'White Americans don't have any culture, they're just [normal/boring/generic/empty]. 'Culture' is when you're quaint and exotic and have interesting ethnic foods and holidays." is such a grating bit of nonsense to have somehow become progressive commonsense in a lot of places.
I'll preface this by saying that I am white, and I've lived in illinois my whole life. That said, I guess I'm just not sure what culture means if not a bunch of things handed down through generations. I have nothing like that. I have no recipes, heirlooms, or even any stories. It feels like I'm completely cut off from my ancestors. I get my recipes online, and everything else from walmart and thrift stores. It truly doesn't feel like I have any culture unless what I've described is actually a culture? Am I alone in feeling this way?I genuinely don't mean to offend anyone.
Your ancestors aren't the only thing that make up your culture. Your culture is your food and your family traditions and local dishes and regional celebrations. It can be things you grew up doing in your lifetime, it can be the things your parents told you about. It's the holidays you celebrate and the things you expect with the changing seasons.
Does your town have a fourth of July parade? Is there a time of year when there's a specific local produce available? Is there a county fair? Did your school have Sadie Hawkins dances?
What food gets served if you go to a barbecue? Do you go ice skating? Do you go fishing? What happens in your city during the Superbowl? Do the diners near you show the World Series on TV in the fall? Are there pumpkin carving contests and trick-or-treating?
Look. Pumpkin Spice Latte season is genuinely, legitimately part of American Culture - white American culture, even. Sure it's commercial as hell, but it's also born out of being the season when people in the US make pumpkin pies, and want things to taste like spices and cider.
Did your parents have annual traditions? Did their parents? If you have a family get together for Thanksgiving (which is a part of American culture - white American culture even; just because it is propaganda that was meant to create a friendly founding myth instead of focusing on genocide doesn't mean it's not part of your culture - culture is not only good things; machismo is part of many cultures, menstrual taboos are part of many cultures) is there a dish that people *have* to have? Is it some mayonnaise or whipped-cream based salad? Those salads are an example of American food culture, which were formed for a tangled variety of reasons ranging from 'the great depression' to 'post-war excess and competition between women in a compulsory homemaker role.'
Did/does your family go to church? Does your church have rummage sales? Are there church carnivals? Are there ice cream socials? Does your fire department do pancake breakfasts to fundraise? Do kids at the local schools sell magazines or candy? Did your school have homecoming dances or a prom? Did your school have SPORTS? Did you go to college? Did your college have sports? Did your college sports have tailgates?
But also - who are these ancestors you're looking to for a feeling of belonging? Are they your parents? Your grandparents? Your great great grandparents? If your family was Swedish and they immigrated to the US a hundred and fifty years ago, why do you think you're missing Swedish culture from your life? What is it from Swedish culture that you think you'll connect to more than your Grandpa's annual ice fishing trip or your aunt's blue ribbon pie recipe? And if your aunt doesn't have a pie recipe and your family gets their pie from Marie Calendars, that's a part of the culture too (as are pizza hut birthdays and Chuck E Cheese and "Cheesecake Factory at a minimum" to reward your kids for good behavior).
There are actually whole American cultural rituals set up based on your different regional food franchises. I grew up in Farrell's Ice Cream Clown culture, not Caravel Whale Ice Cream Cake culture.
Weird Al is American culture. Nick at Night is American culture. PBS Masterpiece Theater is American culture. Clifford the Big Red Dog is American culture. Hurricane cakes are American culture.
Towns grinding to a halt for a few days at the beginning of deer season are a part of the culture. Getting your learner's permit. Getting a corsage for your date. Proposing on the Jumbotron. Getting pizza and beer for the friends who help you move.
This is all your culture, all around you, all the time.
And you can *change* your culture. Culture is, generally speaking, pretty malleable and adaptable (just look at the differences between Italian American food and Italian food, look at the way that diaspora populations adapt their culture to different areas, look at the way that pop culture becomes embedded in culture - we've just gone through A Christmas Carol season - that was pop culture created by Dickens that has become a huge part of anglo holiday culture). You can incorporate Swedish holidays. You can add Chinese recipes to your recipe book. You can decide that you like a few Saint's days and make titty cupcakes because of it. You can start having a friendsgiving (friendsgiving is a relatively new part of American youth culture; you can participate in it!).
