The Atlantic's Special State of the Union Issue is chock full of interesting racial analysis, first and foremost, Hua Hsu's "The End of White America?" In it, he pulls together The Great Gatsby, P. Diddy, William Wimsatt, Nascar racing, and so much more to take a look at the anxious state of whiteness. I've got plenty o' criticism about the piece itself, but am enamored with the awesome visuals by Felix Sockwell, clearly a tribute to Kara Walker.
First and foremost, Hsu weaves an intersectional analysis of race and class deftly into the entire piece, but entirely misses the intersection of race and gender. In fact, there is nary a woman even mentioned in his piece--black, white, or otherwise. It's as if he just assumes that men alone determine race consciousness and culture. Not a very intelligent analysis for such a seemingly intelligent dude.
I found the exploration of white culture, or lack thereof, especially interesting. Hsu writes:
Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University who is a fan of Lander's humor, has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: "They don't care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture ... They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don't have a culture that's cool or oppositional." Wray says that this feeling of being culturally bereft often prevents students from recognizing what it means to be a child of privilege--a strange irony that the first wave of whiteness-studies scholars, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate.Of course, the obvious material advantages that come with being born white--lower infant-mortality rates and easier-to-acquire bank loans, for example--tend to undercut any sympathy that this sense of marginalization might generate.
I think this issue of self-perception and collective identification is at the heart of some of the stagnation around race politics today. White folks voting for Obama felt like they were allowed into a sort of "culture of hope" (NOT a "culture of blackness" or "radical politics" mind you) that felt uncomplicated and comforting. As my friend Charlton McIlwain said on a panel we did together a few months ago, Obama's team strategically prevented Americans of all ethnic backgrounds from feeling like they had to vote for him because he was black, but also allowed them to feel okay about the idea that they might vote for him, first and foremost, because he was black. A brilliant and election-winning paradox.
Growing up with hip hop in the suburbs shaped my idea about what a "culture" even was. I actually felt like I could identify with it, not out of a sense of similar biography to the artists I was listening to, but out of a mutual commitment to storytelling and brutal truth. (Not that it wasn't hellishly complicated, too.) I knew that there was deep pain and secrecy and fakin' in the mostly white suburbs I lived in, but I didn't quite know how to square that up with who I was becoming.
It wasn't until I went to Barnard and lived in New York City, that I started to think a lot more about the culture I had come from, which I define, for the most part, by my family and its traditions, my feminism, the mountains, my grandmothers and their very divergent lives. Whiteness is part and parcel of that, but not something I foreground when I'm considering my culture, which I recognize, is a privilege in itself. Or, as Hsu tries to point out, maybe its also a source of pain. Or maybe that's just guilt and unconsciousness manifesting as denial of the existence of a unified white culture...
Your thoughts?
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I guess that I am more concerned about the claim that white people don't have a culture. What is the definition of culture here? I identify as a white person, and there are certain things that I would consider my culture...like what food I eat/associate with family, what holiday traditions my family takes part in or pay attention to, the kind of family history that has been told me. I mean every person HAS culture. Just because you aren't oppressed doesn't mean that you don't have a cultural background.
While I didn't read the whole piece, just this summary, what I did read didn't really seem like that great of an analysis.
Is Hsu arguing that this feeling of "no culture" is a product of not been oppressed?
I understand , I think , what you are saying. Just because your culture as a white person may be so mainstream due to being the dominant culture, doesn't mean that it isn't a culture at all. It's sort of a form of white privilege that it seems so 'normal' that it doesn't seem like a culture at all whereas other cultures appear to be more exotic because they are not presented as being mainstream.
I think this is a good articulation...
Wouldn't that apply to anyone in a country's majority culture, regardless of what race said country's majority is?
I think it does. It's just that in some other countries, national spirit and ethnic identity are intrinsically linked (modern nation-state) and championing them as such has long been a political agenda. In the US, I feel we have so many diverse groups of people that the two are not linked as often. To be American is not nearly synonymous with any one ethnicity, and the minority cultures stand out as distinct, packaged sets to those observing from the outside.
For the record I've heard the "I have no culture" line from some of my white friends as well. This just reminds me of the time a young friend received a comment about her funny American accent in New Zealand, to which she replied, "I don't have an accent..."
I've never seen myself as wholly white. I'm of a full-blooded ethnicity (Italian) and I always identified as Italian since I was born. Maybe its a bit different for those that are of European descent, but have connections to a specific ethnic culture. Also, as with many middle eastern and mediteranean cultures the skin tone of my same raced immediate family is a mix between white and brown, so its never 100% white.
