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I agree 100% with your sentiment about not caring about who your ancestors are. I had a larger than expected percentage of African and native American ancestry

by JPKab 5y ago

I agree 100% with your sentiment about not caring about who your ancestors are. I had a larger than expected percentage of African and native American ancestry but I'm not foolish enough to think it has any impact on who I am or my cultural biases. We've all seen those moments where an American goes to a country like Ireland and tries to awkwardly connect with them on a cultural level. It's silly and embarrassing because they are dramatically less Irish than a person with zero Irish ancestry who was raised there by immigrant parents. Not unlike the fact that an African American person has vastly more in common with an American of European ancestry than they do with any person in Africa that shares their genetics.

tjs8rj 5y ago
I feel more sad about those awkward moments than embarrassment. White Americans don’t really have a cultural heritage, or at least no common conception of it. They’re just left adrift, the “neutral option”, born as a blank slate with no suggestions as to the kind of person they can or should be. On paper that sounds freeing, but the fact that they awkwardly try to make that cultural connection - likely well aware of the awkwardness - suggests that they’re aware of some deeper experience they’re missing out on. Humans weren’t meant to be burdened with (re)inventing their entire cultural identity in their lifetime. Most people just get born into it. I can’t think of any other group than White Americans (perhaps White Canadians + White Australians to a lesser extent) who are left to do that.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > White Americans don’t really have a cultural heritage, or at least no common conception of it They absolutely do, they just want to avoid thinking about it.
  - throwjd764glug 5y ago
    You mean inventing the ECMO machine currently saving lives from COVID? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen... Or inventing the transistor? Walking on the Moon? Fighting a bloody war to end slavery on their lands, and another war to stop the Barbary states from enslaving Americans and Europeans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War Pioneering powered flight? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers Inventing MRI, PET scans, and discovering the double helix structure of DNA? Building the societies and education systems that enabled those discoveries? Or do you mean just the bad stuff?
    - pjc50 5y ago
      A list of technical achievement is not a culture. But I'm not the one who said white Americans have no culture.
      - throwjd764glug 5y ago
        The items on that list that are technical achievements did not come from a vacuum. There are also countless works of art and literature I could have included, but I wanted to keep it short.
    - dang 5y ago
      Please don't take HN threads into hellish flamewar. As if we need to be arguing about "white culture" here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cwalv 5y ago
    Why do they want to avoid thinking about it? It seems like the parent is saying they wish they could think about it more, but it's ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness.
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      There is no such thing as a group of people who live in adjacency and share numerous social behaviors, protocols, and regular speech patterns are somehow culture-less. The contrary strikes me as the height of ambiguity. There is no sociologist or anthropologist who believes anything close to this.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Please tell me what shared cultural heritage a white boy from a trailer park in eastern Kentucky has with a white boy growing up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, or Cambridge, Mass? They don't speak the same dialect, they have ancestors which came from completely different cultures in Europe, they don't vote the same, and one of them's death is ignored by the media if he overdoses on Oxycontin. (The opioid epidemic was hitting Appalachia very hard for a decade, and didn't get attention from politicians until it hit New England)
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post hellish flamebait to HN. I'm sure you didn't intend to, but I'm afraid that's what this is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
  - tjs8rj 5y ago
    Sorry that wasn’t my intention at all, feel free to delete this

by JPKab 5y ago

tjs8rj 5y ago

I feel more sad about those awkward moments than embarrassment. White Americans don’t really have a cultural heritage, or at least no common conception of it. They’re just left adrift, the “neutral option”, born as a blank slate with no suggestions as to the kind of person they can or should be. On paper that sounds freeing, but the fact that they awkwardly try to make that cultural connection - likely well aware of the awkwardness - suggests that they’re aware of some deeper experience they’re missing out on. Humans weren’t meant to be burdened with (re)inventing their entire cultural identity in their lifetime. Most people just get born into it. I can’t think of any other group than White Americans (perhaps White Canadians + White Australians to a lesser extent) who are left to do that.

pjc50 5y ago
> White Americans don’t really have a cultural heritage, or at least no common conception of it They absolutely do, they just want to avoid thinking about it.
- throwjd764glug 5y ago
  You mean inventing the ECMO machine currently saving lives from COVID? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen... Or inventing the transistor? Walking on the Moon? Fighting a bloody war to end slavery on their lands, and another war to stop the Barbary states from enslaving Americans and Europeans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War Pioneering powered flight? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers Inventing MRI, PET scans, and discovering the double helix structure of DNA? Building the societies and education systems that enabled those discoveries? Or do you mean just the bad stuff?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    A list of technical achievement is not a culture. But I'm not the one who said white Americans have no culture.
    - throwjd764glug 5y ago
      The items on that list that are technical achievements did not come from a vacuum. There are also countless works of art and literature I could have included, but I wanted to keep it short.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into hellish flamewar. As if we need to be arguing about "white culture" here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cwalv 5y ago
  Why do they want to avoid thinking about it? It seems like the parent is saying they wish they could think about it more, but it's ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    There is no such thing as a group of people who live in adjacency and share numerous social behaviors, protocols, and regular speech patterns are somehow culture-less. The contrary strikes me as the height of ambiguity. There is no sociologist or anthropologist who believes anything close to this.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Please tell me what shared cultural heritage a white boy from a trailer park in eastern Kentucky has with a white boy growing up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, or Cambridge, Mass? They don't speak the same dialect, they have ancestors which came from completely different cultures in Europe, they don't vote the same, and one of them's death is ignored by the media if he overdoses on Oxycontin. (The opioid epidemic was hitting Appalachia very hard for a decade, and didn't get attention from politicians until it hit New England)
dang 5y ago
Please don't post hellish flamebait to HN. I'm sure you didn't intend to, but I'm afraid that's what this is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- tjs8rj 5y ago
  Sorry that wasn’t my intention at all, feel free to delete this