Like, somehow people have gotten the idea that "culture" is something other than what they're living in. That there is A Culture that belongs to them and if they practice it properly they will feel like they belong within it. They think that culture is what people did in The Old Times. And that to really celebrate or connect to your culture you have to tap into your family's history and. Like. I don't know, do highland dance or something. Start drinking tea from a samovar every day. Learn to like lutefisk.
I don't know. I've started using my grandmother's tea set. I suppose you could call that an heirloom. It's made up of pieces of glass that you could collect by mailing in box tops or buying a certain kind of detergent. It's an heirloom. It's a cereal box prize.
Cereal box prizes and Cracker Jack's toys are also American culture, for what it's worth.
God, you know what makes me crazy? When people (not you, this is me venting) are like "mayonnaise isn't a culture!"
But. Like.
You know, right, you know that those midwestern mayonnaise salads were largely created by Scandinavian immigrant families. "Ohhh American Potato salad is so gross, all that mayo that's not a salad" like you know Germany has a wide variety of potato salads with mayo in them, right? And they have for a long time. And they brought that with them when there were a bunch of German immigrants to the colonies.
Like, mayo isn't in itself a culture but there are cultural reasons that it's such a large part of American cultural cuisine - and yes, ambrosia salad and campbell's casseroles and tuna salad are part of white American culture that is adapted from centuries of immigration.
The thing is that early generations of white immigrants to the US assimilated really completely in a way that more visible immigrants and later generations of immigrants weren't able to. There was a time in America when scandinavians were the unwanted, uncouth immigrants. There was a time when Italians were considered a racial threat to good white families. But eventually they got folded into whiteness in the US and the edges got sanded off of the things that were a little too scandinavian or a little too italian or a little too slavic or a little too german or a little too catholic and it became potato salad and spaghetti and meatballs and hotdogs and turnovers.
So, like, you're not connected to the culture of your family but if you're not connected to it it's because they weren't either. And if that's because they were forced to suppress their culture to survive then I understand wanting to learn and celebrate the culture that they weren't able to but if your (white) family is made up of a mixture of people who came from the various cultures that were allowed to totally assimilate I understand it less.
If you're Irish and Swedish and English and Slavic and German and Italian - and I tend to think that most of the people who are doing 23 and Me ARE descended from different immigrant groups that were assimilated into whiteness, because if they were from a proud family of Irish immigrants who stayed in a strong Irish enclave in the US and married other Irish immigrants, they'd know it and be fairly connected to that culture - then what ancestry are you chasing? Do you want to feel like you're a part of all of those cultures? Are you picking one of those cultures to look at? Are you looking at the culture *now* or at the time that those ancestors immigrated? How far back do you take it when you're looking at cultural traditions? If you're German do you take your traditions from before or after Luther? If you're Italian do you focus on recipes that don't include tomatoes? If you're Scandinavian are you thinking of traditions from the 800s or the 1800s?
The "lol, white americans don't have a culture" thing is actually a pretty limited and regressive viewpoint. It presupposes the idea of an accessible unified culture that is shared equally by everyone and it erases the way that cultures in the US have blended over time. It's actually not a bad thing that the US has mixed food cultures and mixed clothing cultures and mixed languages and religions. That's not to say that it's good when people living in the US are forced to assimilate to American culture or forced to chip away at their identities in order to live safely in the country. But I'm glad that Jewish food has become part of American culture in a lot of places. I'm glad that schools have choirs. I'm glad that we've got spaghetti and meatballs. The Massachusetts Bay Colony founders would have shit a brick if they heard that it was common for American schoolchildren to have ritual celebrations for not one but TWO saint's days (Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's day, celebrated by candy and pinching respectively). It's good that we didn't just stick with Puritan culture and carry that through and refuse to add or adapt or accept other parts of culture into our own.