I also have a problem when other people who have been oppressed by the old white construct assume that some how my ancestors were KKK, due to my skin tone, when in fact they were harassed by the KKK. I dont want people to associate me with 'white' and my browner relatives with 'ethnic' simply based around the ways caucasians (who my relatives were not considered to be) treated darker peoples in the past. To me, that becomes an interfering aspect within my culture that divides my (or anyone with a similar predicament) racial community by how we are seen and summarily understood by society. That is also stealing away my culture (not in the same extremes that have happened to other races of course)by tying me to something I'm not. If my ancestors stayed within my culture for 4 generations, and didnt wholly 'convert' then shouldnt that be recognized? Lastly, it seems to me that men are the more racist ones in society. Why is it that when men misrepresent our cultures (whichever ones they happen to be)as racist, women automatically have to take his sins up as if we did it as well?
I also have a question for everyone; is caucasian all about skin tone? I've always thought caucasian was a mix of (in general) european (western or eastern) race. Do they always have to be white, or will the definition expand to include other skin tones but simply come to refer as a mixed race, or non-ethnically connected person?
Whiteness in this country is a fluid construct. You are right, Italians were not always considered white. Portuguese were not always considered white; Jews were not always considered white - even now I would say Jews are considered sort-of semi-white. Irish were not always considered white - I mean, Irish! Who is whiter than an Irish person? But now many people who were once persecuted by the KKK are possessors of white privilege through no particular fault or action of their own. But the fact that my and your ancestors were not white when they arrived doesn't make us any less the beneficiaries of white privilege today. The fact that neither of us asked for that privilege doesn't make it any less oppressive to those who do not hold it. I think it behooves everyone to remember just how fluid whiteness is and just how arbitrary privilege is.
I think this is really interesting, and I can definitley identify with it on some level.
I'm roughly half Italian, and I have always identified myself as so...mostly, I think, because of the strong sense of culture that comes along with that "tag." (Addmitiedly at the expense of identifying with my mother's side of the family in a "cultural" sense.) This is definitely something that I have felt, without necessarily being able to articulate it as Hsu has done.
I'm confused. Can someone break this down a little more? I don't really understand what the author or Courtney were getting at. Am I wrong for feeling that I have no sense of culture at all, either?
As a youngish white college graduate, I understand that I have a great advantage, a huge advantage, and I do get that I'm kind of whining about nothing. But I'm poor as hell, scraping by to pay back my student loans while doing theater and temp work, eating beans out of a can. I hardly think I'm privileged.
I feel that most of what MiloJ said she considered her culture, I've stolen those things from other cultures. My family doesn't participate in any religious ceremonies (even though I've refound my faith, I would not be able to get my parents to go to church on Christmas if I begged), we don't do special things related to our ethnicity.
Can someone tell me what kind of culture I have? (Please don't say my generation - I don't even want to get started on them.)
Being white, going to college, securing loans for your education, being able to work in an artistic field, and still having food for your stomach are all privileges. They may not be the same privileges enjoyed by the guy who goes out to buy the new Jag each year, but they are privileges nonetheless. It's all about degrees.
Here's my take on it.
Just like whiteness is considered the cultural "norm," white culture is, also. White students (people in general?) often don't list their race when making a list of personal identifiers. I think this "invisibility" applies to culture, too.
How we define "culture" will obviously influence the way this argument is made, but I'm going to go with stuff like the history, language, holidays, codes of morality and ethics, and also "consumables" like clothing, food, etc. White American culture has all of these things; they're easy to miss if you've grown up as the cultural "norm" (and I'm saying this as a middle-class white American student), but they are there and they do come together to form a culture. (It's easy to say that "well, a lot of white Americans do X but I do Y or Z," but no group is completely homogeneous, obviously.)
Sorry if I've misunderstood, misrepresented or misspoken anything. Please let me know if I have.
The notion that white people don't have a culture is absurd. The fact that college students actually believe this shows not only the horrible state of our education system, but also the degree to which white college students are taught to hate themselves.
I'm going to assume that by "White Culture", the writer simply means "American Mutt Culture". For if he is implying that Irish, English, Germans, French, Italians, Russians, and Greeks don't have a culture, then . . . well, then the writer and this Matt Wray fellow need to quietly resign from their positions and go off to a retirement community somewhere.
But it's not any less faulty to say that American Mutts don't have a pretty powerful culture, as well. It might not have the centuries or millenia that Chinese, Scottish or Spanish culture have - but it is most certainly there for anyone who takes the time to look. From Lewis and Clark to Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson to Bill Gates, from Iggy Pop to Andy Warhol, from Tex-Mex to New York bagel stands. It could be argued that, because of the integration of all our immigrants' cultures, White American culture is the richest in all the world.
