What does this mean in this context please?
Don’t think that you live in a white supremacist culture, especially in the Americas? Look around. Look at your government, from the low rungs all the way up to the top.
Are you using a European-derived form of government such as a republic or parliament? Congratulations, you’ve got white supremacy baked in. Is that government populated mostly or in large part by descendants of European colonists? Congratulations! You have white culture! What’s the most commonly practiced religion? Is it a form of Christianity? White Culture, Baby. Are the most common or official language(s) from Europe? Take a wild guess what that means.
Unless the Natives/First Nations/Aboriginal People are running your country under a governing system they traditionally used and you have assimilated into their language and religious practices… it’s pretty much a guarantee you are living in some flavour of white supremacist system. And nobody here is saying that you have to give all that up, just that you recognize how it works to privilege the culture of whiteness and suppress others. Listen to those voices and work for ways to suppress them less.
If you don’t want to do that, then admit that you are happy and comfortable living in a white supremacist culture. It doesn’t mean that you are a flag-carrying, torch-waving Nazi. It just means you’re okay with being indifferent to people less privileged than you, because you would rather not have to be uncomfortable, thinking about these things.
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As a foreign observer, it seems to me like “White culture” is defined by not being not-White; it exists only in opposition. This is different from, say, Texan or Californian culture, or Italian-American or Jewish American culture, which are defined by what they are, not what they aren’t – positive cultures, instead of the angry negation of White culture.
Plausible deniability, basically.
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2 posts were split to a new topic: ELI5: What was the history of North American genocide again?
All very true. In whatever sense the term “white culture” is being used, whether by the alt-right as something to be defended or as another way of describing and critiquing institutional and societal defaults that allow certain people to play on Scalzi’s “easy mode” by accident of birth, the racism underlying it is evident to those who make a good-faith effort to discuss it.
In addition to the other examples you provided, I’d also note that white supremacy has found a complement and has become intimately entwined in Libertarian/AynCap political-economic philosophy, and vice-versa. If one’s economic and/or societal philosophy posits that certain individuals by circumstances of nature or of specific nurture have more value than others, it’s not a huge leap for one to move to the idea that people with certain skin colours have more value than others.
This is one of the reasons we see such an affinity for “free”-market fundamentalism amongst the assorted racists, anti-Semites, misogynists, TERFs, and neo-feudalists who populate the alt-right, and why it’s no surprise that white supremacists are regularly discovered in mainstream conservative political parties pushing Reaganism and Thatcherism in North America and Europe.
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I don’t really believe that and that’s why I wanted to start this thread. I realize that what I’m grasping at might really be some kind of British-descended culture that shows itself in English speaking nations. But something this discussion has solidified for me is that I think that not being not-white is usually as far as a white person will go in thinking about whiteness because part of our shared culture is not examining our shared culture.
I think as a white person I’m afraid to identify myself as white because I know that’s the domain of the white supremacists. I’m afraid to think of something as white culture because, as @gracchus said, the only people interested in “preserving” white culture are evil people.
But I think there is something that is really there. There is a shared set of values that is sitting unseen beneath the surface of my Southern Ontario culture, and I see it reflected back at me in politics in the US and from the UK and in games and movies. I see it in other parts of my country.
White people often try to characterize it as this inevitable outcome of being the predominant culture. Like Chinese people living in China must be just as ignorant of Chinese culture as I am of Canadian culture. But I’m not sure that’s true. I feel like it’s something we might be telling ourselves because we don’t want to admit that we have a special ignorance, and that that ignorance serves itself.
If there’s one value I’m fairly sure I’ve settled on as a part of white culture, it’s individualism. But we don’t think of ourselves as individualists. We don’t tell ourselves that individualism is a good value because we learned it from our parents and they learned it from their parents and that’s how we built the world we live in. We tell ourselves that individualism arises naturally out of an objective look at the universe.
I think ironically at the same time we’re committed to the idea of a perspective-free view of the universe. The idea is that science and logic (or things that exist in opposition to them) provide us with knowledge of what is really real in a way that transcends people.
And together I feel like it adds up to solipsism. We were raised to think that we were alone on our journey through life and that what is our is what we take.
I appreciate that perspective. I’m definitely grasping at a thing here, and it felt like what I was grasping at was what had been silently handed to me as truth by my culture. What is “my culture”? It’s just the predominant culture of Southern Ontario, and the one thing that seems to link that is whiteness.
I see non-white comedians makes jokes about white people and it feels like they hit bull-eyes every time, so it feels like it is at least as widespread as north america and seems to penetrate in the UK and Australia too. There is something that connects us.
Now maybe I shouldn’t be calling this “white” culture. Maybe it’s post-enlightenment Christian culture. Maybe it’s colonial English culture. Maybe it’s neo-liberal culture.
But to your concern that the point of this discussion is to group people together by skin colour, that is not the point. I started this topic in the hopes of learning something that was eluding me. For me the outcome of this topic has been to find better ways to relate to my children, and I think that’s really worked. If the discussion is too specific to an American or a Canadian experience to be of my use to you where you live then I guess it’s just not for you.
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I will not pretend to tell you how to relate to your children but I can share how I recently
explained racism to my 8yo after they mentioned hearing the word (her class could not be more multicultural if Titania Mcgrath was in charge of enrollment). The conversation was quite long and involved a few pencil drawings but the basic crux was. “people are individuals and should be treated based on how they behave and how they treat you. Taking anything else into consideration like race, gender, skin color, money, is not only wrong but is more likely than not to give you an outcome based on bad assumptions as not.” This is not intended as a solution to “whiteness” but it is what I belive was the best approach for my kid.
