[Replying to a post from the thread about cops here because we aren’t talking about cops anymore but somehow the reply thing didn’t work]
Warning: This gets really personal and “about me” but since I’m white, white culture is about me and I am about white culture
The thing I’ve been thinking about a lot more is how we white people live out that idea in everyday life and in interactions with one another. Today’s white people are fine at seeing how a king asserts dominance over their subjects, but I’m thinking more about how my relationships exist in terms of obedience (to superiors), dominance (of inferiors) and benign indifference (of equals). And how white individualism is a form of imperialism, not of liberty (which isn’t a new idea or anything, obviously American-flavoured libertarianism is actually authoritarianism).
But I guess the main thing is thinking about how it affects my relationships with my own family, and what I can do about that. I feel like I see a malaise where white people basically withdraw from being human. I’ve seen it explicitly in myself where I dissociate and feel inhuman. Somehow my model of being a human is to express dominance over others, so my reaction (and the reaction of more than one person I’m close to) was to withdraw from the idea of being a person. Someone similar to me looked into whether they were able to renounce citizenship and just bow out of society (not to become a sovereign citizen or something, just basically to accept their place as a subject of forces beyond their control).
And then on the other side of the coin (and I do feel like I’m the other side of this coin) you have mass shooters - white people who again see that being human is expressing dominance and throw themselves into a final act of vengeance against people that didn’t allow them to be human. Murder-suicide (and I think most mass shootings are suicidal) is an ultimate act of dominance with no take-backs.
I was looking for a link in the White Culture thread, but I guess it was in another thread (maybe the one that spawned the White Culture thread) of a book written about white people and how whiteness is a bit like a mental illness. And the example/excerpt was about how white people are trained to think of their empathy for non-white people as wrong. Someone then linked to a related tweet about a person thinking back to a memory of their parents laughing at a black man on a motorcycle because it seemed out of place. And that reminds me of something Desmond Tutu said about how it was that white people in South Africa could be taught to love black people: that white children in South Africa were raised by black nannies, and that they loved a black person long before they were taught to hate black people; so the love was there already (Tutu is a hell of an optimist - I don’t mean that in a bad way).
I think understanding of white culture comes mostly from non-white people. I mean my understanding of white culture certainly comes from non-white comedians (and to a lesser extent scholars). My whiteness is very tempted to generalize that by saying that dominant cultures don’t see themselves clearly because of fish-in-water-ness, but I think it’s just as likely that white culture is especially non-self-critical.
But because of that I think a lot of understanding of whiteness is about how white people treat non-white people and the thing I find it hardest to understand is how white people treat one another. In some earlier generation I think the white domination of non-white people came from a place of camaraderie among white people - white people labelled whiteness as a virtue and saw themselves as having more in common with other white people than with non-white people. But under neo-liberalism and colour-blind racism there’s a need to have a “rational” explaination white dominance that never mentions being white. So those of us raised in the 80s were taught (sometimes even explicitly) that everything was down to dominance as the only acceptable form of human relationship.
And so I feel like we aren’t just denying our empathy towards black people or Indigenous people, we are denying our empathy towards other white people. We built a white culture on the white idea that we act only from self-interest (the disciples of Adam Smith who call themselves “economists” are a pretty white group), that even our love of one another is just a self-serving reward-seeking mechanism.
I think of Russell Brand’s “eulogy” for Margaret Thatcher:
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that “there is no such thing as society”, that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness.
…
I’d unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher’s acolytes and fellow “Munsters evacuee”, said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: “We didn’t just break the strike, we broke the spell.” The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.
I just sat down the other day and said to my 8-year-old who was having what I guess I’d describe as an angry panic attack that I think she feels alone, that I think that because I feel alone, and that no one has ever been able to convince me that I’m not alone. But that I don’t want her to feel alone, and I want her to know that I am going through life with her. I know that I hit the nail on the head because I can see her body relax, like someone finally understands. I think she’s been grappling with this her whole life, even when she was very little. I don’t believe I’ve passed on feeling-alone genes (though I may have passed on noticing-shit genes).
I feel like white Gen X’s famous indifference and irony is the result of having been sacrificed by our parents. Figuratively, of course, but looking at the inability of white people to understand suicide and homicide among our children, also sometimes literally (every human can be sad or outraged by something like a mass shooting, it seems incredibly white to be bewildered by mass shooting carried out by people who spent the last six months posting photos of themselves with rifles in front of nazi flags online). We were sacrificed to maintain white dominance.
So my interest in white culture has become very keen because I want to stop it. I feel like I’m trying to break a cycle of abuse. But the part of me that is supposed to feel connected - to people, to traditions, to anything - just isn’t there; and I feel like that’s the whitest thing about me.
ETA: I was just looking over this thread and noticed this post isn’t actually marked as a reply so the “that idea” in my first sentence is without a reference. It was in reply to this post and “that idea” is the idea that whiteness is deeply entangled with imperialism.
