Maybe MLK was right when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
I often have trouble believing that. I agree with many others that racism/white supremacy is a changing same – instead of decreasing, it just takes on new forms.
Still, many freedoms and opportunities ARE available now for people of color (and women, and LGBTQ+ people, and so on) that didn’t used to be. So maybe MLK was right.
How do we bend that arc towards justice, as I guess you’re basically asking? Phew, big question. Keep pushing for the rights of others, as many of us have been, I’d say. And let’s fight in the class struggle too. As I said or implied in the answer above, racism is, ultimately, a tool. White guys in general have long been blind (blinded, that is) to how the solidarity they should feel with others has been torn apart by elites, encouraging them to feel a false sense of solidarity in vertical terms, rather than a true one in horizontal terms.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the point at the very beginning that white people only think they (we) are white and that it’s relatively recent. Not so very long ago, people now deemed simply white would have regarded themselves as specifically French or English or Portuguese or some variety of Italian and several of those groups were definitely seen as Not Good. And it seems like a lot of those white supremacists are of groups that at one time would not have been seen as part of the “ruling class” (scare quotes because I kind of can’t stand to type it otherwise), so they have a vested interest in glomming onto cultural bits that have worked.
As a point of order, are we specifically talking about American white culture here? Or North American? Because European Union notwithstanding, I don’t think you could convincingly argue that a non-Anglo “white culture” actually exists.
It seems to me (and I’m no sociologist, so all my data are personal observation or anecdote) that American white culture is a least-common denominator portrayal in visual entertainment. After all, cultural reference points that are too specific won’t draw in a wide enough audience. Which is why many individuals feel they aren’t really aligned with it (Because, look! I have these differences!) even while they can identify and be identified with significant portions of it. So again, claiming to be a Champion of White Culture is the rattle on the end of a white supremacist—not because it’s a sensible claim but because they want what they think it confers.
[Considered a digression here about actual mayonnaise vs. the unappetizing goo on many an American sandwich, but came to my senses.]
I am wary of cultural competency training. It has some benefits, but I think there is a real danger of stereotyping. And of overconfidence. Hey, I am competent in your culture!
I think it does exist, albeit differently in different places. One constant in places where racial whiteness has been emphasized is an ingrained sense of superiority to racial and/or ethnic others. Another is forms of obsession with cleanliness (literal and figurative). Another is failing to realize and ponder to any significant degree what Coates (and James Baldwin) point out, that white people only think they “are white.”
I guess one challenge whether those are examples of “culture,” but they fit my working definition.
Nicely stated! But just as a point of order, to say that there is such a thing as white culture is not necessarily to say what white supremacists like to say.
As long as its just white people wringing our hands in self-doubt, policing our own thoughts and trying oh-so-hard to get (and stay) “woke”…
…then the constructs of race are in no danger of breaking down. The institutions that use race in their social engineering remain unchallanged, and the people living at the expense of everyone below them, have nothing to fear.
As someone who sunburns easily, I get called “white” a lot. And I try not to get too upset by it, there are a lot of other people who routinely get called much worse. But I don’t have to feed that.
About the only thing I feel safe in saying, regardless of the skin color of anyone listening, is that society has got to stop punishing poor people for the crime of being poor. As long as poverty is a crime, racism is going to be the prevailing social force that points the cops at its victims.
Being rich may not automatically make you a criminal. But it certainly makes you a suspect.
Yes! All of them! But I honestly found them rather sweeping and potentially vague. Thus, asking for specifics.
And I would answer that then by definition those are not a single culture.
Or maybe we’re not using the term “culture” in the same way. My understanding is the shared customs, arts, and habits of a group. You keep listing attitudes towards other groups, which is certainly a part of a culture, but not the whole of it.
OK, can you share your working definition, please? You gave specific examples of heavy metal and pepperless stir-fry but there didn’t seem to be a statement of what constitutes “culture.” I think I assumed the same boring dictionary definition I’m going by, but yours may have ramifications I’m not cluing in on.