"Culturally broke". What an utter fool.
Yeah, a lot of cheap commodity, unless you wanna claim that Iggy Pop is the Mozart of our time and Andy Warhol the Rembrant of our age. The state of serious art nowadays seems to be that art is consumed like bagels or Tex-Mex.
Perhaps off-topic, but my experience a number of years ago with college and "white culture" was sparked by one well-meaning linguistics and culture professor.
The whole "white people don't have a culture" thing has always confused me, but to be honest, what confused me more was when we had to list the things that made up our own culture in one of my first college classes...and then the professor proceeded to tell me that those things were not and could not be my culture. I was raised in the deep south of the US in a poor farming community. The language we used, the foods we ate, the daily traditions - everything that I had known from my childhood - and the professor stood there and told me that none of it was white culture and couldn't be mine.
I had no ideas at the time of how to deal with that. I was hurt. I didn't mind sharing my cultural experiences with anyone of a different background - to me that was common ground. To be told that I was using someone else's culture made me feel like he felt I was some kind of imposter.
It was a lesson I didn't forget - even well-meaning college professors sometimes don't understand about a person's relationship to their upbringing and culture and can unintentionally invalidate someone's experiences.
Your professor was wrong. And an idiot. That's okay, though, many of them are.
Yep - I spent the next 10 years in college and met a lot of both the fantastic and the...ahem....less so professors in my field.
It's just a shame that you have to pay money to listen to the high school dorky reject ones who now have a God complex because they have a captive audience of impressionable young people hanging onto their every word. Their sycophantic students were even scarier than them, imo.
You should have asked that professor if the Japanese have a culture since they borrowed many ideas and traditions from other places. Most cultures have done that to some degree.
I find that many people who use the term "white culture" frequently mean "white, middle class, frequently urban" culture. Poor white people, rural people, and geographically specific people (Westerners, Southerners) are frequently invisible. I hold up as an example the Stuff White People like blog. That blog makes me want to throw things. I realize that no group is homogeneous, but many of the things on that blog and very specific to certain socioeconomic classes. Framing the subjects as "Stuff White People" like marginalizes all the white people who don't regularly partake of those things and also marginalizes the POC who do partake of those things. White culture is no more homogeneous than Black culture.
I thoroughly agree, but I always felt that was sort of the point of the blog. I don't find it particularly entertaining, but I thought they were trying to make a point that just like black culture is not ACTUALLY homogeneous but is often treated like it is, so is white culture. Maybe I was reading too much into things.
If lovin' Lawrence Welk is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
It's quite telling that the illustrations are validated here through the appropriation of a black artist. It could be taken to demonstrate that 'white culture' isn't valid in itself even when the imagery directly references traditional white Victoriana with its genteel pastoral scenes and European toile patterns.
It's a great illustration as the analogy is so apt with the authors original message. (Which inadvertently makes the criticism of the written work here strangely incongruous.)
There's this article called "Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only?" by Mary Waters that addresses many of the issues being discussed here. Here's a link I found:
http://www.umb.edu/academic_programs/wpr/documents/Optional_Ethnicities_June_2005_003.pdf
Sorry, I think that link only gives a short summary; I'll continue looking for the whole article if anyone is interested!
http://mjcgeri.tripod.com/id1.html
There's the whole article!
Waters' article was interesting. Toward the end she talked about how ethnic identification is cost-free for white folks (not always true, but a valid point in broad scope), and argues that it causes white folks to believe that ethnicity is cost-free for POC as well. For a lot of folks, that may be so.
Anyone who says, "I don't have a culture" is taking far too many things for granted.
There's an interesting comparison to be had, though, when looking at Canada (English Canada, anyway; French Canadians have a very distinct culture). We get terribly annoyed when people lump us in with American culture, but it's often difficult for us to explain how we're different -- we often end up resorting to quips about toques, tolerance, and hockey.
And speeches about how un-American we are. That's a big part of Canadian culture.
The best comedic description of what it is to be Canadian comes from a Kids in the Hall sketch: "I'm Canadian. That's *kind* if like an American, but without a gun."
To paraphrase Margaret Avison: the problem of explaining the dominant culture when you're part of said culture is like describing the sound of the sea when you live under the sea.
Yes, this!
WIN.
First you've got to define what you mean by white-
is it strictly WASP?
Do Irish Catholic- Americans count as white?
How bout Greek-Americans?
Italian-Americans?
Is olive skinned white?
