Do you get annoyed when you hear it pronounced with an initial h?
[quote=“Wanderfound, post:832, topic:156579”]
“There is no common cultural bond linking white people apart from collaboration in the subjugation of non-white people“
If this is true, why does this topic exist?
This thread is, it seems to me, a recognition of white people collaborating in subjugation. It’s making explicit what is tacit, not said, perceived as a background, a default.
Recognising white culture, while it will never suffice, is imperative.
11 Likes
Totally, and thanks for reviving the older post. I agree, I guess the part I’m trying to noodle through is the venue for the white dudes who are trying to work through all these things.
To be clear: I do not equate their discomfort or loneliness AT ALL with experiences of marginalized people.
I really appreciate bbs as a place to think about stuff like this, and learn from smarter folks.
The more I think about it, I think I’d recommend to an “awakening” white dude to spend more time and energy listening before they worry about where and how to talk about their experiences. But I’m still interested if anyone has seen some other positive approach.
“Every man is an island in a common sea,” after all.
ETA: and ps, I had the exact same conversation with my mom about “children’s day.”
5 Likes
As a cis, het, anglo-saxon male I’ve found that discussions on racial justice led by people of color are quite open to listening to white guys working through their own relationship with race. The issues most often come in when its a white guy who isn’t listening (and because he isn’t hearing what is being said is also oblivious that he isn’t listening) tries to insist that every one else come to his perspective. If it is coming from an honest place of trying to improve society, it isn’t interupting or derailing another conversation, and you recognize that change requires changing ones own behavior, then I’d say the space your looking for is just about any public discussion on the racial justice.
In fact, despite how often white males don’t listen to anyone else I’m consistently amazed at how willing to listen to white males women and POC are
7 Likes
True that!
The time I’m referencing when this got brought up in college, I had the impression that the white males were more wanting a place to be able to, to put it ungenerously, whine about their lived experience. But trying to think about it more compassionately, I recognize we all need to find ways to process and work through our shit.
On a slight side tangent, I remember several years ago when I was first consciously trying to educate myself about race and privilege (I’m a white cis female) being initially confused by the notion that “it’s not our job to educate you.” I understand it better now, but at the time I thought, it’s in our best interest to try to educate the white male who legitimately wants to know better. I don’t mean it’s our job to justify our very real lived experiences, but just that my own male partner was truly shocked when I started sharing with him the basic experiences pretty much every female has to bear. The groping, the being masturbated at, the subtler criticisms…seeing his shock that all this was happening all the time to the female version of his white cis self definitely broadened my perception of all the crap that Black, LGBTQ and other marginalized members of our human family endure. I mean to say seeing his shock increased my awareness of all the stuff that I had been somewhat blind to or less viscerally aware of. I’m probably not stating it very well, but I ended up thinking it is my job, or at least it tends to have positive results, to try to help those willing to learn, learn.
I don’t mean it’s anyone else’s job.
Putting these thoughts into words is very nerve-wracking.
4 Likes
To explore the cultural bond built around subjugating and othering people who aren’t “white”.
Right?
6 Likes
And to try to help us white folk see what every PoC knows deep in their bones and lives every day. It’s way too easy to not see the culture when you are the culture.
9 Likes
White Christian speaking to white Christians. And, yes, that is the voice of Bob the Tomato, you have to get past that.
This is the kind of conversations that need to take place in white America. I have to think he caught a lot of flack for not toeing the conservative evangelical trumpian line
10 Likes
There is…alot going on there
12 Likes
This is from our local paper this morning, about 3 guys from the Bronx who came up to Maine (at least 93% White state) to rip off some Home Depot Stores. See if there’s anything off about the descriptions:
Pleading guilty Wednesday were: Jeremy Pinales-Diaz, 23, who spoke through a Spanish interpreter; Gilbert Reyes, 22; and Mickey Augusto Mejia-Rosario, 24, who moved from Dominican Republic to the United States when he was 12 years old.
5 Likes
That’s a funny looking mannequin. Kind of wax museum looking.
7 Likes
The wax museum of hate…
8 Likes
Another academic pretending to be a woman of color…
But only on twitter this time at least… /s
13 Likes
Double-whammy, white & male.
ETA: Oh, and a Craig.
6 Likes
WTF?
14 Likes
Oh hell no!
There is nothing wrong with talking about the culture of European(*) people and of course it exists. Only white supremacist would call it white culture, but we are talking about the same thing.
The problem is that with European centrism in almost any study of art, music, dance, history, philosophy…anything, European culture becomes some kind of the “background” culture that is everywhere while other cultures become “exotic” or “Ethnic” (Both words to be used with care) and therefor interesting.
It is not that “white culture” does not exist but many can’t see it because it is what you see everywhere. That also means that any white person that wants to make some original art has to try something else because the classic European stuff has been done to death and everybody already has seen and heard it. So they cast out for something different with the risk of nicking (well, being influenced by) something that was arguably not theirs to take and the problem of appropriating crops op.
Don’t hesitate to talk about European culture, don’t call it white culture, don’t ever stop liking the bits of it you like. Just as you can go on liking the bits of other cultures you like.
And the racists? Three guesses where they can stick their idea of white culture…
(*Yes, you USA lot are of European descent and your language is a mix of Germanic, Romance, and Nordic languages. Deal with it 
)
But they imagine a unified shared culture, based on whiteness, which is a figment of their imagination. There are plenty of European cultures that exist, sure, but no European culture. Even after the founding of the EU because it did not include all of Europe (and still doesn’t) and is only a lose confederation.
I’d argued “white” culture is an imagined European unity that never existed, based in a mistaken belief in superiority of that culture. It’s specifically an identity built on suppressing and stealing from others. And we live in a country that cultivates and naturalizes that idea so that we think it exists and reinforce it.
14 Likes
Some of us are the descendants of enslaved peoples stolen from Africa… but thanks for your glib, assumptive and incredibly condescending overgeneralization.
15 Likes
