Right? We’re trying to determine what we mean when we talk about “white culture”…
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Well, look, you just can’t expect the 4 or 5 actual black members of blacks for trump to be everywhere at once, can you? /s
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Ah yes, another postmodern-era iteration of white culture’s longstanding affection for blackface minstrelsy.
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Wait, I think I have it figured out. It doesn’t mean black people for Trump, it’s people named Black who are for Trump.
(/s, obviously).
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Or that having an opinion that is both obvious and correct in one area does not automatically make one a “man of integrity.” As most of the remainder of his life choices demonstrated.
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If the Point is that white people, when they arm themselves and rise up against an oppressor they will get support from some other white people, whereas if a POC rises up against an oppressor they will only receive condemnation from all white people.
– Then there are better ways of making that point. But then I might have missed the point.
It seems that the discussion has veered off to what is meant by “US white culture”, which misses the point of “white culture”.
The point here is to interrogate the ideology of white culture, why it exists, and what power it has in our society - and yes, most of us are Americans, or North Americans, so that’s going to shape our discussion. We’re aware that there are times when people who are now understood as white rebelled and were (at the time) brutally put down or came in for criticism from elites. That’s not the POINT of this thread, however. The POINT of this thread is to point out how the ideology that creates the category of white and what that means both today and with regards to how this shapes our understanding of history. However Henry and the various uprisings in the 19th century were greeted by the elites at the time, they are understood much differently now, in a much more positive light, and at least some of that is due to an understanding of a united sense of whiteness.
TLDR, we are trying to understand whiteness as an ideology, and reading a white identity back into history where it might not have existed or been understood in the same way is not useful for understanding that. [ETA] Now a discussion of how Patrick Henry was at one time viewed in a very different way than he is today, that would be a useful discussion, I’d argue, on understanding whiteness and how that’s constructed over time, and what they does to our collective understanding of history.
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There are many more recent examples – Basque separatism, Northern Ireland republicanism or unionism for examples. I referenced the 18th (eta and 19th) century because that was contemporary to the quotation.
But again, those sorts of historical divisions are not the POINT of this thread. Rather, the POINT of this thread is to understand how all people in Europe and people in the Americas who come from European ancestors came to be understood as white. As @anon50609448 noted at the start of this thread, there is a concept of white that does exist and that we should be trying to understand, in part because the only people who DO are white supremacists (and much of their claims are based on bullshit). We’re trying to figure out how that actually works and the power it has.
Um… no. James Baldwin lived and died in the 20th century…
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Precisely, a global concept of white.
As you well know I was referring to the origins of the quotation.
That exists and was activley promoted by whites in settler colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries:
They understood themselves as having a shared heritage, based on the color of their skin rather than historical reality. That is precisely what we’re attempting to better understand.
Baldwin said it in the 20th century, even though he was referring to the founding fathers in part of the 20th. It’s still of 20th century origins, and he’s using Henry to illustrate how whites in the 20th century react to black activists employing the exact same language as the founding fathers - with fear and contempt.
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Does my interpretation not fit? How, why?
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I started this thread to help myself (and anyone else who was interested in coming along) learn about what white culture is because:
- Somehow I managed to grow up within it and become a product of it without knowing what it is; and
- I see distress in my own children that is similar to distress in myself and my siblings and I think that distress has it’s roots in the culture I live in - I can’t be a good parent without figuring understanding what I’m teaching my kids.
Obviously the Baldwin quotation or any other part of this thread might not be useful to you or to any other particular person, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to me or others. Because the usefulness of anything shared here will depend on the individual, I don’t think conversations about whether or not something is useful are themselves useful.
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So thousands of “gun rights activists” are converging in Richmond, Virginia today to celebrate their first and second amendment rights. On MLK day, a peaceful man gunned down at the height of his influence. A black man. And they chose Richmond, the former capital of the confederacy. A place well known as a longstanding host city for the KKK. Hrm, how much more naked racism are we going to stand for? Half of this country is drunk on impunity. We are better than this.
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I think one thing, or maybe characteristic, established here is that what “white culture” is depends on context.
The protestors you describe might be said to be participants in a white subculture. It exists within a broader white culture that has as a characteristic a tendency to overlook extreme, overt white supremacists, handwaving away concern about them because they’re “just a few people, who never get up to all that much trouble, and anyway, surely the FBI or whatever are keeping an eye on them.”
Such blithe white disregard goes hand in hand with not caring all that much about injury, suffering and even murder when it happens to people who aren’t white, let alone trying to do anything about it.
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