When I talk about finding better ways to interact with my kids, I’m talking about something that might seem quite peripheral to the subject. I didn’t make this thread to figure out how to deal better with racism. Anti-racism’s got it’s own tactics. What I want to know is what values I’m handing down without knowing I’m handing them down because I’ve never examined them. What have I had passed to me, embedded in this culture (that I called white culture, but like I said if someone else told me, “no, that’s just british colonial culture” I wouldn’t jump up to contradict them) that I am going to pass on unthinkingly.
I know this is going to sound a little far afield, but basically I was singing Leonard Cohen’s “The sisters of mercy” as a lullaby (comments on the appropriateness of that I’ll save for another time). I know the lyrics in that I can sing them, but I didn’t really think them through ahead of time. And Cohen wrote:
You who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul
And I was struck by the poverty of soul (I’m not going to dwell on this term excessively, it can be a metaphor if it needs to be) that exists in my culture. The thought of one another as things, as disposable, as useful-if-they-are-useful. And that makes me think of Smog’s “The be of use” which is a song about fantasizing about being as useful as a corkscrew - a song that deeply affected the Gen X white men I listened to it with.
I think that the imperialist solipsism that has been handed to me invisibly and unthinkingly by my parents exists to a significant degree as an element of a racist worldview and power structure. But I also think it is a thing unto itself. It exists in my culture, it’s poisoned my siblings and it’s poisoning my children.
So when I talk about this thread helping me interact with my children, I’m not talking about talking to them about racism. I mean that one night when my daughter was extremely sad and angry and couldn’t calm down I told them that I think sometimes they feel alone and feel that they will always been alone. And I think they feel that was because I feel that way. And I want them to know that I am going through this life with them and I don’t want them to have to feel alone. And that was exactly what I needed to say.
That’s how this thread helped me. So I have no idea if it is living up to it’s potential for others, of if there is anything useful here for you. But I’m very grateful to people who did want to share because I think it’s helped me and by helping me it’s helped my family.
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People keep talking about how if we act like race doesn’t exist, it’ll somehow solve racism, because it’s “just a social construct it isn’t real”. Unfortunately, that leads into the kind of thinking that an ideal, non-racist world is one where we’re all treated the same. Equally. The problem is that if you ask white people what it would look like, it looks an awful lot like what we have now, just for everybody. The same kind of cultural assimilation we’re supposedly trying to undo. As long as we treat ourselves as some sort of default normal, we run the risk of doing just that.
As I said above, white supremacy is more than just NeoNazis and the alt-right. It’s the idea that people should become like us, follow rules and norms that we have identified as ideal, or part of a well-run society, while ignoring the voices of cultures we see as other.
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I posted this in another thread, but thought I’d post it here, considering the history of Oregon as an incredibly white state that was founded on racial exclusion, it most certainly informs politics there today:
The more obvious outposts of white supremacy are easy to dismiss for many as outliers:
But white power groups have been remarkable successful at colonizing the right wing in rural places like Oregon and Idaho. They do this by leaning into “common sense” notions of race, at first at a very dog whistle level, but with increasing understanding of what they actual mean. The language of culture has come to replace more eugenicist language that have been more openly coded as racist by the larger public. So people can say things about “preserving our culture” and not sound like a new recruit for the hammerskins. And the militias that have spreads of land in these rural places position themselves as “patriots” seeking to “make American Great again” in the form of re-imposing “white” cultural norms (ie Western civilization, etc) and maintaining white control, but they speak in a way to appeal to at least some members of the GOP. They push people who become attracted to their movements (like they think they have a few “good ideas” and are talking some “common sense”) to run for office and push for agendas that are friendly to their goals. The reason why people who might not consider themselves to be racists (like the KKK or whatever) feel an affinity for these groups rests in how these groups employ particular kinds of language that avoids open racism, but appeals to particular, deeply held beliefs rooted in some of the notions that @MalevolentPixy is discussing above, that “white” culture is seen as inherently superior and desirable to assimilate to.
The colonization of the GOP by the far right, including white power-aligned groups has led to this sort of hostility when democrats are in power, because they’ve fed into the notion that a more progressive agenda that includes a social justice platform and greater inclusion is a direct attack on them and “their way of life.”
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And the thing is, even rural Oregon is pretty diverse. There are few African Americans, but it’s a melting pot of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and other ethnic groups. The folks who support that stupid “Greater Idaho” boondoggle or the older “State of Jefferson” nonsense don’t factor in the diversity of the area they want to control or the effects on the people within that geography.
The last thing I would do is trust such a state to treat minorities fairly, even in proportion to the population. How do I know? Because shitheads like Matt Shea are their chosen leaders.
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Yeah … the people of eastern Washington want their own state until the new western Washington state slows down the interstate agricultural trucks for border inspection and fees fees fees.
And I’m sure that the ports in Seattle and Tacoma could figure out how to make money on out of state agriculture, too.
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there’s definitely a white culture, i’m indulging in it by listening to podcasts and eating ramen that i paid a whole dollar for not because im poor but because im lazy.
actually now probably gonna listen to that deftones album with the japanese name because i’m the cool japanese nerd. yeah, i totally saw the catbus movie. and watched akira and the animatrix. my favorite animé though, remains king of the hill 
also i am catching up on curb tonight
and the criticism that white people eat too many things is just fucking great. “you accept all kinds of stupid shit in your mouths. fucking escargos and who drinks grass?!”
some folks one insisted we order escargot because “IT’S PARIS” after a long walking tour. i was having enough fun with the folks i met to not push back.] there is definitely a white culture, and i like when comedy isn’t afraid to lampoon it.
In Texas of all places! The howls of outrage are audible from here…
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