It’s not about individual people. It’s about a culture. White people like to pretend that white culture isn’t a thing, because we are constructed as the “default.”
OK, but my point is, which white culture are we talking about? White working-class evangelicals in a rural area and white upper-middle-class professionals in a city are two distinct cultural groups that have very different values, customs, and beliefs (with, of course, some overlap and lots of individuals that do not fit the stereotypes associated with their particular group), and this chart seems to be conflating the two. People in the first group do not place a strong cultural value on “the King’s English,” and people in the second group are generally appalled at the idea that wives should be homemakers and subordinate to their husbands.
That’s sort of a good point that other individuals might not want to treat others as individuals, and this tendency might be culturally-influenced, but it’s no use to condone making broad generalizations about everyone based on categories we construct for them. That’s how we got where we are in the first place.
Agreed. This is not the definition of whiteness. This is a list of things that white people believe about themselves. It is a comfortable substutute for understanding that blackness originated as a legal fiction for declaring certain people slaves. After slavery was abolished, blackness became defined as whoever could be discriminated against, and it eventually got reappropriated as a point of pride. Whiteness was just the leftovers of whoever couldn’t be enslaved but wasn’t Indian (speaking of stupid labels).
I really can’t figure the purpose of the project mentioned by the OP. Whiteness shouldn’t be reified as a real thing. Instead we should be trying our hardest to unmake racial categories.
This is also why white pride movements make no sense to me. Whiteness has always been synonymous with racial pride, and whiteness has never been enslaved or humiliated in history. There’s no greater pride than deciding you deserve better treatment than most of the rest of the world.
You can’t unmake something laid into the foundation of a culture by pretending it doesn’t exist. I think the clear intent of this poster was to shine a light on notions of “whiteness” for this purpose.
If anyone’s pretending something didn’t exist, it’s when the author omits the fact that white/black dichotomy didn’t originate as an ethnicity, it was a legal technology for human labor extraction. When you omit that fact and choose to use a lot of white-flattering tropes, this is the opposite of shining light on anything.
I agree white supremacy can’t exactly be unmade. But it’s never too late to stop legitimizing white identity as an ethnicity. It’s no more legitimate than, say, Confederate identity.
Wasn’t this poster just one exhibit in a whole museum? Are you really confident that there was nothing about that whole “white/black dichotomy” in the museum?
You’re kidding, right? Whiteness was not the leftovers. All of the things that were valued, or that were the norm for the people in power were aggrandized to whiteness. “The White Race” was constructed specifically of and to be the group/race that holds all of the meaningful power.
It was reprehensible to construct it, but it was constructed, and it does exist. White people are perceived, e.g., as law abiding, not inherently threatening, and deserving of the benefit of the doubt. Hence, proportionally fewer unarmed white people are shot by police. That is a real thing. That does not mean, and no one is saying, that obeying the law is a white thing, or that being nonthreatening is. On the latter point, it’s the opposite. Black parents have to give their kids “the talk” about how very respectful and nonthreatening they need to be when interacting with police so as not to get arrested without cause, beaten, or shot.
To use punctuality, isn’t that a trait so ingrained due to the professional realm though? Any work hours may be flexible but appointments are appointments, as is a work schedule.
I think, to me, it would be broken down into professional and personal. If as a professional I am late, that is seen by me (and usually the other party) as inconsiderate and incompetent.
You likely have more lee-way in the personal realm.
In today’s world, wouldn’t anyone conform to whatever standard was successful instead of fervently fighting against it?
The professional standard originates in the cultural preference for punctuality. In India, for example, failure to be punctual is not seen as being inconsiderate and incompetent in a professional realm. Appointments are made to accommodate this.
You don’t for example schedule several appointments close together, because any one of them might result a delay of an hour or more. You might schedule just one appointment in the morning and one in the afternoon, with no expectation of its starting or ending at any particular time.
If you are consulting a professional service, like a physician, you plan to wait in a waiting room for perhaps hours.
Who is fervently fighting against it? It is included on a chart about the construction of whiteness. Acknowledging that this is culturally relative rather than universally a virtue/failing is important.
And you just handwaved away a billion people, and then referred to “here” as “today’s world.” Here is not the world, and having a billion people have a different practice is significant evidence that this is not some kind of universal view of what’s obviously virtuous and considerate.
No one is fighting against anything. The chart isn’t saying it’s WRONG to have a culture that stresses punctuality, it’s just identifying this as a very strongly held value in this particular culture. The point is to show that this isn’t a universal truth, and that cultures that arrange things differently aren’t less professional or inferior.
Wrong. The black/white dichotomy initially was a criterion determining who could be enslaved and who could not, after the initial criterion of religious affiliation had failed because people can change religions. Only after the black/white dichotomy was established did whiteness start accumulating a mythology of its own worthiness.
There has been no judgement from me, however putting a value on it makes sense when you are talking about success.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any culture if they don’t value a something (punctuality), but they should not be surprised if the things that people here value that thing, correlates to success.
We are talking about the whiteness of punctuality correct? And here we have a whole host of people saying punctuality isn’t valued elsewhere. That may be true and I hold no judgement on those people, but what purpose would a white person value being punctual and a different race not hold?
Are there more lead in questions that ultimately may get to, Maybe you guys shouldn’t hold punctuality so high, so it lets other cultures who may not value you it as high do better? Or what is the whiteness factor here?
A lot of things on that list would also show up on a success chart.
I am not trying to handwave them away, in fact, I have no judgement, positive or negative about them. I am not even really talking about “here” except through my own lens as a business owner. To be successful, do the things that make you successful in that particular area. Here, be punctual. There, you don’t need to be something else is valued over punctuality and yes that is perfectly fine.
That’s the point. We’ve created a sense of normative ‘successful’ behavior here that may not be successful behavior in other places - which impacts the cultural assumptions of folks from those areas.
They show up on a success chart in the US, because the culture as a whole values punctuality. A business person in many places who valued punctuality more than flexibility would be less successful than others. He’d offend clients when he ended meetings before they were satisfied because he had another appointment. He’d lose good employees who didn’t understand why he cared so much. He’d waste tons of time spinning his wheels, waiting on people.