Something I think goes unappreciated is how nice it is to not have a white culture. The idea of being culturally shoved into a box because of your skin color genuinely sounds abysmal.
The left won't say it because it means criticizing minority cultures. The right won't say it because they're jealous of how liberals treat minority cultures. But at the end of the day, the fact I can basically just decide what cultures I'd most enjoy being apart of without worrying of someone will accuse me of "acting white" or "not being a real X" is very relieving. Putting aside all the other weird race shit in academia, seeing virtually every single black person in the social sciences being focused on race was somewhat depressing, just because lots of those kids would have probably loved other topics if they weren't culturally encouraged to focus on everything through their own racial experience.
I bet Blacks in America are even acutely aware of the distinctions between African immigrants, Carribean immigrants, and US-heritage blacks. They just don't talk about it that much.
I know Hispanics often express frustration that everyone thinks all Hispanics are basically the same culture when actually Mexicans, Venezuelans, Brazillians, and Argentinians have huge differences. There's an enormous continent down there.
"I bet Blacks in America are even acutely aware of the distinctions between African immigrants, Carribean immigrants, and US-heritage blacks. They just don't talk about it that much. "
They talk about it a lot, actually. African migrants often complain about the xenophobia shown by “native” African Americans.
Yeah, just another example of how identity politics tries to falsely shove people in these boxes. Maybe "native" African Americans actually have more in common with white people or Hispanics than African migrants.
My daughter spent years teaching high school in almost exclusively African American high schools in Irvington and West Newark N.J. During several summers she worked for Yale Young African Scholars on location in Rwanda, Ghana, Zimbabwe and other places giving SAT instruction and other college prep “bridge” work for elite African students preparing for study abroad.
She would be the first to tell you how bewildered Africans are when they come here. There is a cultural abyss between Africans and African-Americans that is comparable if not more pronounced than with other Americans.
Where you were born and raised matters vastly more as it relates to culture than what you look like.
>I can basically just decide what cultures I'd most enjoy being apart of without worrying of someone will accuse me of "acting white" or "not being a real X" is very relieving.
On the flip side, you can get accused of being a colonizer or engaging in cultural appropriation.
The notion that any race considered in it’s entirety to have a single coherent culture is utterly without empirical basis. What does a Tanzanian have in common with an African American from Detroit? A Finn with a Sicilian? A Filipino with a North Korean? A Sri Lankan Sinhalese with a Kashmiri Muslim?
There is a confusion and conflation with white identity, which never was much of thing until recently. It arrived in its current form likely as backlash to other identitarian movements, and to a perceived loss of influence. Oddly, those areas where whites are an impending minority status and where there is much racial admixture (I’m from LA) the cries of white identity are more muted. But in the very white areas like Kentucky and Missouri, much louder..
As you correctly point out, white identitarians are merely making a political statement.
Quite a bit in any multiracial environment. Drop a Swede, an Ashkenazi Jew, or a Frenchman in an African town and locals are going to see three Europeans and not split hairs over whether there’s ’a white culture.’ More salient is the fact that being American means very little other than sharing a common currency and economic zone.
The Africans would see three white faces. That’s it. With quite a bit of time and interaction (and a DeepL language translation app) they ultimately might understand that these three white people are very different indeed.
It’s a truism that to people largely unexposed to different races, the people of those different races look to them largely the same. Similar appearance does not necessarily translate into similar culture.
Except they aren’t that different at all in an environment with racial aliens. Their intra-European differences are minimal compared to those between themselves and the sub-Saharan African throngs around them.
I don’t where you’re from but in my world it’s very self-evident. My world is urban America. No one is autistic enough in my world to split hairs over race. Everyone knows who is black, what whites are and what Mestizos are. Only people removed from everyday reality or in some spectrum has an issue with it.
I am a living refutation of what you’re saying. Physically, I look African-American. However, I am a second generation immigrant and grew up in a very different cultural environment than most black Americans. I knew from a young age that black American descendants of slaves and my own family were not the same ethnicity. We spoke a different language, ate different foods, wore different clothes, worshipped differently, played different sports, danced differently, etc. When people I met later in life simply assumed I was a black American with a typical black American background, they quickly realized how little they knew once they got to know my background a bit more. Furthermore, black Americans were not closer in culture to my family than white Americans.
Well considering they're way more likely to be able to communicate with the Frenchmen than the other two, you probably picked the worse example. Have you ever been to Africa?
