out of wedlock.”

There are people who won’t let you ask “Why should taking a break from work to have children disadvantage your career in the long run?” and “Why should failure to maintain a stereotypical nuclear household affect your ability to succeed in the long run?”

196

Do you deny that American society (white- and WASP-dominated American society) has historically held certain ways of doing things as “the right way” or “the normal way”? For example, in 1950s suburban America, would a multi-generational household have been considered standard or unusual?

This isn’t exactly novel: pretty much every society has established norms about what is the best and what is intolerable, so I’m not picking on American WASPs. However, “there is no right, wrong or in between way to do something” is ludicrously ahistorical, because every society does have established norms, and for most of human history, doing things the “wrong” (non-society-approved) way got you shunned or kicked out of the group, or at least disrespected.

The whiteness chart is explicitly labeled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States” and explicitly states it lists the traditions, attitudes, and ways of life that have been normalized as standard practice in the US. Are you attempting to argue that these are NOT the norms of historical WASP culture in the US? Some of them are certainly getting a little long in the tooth today (e.g., husband as breadwinner, wife as homemaker), but if you are going to assert that this was not understood and presented as the ideal arrangement for many many decades, you have a very tough hill to climb.

No, it is not racist to say “these are the core beliefs and traditions and norms of this group,” (at least not if you accurately state them). Would you care to clarify why you think it racist to try to list a group’s norms in descriptive fashion? It would be racist to say that all whites (or blacks or Jews or green people) necessarily have the exact same world-view, but no, it’s not racist to say that the dominant norms of white America have historically been x, anymore than it is racist to say that the dominant norms of ancient Rome were y and the dominant norms of modern Saudi Arabia are z. The norms themselves may be racist, but attempts to accurately describe them are not inherently discriminatory or prejudiced. (How can you even begin to discuss the legacy of white supremacy and institutional racism in America if you can’t even discuss the norms and standards of those who have historically held power in America?)

There will always be things and actions that correlate to particular definitions of success. Since different things and actions must necessarily correlate with different “successes,” leaving out that italicized clause implies that there is only one kind of success: to wit, success as the speaker defines it.

197

Okay, OP here finally posting after following the debate for a while.

First, I want to talk about the supposed ‘characteristics of whiteness’. They are all over the map. NONE of them are ‘white’ characteristics. If anything they could be classed as middle class or bourgeois values, common to middle classes around the world of all races.

Take ‘punctuality’. That doesn’t come from white people. It comes from specialization and the division of labor. Like it or not, in a world where many people have to coordinate to create goods and services, punctuality becomes important. Being punctual is not only efficient, but it’s moral. In specialized, factory-driven world, if you are 10 minutes late the person you are replacing has to work 10 minutes more. So we have developed social norms in 1st world countries such as expecting people to show up on time. I guarantee you that minority-owned factories in every country make the same demands on their workers.

Other ‘characrteristics of whiteness’ seem like straight-up racism. Bland is best? Wife is subordinate to the husband? That may be true of some small religious sects, but no white person I know has ever told me that his wife is subordinate to him. And there is plenty of patriarchy in the black world. It’s just a prejudiced claim when aimed at ‘white people’ in general.

By the way, the ‘Nuclear family’ is more a product of cities and modern living requirements. The traditional model for families both white and black was an extended model. What killed that was two things: migration into the cities, and the welfare state. The extended family model was a social safety net. When families had to break up to find jobs, welfare and other programs took over, so people started having small families.

Things like family structure are not associated with race anyway - they are emergent Black people used to have exactly the same kind of family structures as other people in their communities. The loss of the ‘nuclear family’ in black neighborhoods is not the result of a lack of ‘whiteness’ or of a preference for broken families by black people. Rather, it’s the result of decades of policies that kept black people ghettoized in failing inner cities, along with economic policies that punished poor families who kept the father around, and with a drug war that put many young fathers in jail. The collapse of the family in black communities is a disaster for them, and it’s obnoxious (and again - racist) for people to suggest that this is the natural way for black people to live, and only ‘internalized whiteness’ causes them to have actual intact families. The activists are trying to turn a major failing of their own policy preferences into a lifestyle choice.

The religion bit is totally whacked. If Christianity is a white characteristic, they’re doing it wrong because white people in America come in third in religiosity behind blacks and Hispanics. Christianity is the dominant religion in many black nations. A much higher percentage of blacks attend church than do whites. Another crazy, specious claim. The same is true of claims that ‘Whiteness’ means that skinny blondes (“barbie”) are the standard of beauty, or that only whites want to ‘win at all costs’.

Frankly, many of these read more like, "things progressive white people hate about conservative white people’, and have nothing to do with race whatsoever - unless you think that individualism and self-reliance are things black people don’t value. Which, again, is racist.

Most of the rules on that page read like “A guide to success in modern society”. To associate these with white people is about the worst thing you can do for minorities. And it’s really, really racist.

Also, this stuff isn’t the fringe rantings of a single nut. This stuff is part of of critical race theory, which is the source of such lovely modern claims as “science is violence”, “math is the tool of the patriarchy”, “My truth” and “lived truth” as compared to objective truth, and on an on. It’s the source of the current push to grade minorities easier than white people to ‘remove systemic racism’. It’s hard to come up with an educational policy that would hurt minorities more than treating them as weak people with a culture that requires them to be coddled to survive. It’s all complete horseshit, and again, racist as hell.

More later.

198

I would love to hear you explain how you can have a successful society on principles such as, “Cause and effect don’t matter”, “Objective, rational thinking is not necessary”, “Play before Work”, “Don’t plan for the future”, “don’t respect authority”, “evidence and the scientific method don’t matter”, etc.

199

I’d respond to you but I am not sure you got that interpretation from my postings?
I largely agree with your post above the one you quoted for me.

200

Nobody, including the Smithsonian poster, is claiming they are. The point is that they’re characteristics that are stereotypically (although not universally or exclusively) associated with the self-image of “whiteness” as a cultural category.

This has been explained several times already, but here’s an additional analogy to get it across more simply. Suppose that two families, the Smiths and the Robinsons, both happen to like dishes that have hot sauce in them, and both consume about equal amounts of hot sauce. But the Smiths are much more consciously enthusiastic about hot-sauce-eating as “a thing”. They talk about it more and give it more prominence in their attitudes about cuisine and family traditions in general than the Robinsons do.

Then it would be reasonable to describe hot-sauce-eating as part of the “aspects and assumptions” of Smith family culture, but not of Robinson family culture. Once again, does this mean that Robinsons don’t eat hot sauce, or don’t enjoy eating hot sauce? No, it doesn’t.

Every post of yours in this thread has been arguing against the same strawman.

201

At this point, one has to wonder if there is some deliberate obtuseness at work here. Your various explanations have been very, very clear. I’m not sure how anyone could be failing to understand the very obvious point you are making.