I know "white americans have to appropriate our culture because they don't have one of their own" became a way of owning sports fans who want to defend wearing headdresses but a lot of people doubled down on the argument that cultures shouldn't share. That there shouldn't be crossover. That there is one lane for your culture to be in and you should stay in it.
And if you've landed in the camp of "there should be no cultural crossover, I don't want people taking things from my culture ever and I don't want people putting their things in my culture ever" you are arguing for cultural purity and cultural contamination and. THAT'S NOT GREAT, actually.
So I guess what I'm saying is,
TL;DR, yes culture is more than just what your ancestors did - if you are a human being alive around other human beings you are participating in a culture (and unironically yes "i live in a crumbling rust belt town where walmart ate the local businesses" is an example of a facet of modern American culture. It is a shitty one, but there are likely other things in your life that are part of a culture you've grown up in that you may simply not recognize as cultural because that's the background radiation of culture that you consider 'business as usual')
(also none of this is an endorsement of American Sports culture, American holidays, or christian religious traditions the fact that football, the fourth of july, and christmas are inescapable whether or not you wish to participate in them are examples of these things being a part of the *dominant* culture of the US; not all aspects of any culture are good, which is just one reason why it's a good thing that cultures change over time)
In my experience nearly every time white Americans say things like "I don't feel like I have a culture", what they describe immediately afterward is lack of community. But guess what! Lack of true community is American culture. That's the whole point of the nuclear family, the 40-hour workweek, the intense focus on individualism, encouragement to distrust and even spy on your neighbors, disrespect for elders, etc. It isolates you from your community by design so you're more profitable under a capitalist structure (and yes, capitalism is American culture, too).
If you don't like your culture, find or make a community you feel connected to. Culture will naturally form.
Felt the need to add: almost everything you do or think is, in some way, affected by your culture. Some examples:
- What does a normal breakfast look like? When is it?
- What colors and symbols do you associate with purity? With luck? With death?
- How do you show affection? Are certain actions ok with some people and not others? (Hint: in most of the world it's normal for friends to hold hands)
- What kinds of functionality are expected for a home? Do you need your own cooking equipment? Is there a western toilet? What are the walls and floors made of?
Literally everything you take for granted is your culture. You just can't see it because it's so normalized.
#phenomenal read #and especially want to point at white ppl usually meaning community when they say culture #individualism is anti-community and individualism is a huge part of white American culture #and I want to add that this is true AND the fact that white supremacy encourages individualism and assimilation is ALSO true!! #your ancestors did things you wouldn’t do today!!!!!!!! #a lot of the discussion around unlearning biases and forming communities and such today includes telling white Americans to look back #the idea is that ALL people were at some point part of communal cultures and white Americans would benefit from finding those roots #and that’s great!!!!! I completely agree that’s part of the path forward!!!! #HOWEVER you also need to know that your ancestors likely did some AWFUL shit - intentionally or not!!! #their hardships do not excuse their prejudices and your descending from them does not mean you have to agree with them or their actions !!!! #acknowledging that they did some fucked up shit and learning from that what NOT to do is why history is/should be studied!!!! #the whole ‘doomed to repeat history’ thing is an oversimplification in many ways but the general idea isn’t the worst#but ppl usually refer to like major war and disaster and famine when that also applies to the small things !!! #like my family has a history of being fucked over by our parents but taking it out on and then distancing ourselves from our siblings #my grandfather did it and lost his claim on the family house. my father (OTHER SIDE) did it and now we only know people have died from FB. #I can acknowledge that my family has done that AND I can swear to try and be there for my siblings!!!! #ALSO ALSO ALSO your ancestors can include people you aren’t biologically related to!!!!!! #I write about that a lot in my research studying queer history - these ppl didn’t have kids but they still left an impact on the world #and they were part of the community culture !!! they contributed !!!! #ugh idk where I’m going with this #I want to have in depth discussions on this irl so bad #I want to sit down with my friends and family and literally do the work of exploring personal histories and learning from them #but alas all the societal bullshit that makes modern life difficult really doesn’t want you to do that so here we are #I should’ve typed all this out rather than put it in the tags fr
(tags via @readwritethrive)