Having been once been under French colonial rule doesn’t make one French. What are black crime and sexual assault statistics in France versus Arabs/North Africans and native French ? The French government doesn’t disclose crime statistics by race and ethnicity unfortunately.
But that reverses the argument on its head. The 3 people will still have less in common among each other than they do in the view of the other culture. They might find common ground in commenting on their surroundings, but they remain very different overall.
"A Sri Lankan Sinhalese with a Kashmiri Muslim" - Not just that, I am very sure a Kashmiri Muslim will have a very different cultural setting that a UP Muslim or a Karnataka Muslim for example. Similarly, a Kahsmiri Hindu will have a lot of cultural differences with a Andhra Hindu or a Bengali Hindu! This cultural variety can be easily observed in food, attire & traditions. Just India, in itself, has rich enough diversity & variety of cultures that you don't even have to compare with people from other countries to come to the conclusion you have pointed out...
In biology there are intraspecific classifications such as subspecies and “distinct breeding populations” that over time lead to morphological and other intraspecific distinctions that are measurable. But these definitions are fluid and populations can merge erasing differences.
We are a species of primate and the same genetics apply to us. Intraspecific differences are a continuum and likely to be eradicated overtime as populations merge. I’m virtually 100% white British Isles. My grandchildren are part Mexican, Askenazi Jewish, Parsi Indian, and Scots Irish. But 100% human and adorable!
Your comment on the social overlay triggered an interesting question. So it seems to me that what makes humans unique is we are aware of the various subspecies or distinct breeding populations (ie “races”) and indeed we make a huge deal about them. I wish we didn’t.
I am unaware of any research on the question of whether subspecies of other animals are reluctant to breed with other subspecies. (I.e., nonhuman racism).
My experience is that there does not appear to be evidence of animal racism, but I’m now going to check to see whether any empirical work on this question has been done.
Yes it’s very simple really. I spent many years as an environmental lawyer for nonprofits trying to enforce the Endangered Species Act.
Apart from the decelerated pace of evolutionary change from long human lifespans, the dynamics of human races are no different than the ever changing dynamics of various subspecies of songbirds called gnatcatchers.
For most animal species, when distinct populations or subspecies come into contact, the default tendency is actually to interbreed quite readily, not to avoid it. Hybridization in nature is far more common than the classic “biological species concept” implied. Genomic studies over the last two decades have revealed pervasive gene flow between what were considered distinct species, let alone subspecies — the revelations about Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture in modern humans being just one famous example among many. Wolves and coyotes, polar bears and grizzlies, various duck species, Darwin’s finches — hybridization turns out to be the norm rather than the exception across much of the animal kingdom
To address what I see as the nub of white identarian anxiety, there must be sequelae when a hitherto majority group loses its majority status. Eventually, that group will lose some if not most of its cultural centrality and dominance.
In earlier times, this anxiety was assuaged by the concept of the melting pot, newcomers would gladly adopt American (white) culture. Indeed, many immigrant parents are unsettled as they see their children growing up "American,” in a process that seems fundamentally out of their control. Ironically, one might speculate that antisemitism has done a lot to preserve Jewish identity in the United States.
But what it means to be American is not standing still. Until the 1960s, baseball was by far our most popular sport, but now it's football. All of us, including white identarians, are along for a ride od cultural development controlled by nobody.
I write this as a white person whose birth culture was always a minority, namely, Pennsylvania Dutch, specifically Church of the Brethren, an offshoot of the Mennonites.
One thing that has helped me understand American "White" culture is the concept of the 4 Nations of White Americans at the time of the founding: New Englander, Mid-Atlantic, Appalachian, and Southern. Each of these classical regions has its own culture, which spread to other parts of the country, and even to other ethnicities.
Things like which of the 4 Nations you belong to, religion, your specific ethnicity, your city/town/state, your family, and your profession - all of these things impact your interpretation of the human experience.
Thank you for reminding me of that typology--it is a good one.
I feel blessed to belong to a 5th nation. We Pennsylvania Deutcher knew we were different, and we knew it was important to stay different. I have never once felt I had to conform to anyone else's ideas about anything.
Incidentally, I had a few relative (dead now), who spoke German as a co language, even though our ancestors had been in the country for 200 years at that point.
