3 ms·

> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does" To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white

> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does" To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa." The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.
- vinay427 6y ago
  I tried browsing /r/whitepeopletwitter for the first time, and as far as I can tell it mainly consists of meme-like language that mocks views typically ascribed to Republicans or, in the case of race issues, white Americans that espouse white supremacy. This seems more like an expression of the political reality of some white Americans than any cultural aspect that applies to "white Americans" in general. > The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists. I would also disagree with this premise. There were stereotypes about black Americans as soon as the first slave ships landed, despite these populations being from vastly different parts of the continent, different ethnic groups, different linguistic groups, etc. They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around. There are also stereotypes about various immigrant and second-generation American groups today (e.g. "Asian-Americans are smart") despite most of these primarily being a result of selection bias due to immigration policies that were ostensibly racist until recently, not a result of a general cultural attribute (e.g. "superior Asian intelligence").
  - yanderekko 6y ago
    >They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around. The thing that I don't accept about this argument is that this would seem to imply then that not expressing these differences could be seen as "white culture." It seems like only you try to disentangle Black Culture from American Culture, then the non-black aspects of American Culture can be thought of interchangeably with "White Culture." It's almost like a straightforward semantic thing, but it's aggressively resisted for reasons that I can't see as stemming from anything other than a prior desire to somehow elevate blacks. Note that the argument can scale up to encompass other racial cultures as well - once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Is the because it would be argued that these cultural dimensions didn't arise because of a specifically-shared white identity? It seems pretty odd to find that relevant, however, as the specific practices of other racial cultures largely did not originate/propagate based on conscious racial identity. I think that it's really difficult to justify all of this stuff without embracing an axiomatic "white people are different" assumption somewhere in the argument. Like, what does it matter for the definition of culture if group X and Y are different because X was "forced" to adopt different practices? Does this means that X culture exists but Y culture doesn't? That seems arbitrary to me.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Perhaps because on the one hand you still need to subtract so many other immigrant cultures (Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, etc.), and on the other the "melting-pot" residue is still a set of (largely regional) subcultures that don't have all that much in common (California Surfers, Utah Mormons, Mountain Westerners, Texan Cattle Ranchers, Minnesota Nice, New England Yankees, Deep Southerners, etc.), and if you subtract those what's left over is a fiction that mostly exists only in media and advertising, like the Standard American Newscaster accent that no-one actually speaks natively, although you might make a case for the existence of a generic Suburban American culture that, if it can be said to exist, only came into being after World War II.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago

A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.

vinay427 6y ago
I tried browsing /r/whitepeopletwitter for the first time, and as far as I can tell it mainly consists of meme-like language that mocks views typically ascribed to Republicans or, in the case of race issues, white Americans that espouse white supremacy. This seems more like an expression of the political reality of some white Americans than any cultural aspect that applies to "white Americans" in general. > The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists. I would also disagree with this premise. There were stereotypes about black Americans as soon as the first slave ships landed, despite these populations being from vastly different parts of the continent, different ethnic groups, different linguistic groups, etc. They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around. There are also stereotypes about various immigrant and second-generation American groups today (e.g. "Asian-Americans are smart") despite most of these primarily being a result of selection bias due to immigration policies that were ostensibly racist until recently, not a result of a general cultural attribute (e.g. "superior Asian intelligence").
- yanderekko 6y ago
  >They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around. The thing that I don't accept about this argument is that this would seem to imply then that not expressing these differences could be seen as "white culture." It seems like only you try to disentangle Black Culture from American Culture, then the non-black aspects of American Culture can be thought of interchangeably with "White Culture." It's almost like a straightforward semantic thing, but it's aggressively resisted for reasons that I can't see as stemming from anything other than a prior desire to somehow elevate blacks. Note that the argument can scale up to encompass other racial cultures as well - once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Is the because it would be argued that these cultural dimensions didn't arise because of a specifically-shared white identity? It seems pretty odd to find that relevant, however, as the specific practices of other racial cultures largely did not originate/propagate based on conscious racial identity. I think that it's really difficult to justify all of this stuff without embracing an axiomatic "white people are different" assumption somewhere in the argument. Like, what does it matter for the definition of culture if group X and Y are different because X was "forced" to adopt different practices? Does this means that X culture exists but Y culture doesn't? That seems arbitrary to me.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Perhaps because on the one hand you still need to subtract so many other immigrant cultures (Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, etc.), and on the other the "melting-pot" residue is still a set of (largely regional) subcultures that don't have all that much in common (California Surfers, Utah Mormons, Mountain Westerners, Texan Cattle Ranchers, Minnesota Nice, New England Yankees, Deep Southerners, etc.), and if you subtract those what's left over is a fiction that mostly exists only in media and advertising, like the Standard American Newscaster accent that no-one actually speaks natively, although you might make a case for the existence of a generic Suburban American culture that, if it can be said to exist, only came into being after World War II.