Is it about being Caucasian? Does that then include Persians?
Are Arab-Americans white?
When did Arabic become a Race?
Are Moroccans in France considered white, Arabic or African?
It's all a cultural construct.
Racism is thriving but race is not real.
I agree with the AAA & AAPA statements on race.
http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
http://physanth.org/positions/race.html
If you are a U.S. citizen and were raised here, this is your culture. Your family home may have additional flavors of ethnicity or art scene, academic, money, guilt, shame, religious influences, etc.
but, you can't get away from being "American" when you are raised here.
We didn't speak English in my house till after the divorce, past my elementary years and you can bet when I go to the "old country" I am considered the American cousin.
I think this illustrates that young college students too often confuse "culture" with "sub-culture", by trying to define it as something in opposition to the mainstream.
White people make up like 60-65% of the population, which is to say that white people largely define what is "mainstream".
In fact this can become a problem because if it doesn't reflect white thought/behavior/culture, its often considered non-mainstream/other/foreign/unAmerican. Its like when you ask someone to describe the classic American look is & they point to Abercrombie & Fitch & say blond hair, blue eyes.
I've never felt like I "had" a culture, but it's always felt pretty obvious that most of us are operating within the confines of many of them at once. In the end though, the culture is patriarchy. Individual cultures based on the construct of race, country of origin, language, age, etc, are all a variation on the basic recipe with different flavors of oppression added in.
As a white american living abroad, it's been my experience that white americans definitely have culture. I know this because I have experience culture clashes as well as a certain resentment on behalf of many Europeans at the import of American culture abroad. All you have to do is read stuffwhitepeoplelike.com and realize that none of your non-American friends are going to understand any of it, to realize white Americans have culture.
America has Hollywood and whites dominate Hollywood. I just watched the Assassination of Jesse James with friends of mine from Germany and Australia. For starters they knew nothing about Jesse James. Name me one white American who doesn't know who Jesse James was? Since the film didn't have subtitles I had to spend a lot of time translating the "white american dialect" stuff like "I gotta use the privy something terrible" and "they gonna shoot themselves female"
Culture is what? Food, Art, Architecture, Music, Literature, Language, Festivals, Religion, Traditions?
Star Bucks, Burgers, hot apple cider, Edward Hopper, The Vietnam Memorial, cape style houses, McMansions, MIT's campus, anti-folk, country, Mark Twain, Edward Abbey, Shel Silverstein, wtf?/lol, political correctness, The Annual Missouri Testicle Festival, Rodeos, State Fairs, Mormonism, Santa Claus and Rudolf, boy scouts.
I'm not saying all that stuff is "white American culture" exclusive, but if we were to make an American ethnicity venn diagram, I'm pretty sure all of those would overlap with the "white people" circle.
Not to mention white American sub-cultures like say, the queer community. How many black people were in MILK? I heard tell that Castro Street wasn't (isn't?) all that welcoming to blacks. Which makes it pretty white. How can someone argue that something that is labeled as a sub-culture, has no culture?
People who think they have no culture need to spend a little time abroad. It's hard to know if something is unique to you until you live somewhere it doesn't exist.
I agree. Many Americans tend to think of the United States as the center of the universe, and I certainly feel this has everything to do with the fact that many of its citizens feel they have no culture.
This has much to do with the media and Hollywood... all you have to do is look to mainstream movies. One example would be the fact that aliens ALWAYS land in America.
If Americans would open their eyes to the rest of the world, they'd realize their specific culture is, in fact, very unique.
"This has much to do with the media and Hollywood... all you have to do is look to mainstream movies. One example would be the fact that aliens ALWAYS land in America."
To be fair, iirc everyone's entertainment does that (think of all the anime, manga, or giant monster movies where everything significant happens in Japan. Same idea.).
Don't forget Jazz - so very American, and Zydeco, Bluegrass and so many other regional styles.
Most white kids plopped down in the midst of any other country would quickly recognize that they have a culture as Americans. But in this country, our regional cultures are more important than our ethnic ones. Another commenter pointed this out quite well.
I never felt like race was the only thing that defines one's culture. I'm a white Southerner, and I guarantee that I have more in common with a black person who was also raised here than I do with another white person from, say, Southern California. (Unless they eat chicken and dumplings in LA and I've just never heard about it...)
I think it also has to do with the way that "culture" is fetishized in our...um...culture. It's something that you have to go somewhere to "experience," something foreign. Aside from the fairly neutral (though true) idea that the dominant culture is the norm and therefore less (or un) noticeable, I think the way we talk about culture and race contributes to and enforces the feeling of cultural bankruptcy. If a nonwhite person, and especially a foreign person, does something that a white American doesn't understand, it's "cultural." Technically a fine use of the term, but it becomes set against the norm. So there's what we do, and there's "cultural."
