White Culture

I finished Thomas Sowell's book, "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" which I reviewed previously. Sowell spends a lot of the book talking about how various cultures have integrated into the United States over the years, and it suddenly occurred to me how wrong it is to frame discussions about race and ethnicity in terms of a minority culture versus a "white culture", and using rhetoric that pits these cultures against one another or calls for the dismantling of "white culture".

This dipshit with a Ph. D., Mikhail Lyubansky, who can often be found writing for such sterling bastions of journalistic rigor as the Huffington Post, thinks he has a handle on what "white culture" is, by giving us three tenets. You can spot what an asshole and an idiot he is by realizing that all three of these tenets are subtly or not-so-subtly negative in character and flow right into the ever-fashionable intersectionality theory that helpfully explains why white people are terrible. Those tenets are:

1. Distinction from Black culture
2. Avoidance of Self-racialization
3. Privilege

So white culture is "not black culture". That's really helpful, genius. California surfer culture is not-Portland hipster culture. Dr. Who fans are not-NFL fans. You don't define a culture by reference to what another culture is not. The truth that Lyubansky is obviously trying to avoid is that what he calls white culture is really just American culture. It is the dominant culture, in the same way that Argentinian culture is dominant in Argentina and Cuban culture is dominant in Cuba. Sure, there are sub-groups within these, many in fact, but trying to divide culture along melenin-content lines is stupid and insulting.

The entire idea of a white culture falls apart even at the most superficial level. First, you have the diversity of ethnic backgrounds, the English, Scottish, Irish, French, Germans, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Italian, Polish, Greeks, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, and others which, all, racially, appear Caucasian, but have very different cultures. Pockets and remnants of these cultures still exist today in various parts of the country.

There is, too, another dimension to culture in the United States that is based on regions in this country. New England has a very different culture from the South. The Midwest differs in many respects from the Northwest or Southwest. To say that there is a monolithic white culture that represents all of those different ancestries scattered across all of those regions of the country is ludicrous on its face.

The avoidance of self-racialization that he talks about is bullshit. I've never met anyone who is reluctant to call themselves white. I have mixed ancestry that includes Cherokee, but readily admit that I look white. I have a white friend in Canada and we jokingly call each other "cracker". Where there is reluctance to talk about being white, it is usually in an attempt to avoid singling anyone out by race in a racially-mixed group. The reason that white people don't like to mention race is because we've been conditioned to believe that doing so is rude, that it makes people of alternate melanin content uncomfortable. That is not a consequence of "white culture" but of the guilt that gets heaped on whites. This moron wants to treat this as some kind of self-serving behavior, when in fact it is defensive in nature, a form of appeasement. It is assholes like him that make white people act this way.

And then we have privilege, that slippery concept that somehow trumps all other cultural and socio-economic factors. Lyubansky unwittingly removes whatever veneer of respectability that the entire concept has enjoyed by trying to logically define an idea that is grounded only in ephemeral emotion. His conception of privilege boils down to possessing the knowledge and skills to negotiate social situations involving whites without having to second-guess yourself.

I'm sorry, I have to take a moment here to be stunned. Wait, you mean to tell me that the big truth that white people are seemingly ignorant of, the one thing that, generation after generation, just crushes people of alternate melanin content beneath the weight of its insidious power, is that white people tend to act and think like white people?

What the flying fuck? Is he mental? Did he just give away the entire case for multiculturalism? Isn't it obvious what the solution is? If you have a minority that has a difficult time relating to the dominant cultural group of a given geographic area, wouldn't it make sense for that minority to--I don't know, stabbing in the dark here--to try to assimilate some of the traits of that dominant culture?

"Oh, but then they would be LOSING so much by giving up their culture!" the liberal whines.

So turn it about. Imagine that, for whatever reason, you decide to leave the United States to go live in China. Are you going to try to learn the customs and mores of the local population? If you have children, are you going to teach them only English and insist that they reject Chinese culture? Do you tell them that they are doomed to failure because the Chinese will always hold them back? Or do you work your ass off and try to make a better future for your kids, just like the Chinese who were imported to America as cheap labor?

So, to recap his position, white culture is distinguished by not being black. Bullshit. White people never admit to being white. Right. I keep a mental list categorizing everyone who is not-white, but have no idea that anyone who is not-not-white is actually white. Finally, I have privilege because I don't understand what a struggle it is to be not-white. It's like nothing I could ever imagine because no white person ever has been in a situation where they felt out of their element or confused by the way people around them acted. And that lack of understanding is VERY BAD. My refusal to acknowledge that understanding makes me EVEN WORSE and I'm probably committing micro-aggressions RIGHT NOW.

The only cultural element in the United States other than American culture that could reasonably be called "white culture", given the massive umbrella that encompasses the different sub-cultures that are white, is western classical liberalism. These ideas came primarily from western Europe, places like Britain, France, and Germany. They led to the American Revolution and the creation of the US constitution, but they had their roots in the Enlightenment. It was the guiding principles of classical liberalism that prompted the West to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century.

So, there we have it. White culture. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of trying to puzzle out meaning from nonsense. I think I'll just stick to the classical liberal tenets of rationality, personal liberty, accountability and peaceful cooperation that Lyubansky thinks aren't important enough to mention in connection to "white culture", This Marxist intersectionality multiculturalism is the most useless and destructive shit you could possibly imagine.