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How would you define your white American culture?

I ask this having been to events with national/ethnic dress, food, and other cultures. What can a white American say their culture is? It feels that for better or worse it’s been all melted together.

Trying to trace back to European roots feels disingenuous because I’ve been disconnected from those roots for a few generations.

This also makes me wonder was their any political motive in making white American culture be everything and nothing?

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  • I agree with the general consensus, there is no "white" culture per se, uness you're talking about the bad craziness of nationalism.

    What I think OP means is "plain vanilla American culture." And that's the thing. The US is so huge, so comparatively young as a nation, that it's hard to even have a culture.

    Furthermore, anywhere you go in the states, you have pretty much the same TV, same radio from central locations, news anchors from the same school, holding the same rip 'n' read newscast. The corporate world has skin in this game. Keep us homogenized and you keep us focused on the consumer culture they want us to have.

    That said, we Americans who don't identify with any ethnicity do have cultures, but it's based more in what we do. Bikers, goths, snowboarders, rail fans, Trekkies, and then some. Those are all cultures.

    Then too, when we try to do culture, because of our media obsession, it often becomes a parody. Case in point, I once went to an Oktoberfest here in California. I saw people wearing stereotypical "German" costume, playing a Polish-American wedding game (Chicken Dance) and singing an Italian children's song (Rooki-Zooki). That's about as all-American as it gets.

  • The most central characteristic of whiteness is a belief in racism. It feels disingenuous because there is no white race other than what we've constructed socially for political purposes. English culture exists, Latvian culture exists, Russian culture exists, many American cultures exist, and white culture doesn't exist and never has.

  • As a white American myself I define it as a lot of things. It's mostly European in origin. Things country music, burgers and fries, flannel shirts, line dancing and the Beach Boys are just some things that scream white Americana.

  • US whiteness is a social construct that serves to justify and reproduce marginalization: white supremacy. It started out excluding the Irish, Italians, the Spanish, Slavs, etc and shifted over time in order to maintain anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity. So it is far from just one thing and is simultaneously very recent. It would be best described as a culture of domination and capitalism, being a product of the US' industrialization and then economic subjugation of the planet. Whiteness is about who you are better than and how entitled you are to a good life, or at least one better than non-whites. White culture is tolerating and even engaging in genocide so long as it is against non-whites. White culture is trying to pretend oppressions don't need justice on any timeline that might inconvenience a white person. White culture is jingoist. The image of a warlike America has a white face.

    As white people were largely drawn from European immigrants, they sometimes have watered-down elements of culture from "the old country", Americanized to the point of being unrecognizable. Those elements were usually watered down because their immigrant ancestors were not considered white at the time so they tried to hide or erase identifiable cultural elements. Name changes. Modifications to food. Going to the whiter church. Skipping traditional holidays.

    And of course, much is just white supremacy under capitalism. Processed industrialized foods. Commercialized holidays and events. Workaholic myths of paths to success. Everything cheaper or subsidized to their benefit and treated as an entitlement. National chauvinism and racist warmongering. Colonizer mindsets.

  • As a white American male, not once have I considered my own “white American” culture. Kind of hard to wrap my head around the idea. Maybe because I don’t at all relate to what I would consider “white America” - like country music, corn fields, guns, fear of others, etc. So, yeah, there’s a diversity of white American culture across the country.

    I also don’t have any emotional connection to the places my ancestors were born. So, at the same time, I reject stereotypical white American culture and my own heritage.

    My culture is my family, my friends, my community and the things we do to pass the time and to strive to be better neighbors. It’s not based on color, or nationality, or heritage. It’s more about zip code than anything else.

    But I recognize I’m in the minority. A lot of my friends are really into football and tailgating, etc. That’s not something I’ve been able to go all-in on. It seems cultish to me and I like to keep my head above ground.

    Personally, I’ve never had a strong desire to fit in or belong to a group. I enjoy the freedom of flexibility and decision making based on my own lived experiences rather than the experiences of others.

    To your point about ethnic events, the greatest thing about the US is the diverse culture. I would hate to be part of a monoculture like you find in the vast majority of other countries. It feels a bit like indoctrination to me.

  • Ehhh, I don't think there is a unifying "white" culture.

    Plenty of regional cultures that are predominantly white, and definitely city level ones, but that's different from a "white culture".