There's a similar ideological problem with terms like "people of color." Not that we should stop using the term or that I have ideas for a better one, but it sets up a kind of exclusivity that I think can contribute to white people feeling at the same time bereft of culture and aloof from (and therefore justified in ignoring) the experiences of people of color.
Not to mention the fact that many parts of modern American culture - fast food, television, heavy metal, Elvis - are often derided as "low" and therefore not worth discussing as culture.
Can those in search of their white cultural identity go read "Stuff White People Like?" There's a book now too, and it's great.
I think this post is in there somewhere, actually.
You don't see it as "culture" because nobody put it in a tiny little box with the word "white" scrawled on top and handed it to you.
On the same tip, be wary of anyone who talks about "black culture" (or "Latino" or "Asian" culture) as a singular noun. If you really think there's one, you need an intervention.
It's common for people to ask "What are you?" and expect an answer like Black, Italian, Chinese, etc. I tell people I'm American, but it usually gets some weird reactions. My family has been here many generations, so it's ridiculous to say I have a connection any European culture. I wouldn't say I'm bereft of culture as a white person, but I don't think I experiance it in the same way as someone who self identifies as being part of specific ethnic group.
This is silly. Of course white people have a culture as much as any other group of people. What's the difference? It's the default, it's the norm. White privilege means you never have to defend it or define it against anything else.
The idea that "white people" have a culture is as completely absurd as the notion "black people" have a culture.
It's the racism which is still not recognised as such though.
Both have a culture. Black culture is more specific and definable than white culture because being black is also an ethnicity in America.
Let me give an example: Jeremiah Wright's church on the south side of Chicago was criticized (by some knucklehead wingnuts once they knew it existed) because they have a mission statement that mentions serving the black community, black work ethic etc. Critics claimed this was racism.
Blacks have a community and shared experience in Chicago that means having a church serve that community is not exclusive or hateful to non-black races, they're just trying to help this group. It's not the equivalent of having a church "serving the white community" so much as it is equal to a church that serves "the greek community" or something like that. There is in fact a Polish Roman Catholic Union on the north side of Chicago to serve that ethnic community.
If you have a church that has its mission to serve "the white community" it's almost certainly going to be a racist group that's more interested in hating and excluding others (in fact that kind of thing does exist - Aryan Nation and such hate groups that identify religiously). This is not to say that white people don't have a culture, but their culture is diluted and diverse enough on it's own that efforts to protect or aid the "white community" are usually more about hate and exclusion of others.
OK, yeah, but "black culture on the south side of Chicago" is not the same as "black culture in Oakland, CA." Black people from both cities are going to find a lot of cultural overlap, sure, but so will white people from Berkeley and Topeka. Only the white folks aren't going to see the fact that they both wear flip-flops and listen to the Postal Service as "culture."
I feel like the main impetus behind this notion is hiding in the commentary here about how American middle class white people are largely descended from various European backgrounds, and the way that we use the term "culture" in typical American discourse.
There's obviously an American culture, but we also use culture in different way, which is tracking the cultural history of one's "people".
Italians have an Italian culture. Germans have a German culture, Africans have an African culture. Chinese have a Chinese culture. But if I'm 20% Dane and 20% German-Jew and 15% German-Other and 15% English and 10% Scottish and who knows what else, it's easy to feel like I don't really associate with any particular cultural background. Sure, I am American, and I have my American culture, but I don't feel like there is anything particular in my "blood" the way some pure-bread ethnic people seem to. I think that's what the author is getting at, and why some typical "I'm just white" kids would just say they don't have a culture. They don't mean that they are removed from any present culture, but that they don't have any historical culture with which they identify. Some people can begin a sentence with the phrase "my people" and have it mean something, but that doesn't really work for the "I'm just white" crowd.
"They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don't have a culture that's cool or oppositional."
Well, what do you expect when you take an upper middle class white kid and put them in college where there are Gay Studies, Women Studies, Jewish Studies, African American studies etc. which fights the "good cause" and ends up being "cool" and "oppositional"---at least in the college setting.
Honestly, this prof should recommend them to do Study Abroad cuz that's the only way they're gonna learn, but then again, this isn't about American Culture vs. Another Country's Culture, this is about diverse cultures within the broader American culture.
At any rate, when did defining culture become "cool" and "oppositional"?
It sounds like we all should start talking about the similarities between the various American cultures.