I've been enjoying your "white people" rants but I'm uncomfortable about the implicit assumption that white people = North American WASPs. It seems to me like it has the potential to reinforce the tendency you point out, that "WASPs have traditionally been held up as the cultural standard everyone else... should follow, and the “whiteness” of different European ethnicities in those colonies is generally judged by how assimilated they are to the WASP ideal."
I’ve personally got the ideological stance that as we understand that race is a really inaccurate construct, we move away from using it. Race constructs are the meatgrinder we pour ethnicities and cultures into to get some kind of easily-digested paste. Social constructs, like race or money, are real inasmuch as they are real in their consequences, but they can be deconstructed through careful analysis.
One of my first suspicions that whiteness was kind of bullshit was learning that in the Indian Residential Schools, Indigenous Canadians got taught really specific values and held to really specific standards of hygiene and criticized for particular behaviours, and going, “WAIT A MINUTE, a few decades before, white people got yelled at for doing the exact same thing! All of the stuff they’re punishing children for are things Europeans have done for ages!”
And I’m partly thinking about my own reaction earlier in the decade to Stuff White People Like, which is about a type of North American upper-class whiteness I did not grow up in. It was so jarring to hear so many inaccurate racial stereotypes that did not apply to me! And then so eye-opening to move to Vancouver and meet 10,000 of the kind of white people the website talked about and go “OH MY GOD”. That experience really drove home, to me, the difference between the amalgamation of stereotypes, and the actual lived experience of individual people in that category. Like, I’d heard POC talking about their own experiences, and I generally knew stereotypes were pretty inacurrate--but it was so much more visceral and real when it was about me.
So I guess I’m trying to do the same kind of thing, to point out whiteness as a formerly unmarked category, a generally-held assumption of civilization and normalcy, and name it and talk about its history, so we can untangle the stupid assumption that there’s such a thing as a naturally-occurring biologically-based “white culture”, that grouping people by race, much less setting up a hierarchy, is at all a good or reasonable thing to do.
I honestly hope lots of white people will read it and go “WILD, I am from white people who are NOTHING LIKE THIS” and then learn something about cultural stereotypes and the limitations of sociological analysis. That stereotypes come from a certain place and time and social pressure, and while they’re sometimes based on true experience of a certain subset, they’re also really bad at predicting what every single person in a group will be like.
Which they will then hopefully keep in mind the next time they meet a person of colour!
