Without a doubt, whiteness is a bigger enemy of “white culture” than anything else.
As for me, if I had to name my ethnicity, I guess I’m German-American; and once upon a time, that used to really *mean* something, used to be something deeper and more meaningful than Lutheran church and polka music and pretending to give a shit about soccer. There used to be extended families, schools, Sprachenbund, festivals, distinct communities, all that good stuff, but that’s all gone now. “Now it is just another someplace where automobiles live,” as Herr Vonnegut once said. And it’s the same story with Irish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, et cetera and so forth immigrants to this brokedick country; there used to be rich, vibrant communities of European immigrants and the children of European immigrants that kept alive art, music, folklore, language, all that good stuff, that said loudly and proudly, “We are here, and this is who we are.”
That’s all gone now. Nowadays, ethnicity within whiteness is just an excuse to drink expensive beer at a folk festival once a year. And people of color didn’t do that, naw, the dominant WASP society did that, and we were complicit in going along with it, because we benefited materially from it, nevermind what we had to give up along the way. They’ll try to sell you a bill of goods about how integration did this; it’s actually the opposite.
White pride is not cultural pride because whiteness is not a culture; whiteness is the Borg. The truth is that white-identitarianism is how come I never got the opportunity to learn Diets on my Oma’s knee.
It’s stuffy and takes a long time to set up and is more reading than anyone feels like doing but Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture is a huge-ass take on basically this by other means.
As a Jewish person who married into an Irish-German-Geek family, this is scarily accurate. They were astonished that my family had this entire side-culture that had nothing to do with America OR really to do with religion, but was entirely about being Jewish (culture) - music and food and jokes and language. They had no traditions that were specifically German or Irish or Greek (or even any celebration of that particular blending). My husband didn’t even have the (to me) expected smattering of German or Greek words in his vocabulary, and had no knowledge of the cuisines.
Even their Christmas traditions were kind of… homogenized Americana.
I have felt this strongly for a very very long time. I have nothing of my Greek or Hungarian backgrounds, and almost nothing of my Jewish background because to earn whiteness, my family shed its cultures, its languages, its stories, and its everything. What I have of those things, I have had to excavate myself and there is so much that I don’t have the tools to access. Whiteness is like a gaping wound in my identity, its a sucking void that prevents me from finding the ground of my history to put my feet on. whiteness requires that we do violence to ourselves in order to access it, there should be no surprise that it is expressed through diverting and amplifying that violence outward. I experience whiteness as violence, and I genuinely do not understand how other white people find a place within it, and doubt that any of us do. and maybe this is the source of white insecurity, the instinctual knowledge that we are trying to exist in a non-space, a space of lack, an emptiness. We defend whiteness because we live in a world that tells us that it will keep us safe, when we know on a gut level that the shield is made of cardboard, that the protection it affords is barely more than a placebo. Whiteness is a poison. we can choose to counter it with an antidote, or we can poison ourselves and those around us for the appearance of safety.
Whiteness = Cultural Bleach