    Hell, it's hard to even say there's am American culture because it's just so damn big. Even regional cultures, like the general southern culture I came up in, I can't say is a single one. There's to much different between adjoining counties sometimes, and states can be even further apart.

    If I point to the Appalachian culture I'm also a part of, you can't really rely on that as much as you'd think, because five hundred miles in the mountains is a huge barrier to culture connections, even though much of the population shares common ancestry that informs the local cultures.

    So, nah, I can't buy the idea of "white" culture any more than I can any singular racial culture. They just don't work when in reality, though they're temping on paper.

    Shit, even "ethnic" cultures vary too much between specific cities to rely on them translating fully, so why would arbitrary skin color groupings? The Irish folk here in the hills have kept and/or adapted the culture of their ancestors different than those in Boston, or New Orleans, or New York. Just looking at my maternal and paternal families, there's enough differences that I wouldn't give credence to an Irish, Scots-Irish or German culture being fully passed down in the same way.

    The UK is way smaller than the US, and every city has its own distinct culture. Some are big enough cities that there's multiple versions in each one.

    If I had to lay claim to a national culture of the US, it would have to be adaptability. The overall culture of the US is to take what comes here and mix it around until it sticks. And that's not a very distinct thing at all.

  • American culture is exposed to everyone due to the internet

    I would define the American culture to be highly individualistic and xenophilic (to a point), cuisine generally being borrowed from Germany, France and Italy with most famously their Burgers

    Christmas and Thanksgiving is very ingrained, and whilst you might claim Christmas is very universal (partly thanks to America) Halloween isn't, and it's mainly celebrated in USA and mostly USA only.

    in America, community is more loose of a term than anywhere else, and independence is a must-have skill to have, this is why the trope of being kicked out as soon as possible from a household is so prevalent even though this doesn't seem to happen as much, or at all in other nations unless in very dire circumstances

    America is generally depicted with the stereotypes of either southern conservative god-fearing people who attend protestant mass, or Californian liberals who seemingly accept anything and everything, enjoying luxury and being very upset about trivial issues, though due to individualism I can not think for the life of me a common dressing pattern, maybe military uniforms or suits

    Due to how xenophilic and domineering American culture is, the media have essentially allowed for American culture to be available basically anywhere, mostly portraying itself within companies, holidays, local media and politics

  • I'm gonna talk out my ass for a minute, I haven't actually done any focused reading on most of the tidbits I'm about to discuss. Just putting together a lot of disconnected thoughts and anecdotes I've collected over the years

    I'm remembering that the phrase "white pride" only exists in imitation of the phrase "black pride" and the accompanying explanation for why one is absolutely not at all problematic while the other is unabashedly supremacist. That explanation being that "black" references the culture common to that group of people which, in the case of American black people, can't really be narrowed down to any one country. While it can be narrowed down (mostly) to one continent, that still represents a fifth of the Earth's land-area and therefore includes a lot of cultures that don't have anything in common.

    So, "black culture" then is a sort of (the word I'm about to use may be problematic, I don't know, it makes sense in my head but I'm white and have no idea how it might feel to have someone else describe me this way) "prosthetic" culture. I'm thinking, because they did lose a real part of themselves but, because there are so many others with the same culture-esque background in America, the phrase "black culture" refers to a real thing that exists.

    Now, the other direction. "White culture" is problematic because, what culture is it that "white" people share? People who are "white" have a cultural history already, they don't need a prosthetic. I know I come from something vaguely Scots-Irish. If I could be bothered to look into that more, I could surely find clubs, celebrations, or whatever kind of pageantry I wanted to validate that identity. But what cultural history do I have in common with this other random "white" person who it turns out is actually Romanian?

    And that brings me to the best bit! Take all the people who are considered "white" today, put them in a room and have them discuss with each other, looking for the single attribute that their culture shares with the most other cultures in that room. I would guess (totally out my ass here, I have no idea) that the one thing most cultures have in common today even the ones currently considered "white" is that they used to be persecuted for their non-whiteness.

    I don't have any numbers for that. I'm just thinking about how, for example, Italians didn't used to be "white", Irish people didn't used to be "white", or Romanian people are still kind of struggling to be considered "white". Or we could take it another way, Jews aren't "white" regardless of their skin color (though of course the state of Israel is likely to sterilize anyone whose skin is too dark...) and I remember a stereotype about Catholics that sure seemed to fit in the category of non-"white".

    So, now I don't remember what the subject of the post I'm writing this in was...

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