I got to hear the social psychologist Claude Steele speak on “stereotype threat,” which is how we react when we think we’re in danger of confirming a negative stereotype. It was funny and fascinating, but what I remember best was at the end when someone asked, “So how do we get rid of stereotypes?” And he said, “Well, unfortunately, you don’t. They’re baked into being a social species.” We’re born classifiers and quickly learn what categories are important where we’ve landed and what our caregivers think of them. However, we can choose what our reactions will be to those learned classifications. It’s kind of a mix, but I’ll take it as an up-note.
Racism isn’t held up by too many white people being made slightly uncomfortable by being called “white”.
It’s held up by a majority of white people letting thousands of decisions be influenced by culturally learned prejudice and fears of upsetting other white people or fears of risking being demoted in social rank by speaking up for non-white people.
I’m fine with defining culture here as “a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices.” Given how the fiction that is race forms and takes on salience, everything I wrote fits as manifestations of “white culture.” And I don’t think that requires limiting the examples to some specific location or group of people. They’re true, with variation, across places where racial whiteness has been emphasized.
I agree. But I don’t know what that has to do with white culture. I’m not saying that people steeped in white culture can’t rise above its inculcated blinders and impositions.
The only thing that make me think I am white is can blind you by taking my shirt off on a sunny day.
Seriously though I am never sure what ‘white’ culture is other than maybe 50’s tv surburbia which is like eww no cause that is a grown in a petri dish of toxic propaganda and lies culture.
Don’t @ me that you’re atheist (not directly aimed at Tobin) Look around you. Look at the two biggest holiday seasons of the year. They are quite literally holy day seasons. Holy days for a very specific religion. I don’t care if you’re not going to church, if for you it’s all about Santa and Reindeer and plum pudding: our entire calendar is Christian.
Christmas and Easter are international holidays, not region specific. Outside of places like New York, do workplaces and school schedules recognize any of the major Jewish holidays that don’t coincide with major Christian ones? Do they offer time off for Diwali? The Gregorian calendar is the world standard.
And so much more pervasively than we think. Even so many “standards” that exist are because white-dominated¹ countries and orgs set that as the standard.
¹As in more embedded into the power structures of said country or organisation, not as a measure of population.
The question is: Why are groups?
If a group of people is discriminated, disenfranchised in such a way that these people are basically segregated either through social or economic pressures into a localized geographical location, then buddy, you have yourself a group. A group to which many people would rather not belong.
If these people use their collective power as a bargaining tool to improve their situation, that is because they have no power individually. This group needs to be addressed as a collective, but I’ll get to that.
If you engage with people as part of a group, then you better be willing to engage with the divide itself and that can only be done in good faith, walking in blindly into this sort of conversation is at best, insensitive. The paradox is that acting as if there is no divide means that you are ignoring the problem hoping it goes away, engaging with individuals purely as members of a group ignores that the person has been othered by virtue of being grouped.
Anybody who claims that people who take pride in their group are the ones doing the dividing ignore that the group came before the pride.
I don’t agree with this, though I do understand the sentiment.
As @anon29537550 put it.
White culture gets discussed ALL THE TIME, white supremacists just have a very narrow agenda which can be summed up all too easily (It being so stupidly simplistic) but it is actually born of the same ennui that leads white men who recognize the systemic racism inherent in their society to feel disconnected from being able to do anything about it.
Now this is interesting. I am very openly Mexican (Disclaimer, I am pretty pale, more than one well meaning American has told me that I could pass for American. As a complement!) so when you say that metal and indie are white music, that’s not a perspective I share. The indie aesthetic is very much alive and well all around the world and so is metal, it may be true that you only listen to metal bands whose members read white but I’m sure a lot of Scandinavian bands would describe themselves as just that before they would label themselves white. In a sense, calling it white music just because white people make the most money can feed into systemic issues and in fact defines them.
I’m all aboard with all of your comment but the end. I’m not sure about metal musicians and their audiences, but doesn’t percentage matter here? If like, 97% are white? What about "country music? Isn’t that a “white music” in that sense?
Yeah. I didn’t wanna go into that, Hank Williams learnin the best things he knew on the porch of a black neighbor, etc. But I agree, it does need mentioning.