Great point. The past is a foreign culture. We're all experiencing cultural change from within whether we want it or not. Lots of people in America grow up in religious or ethnic subcultures that are pretty distinct from mainstream culture. Having a tolerance for diversity and change isn't just beneficial for immigrants but also different generations.
I like how these people talk about immigrant or black crime then wax nostalgic about the Scots Irish. We are literally the most violent white demographic in the US by a wide margin. Our origin is literally as lawless bandits that the English tried to buy off by using us as thugs to control Ulster.
The black crime rate is infintesimal in comparison to the white crime rate compared to the male crime rate in comparison to the female yet we don’t use that disparity as a reason to assume all males are one step away from murder. And much of (but not all of) the black crime rate disparity is that blacks have a much higher proportion of their population in the peak crime age group. The median age of black people is 10 years younger than the media age of white people. And it is conservative @Wilfred Reilly who has pointed this out.
Nobody said "all black people are one step away from murder". However, objectively speaking, their crime rate is disproportionately higher compared to that of white people, even after adjusting for age and social class. There's a reason even white liberals tend not to live in predominantly black areas.
Look at the most common age for blacks and whites. The most common age for a white person is 58! For a black person it is 27. This is going to have some significant bearing on crime rates. Age disparities in murder rates are more profound than racial ones. Again, not saying this is the whole story or anything but definitely brackets things. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/
But it cuts way back on how stark that disparity is. Age matters more than social class. Age disparity in crime it profound. A 20 year old white man is more likely to kill someone than a 40 year old black man. I have also lived in cracker southern places with no black people at all and you also were suspicious of teenage boys wandering aimlessly about.
Oh yeah, I have no problem with any of that, but what exactly would we like to see differently in terms of policy or whatever in light of that fact? Men are 94% of criminals but in my daily life it changes not at all how I interact with men except maybe in some unique circumstances. And men get actively mad (rightly so) about being stereotyped by group data. And yeah, white southerners are many times more violent that whites in other parts of the country. There is data on this. Mississippi has a white murder rate of 6.3 per 100,000. Compare that to Massachusetts at 1 per 100,000. So should we treat white southerners, relative to white yankees, the same way you would like to treat blacks relative to whites on this information? Are you scared to live in the South among whites given the 6 times higher murder rate? So yeah, there are dopey liberals who aren’t realistic about negatively valenced disparities but most of us have a pretty good grasp on levels of analysis.
It's not as if women can live in women-only neighborhoods. And most men don't really get acticely mad when they are stereotyped as being more violent than women, because we all know (and accept) that it's true. I don't want to treat Black people any specific way (nice strawman), I'm simply showing statistics that explain why the crime rate among white people is considered less threatening than that among Black people.
And I should add a black neighborhood is defacto a neighborhood with a huge disproportion of men in prime violence years. Would I live in an all black neighborhood with white neighborhood age demographics? Certainly! If your average neighbor was 50 years old? Shit, probably be better than a white neighborhood. Bunch of old church ladies in fun hats. And I have lived in majority black middle class neighborhoods and my black neighbors LOVED the police. Called them over almost nothing all the time. Were way more suspicious of unknown black teens in the neighborhood than I was.
Men of course mind getting stereotyped as this because we rightly understand that you can’t treat individuals according to group disparity data. Its fine in a low information environment or an environment where women will encounter so many men that the group data will win out. But otherwise we don’t like it. Men are responsible for most violence crime, but most men are not violent criminals. White men are far more dangerous than black women. My point is that if we somehow had no black people, you’d then need to make distinctions among white ethnic groups with very disparate crime rates and the group these white nationalists lionize is the most violent one!
Maybe in the right tail but Southern states have higher white violence rates than any other states. My wife is Sicilian from NY, I'm full Scots Irish from Georgia and I ask her how can her people do all this yelling and cursing each other without fights breaking out all the time? All this honking at each other in the street and yelling insults at strangers. This would get you beaten up or killed eventually in the South. See for example https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8656339/ and https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-Directions/dp/0813319935
This is spot on. The only reason to make "white culture" a thing is because you want to play identity politics of some sort. This is part of a long line of things where it seems like the MAGA right is literally trying to embody the image of the American right conjured up by the most insane leftists. The left comes up with "whiteness" as an overarching cultural enemy, so MAGA has to go and make "whiteness" a real thing, in the form of "white culture", in the process buying into the leftist idea that a host of things that many of us would just regard as universally good values are somehow "white". You're literally endorsing the woke worldview by arguing that "white culture" is a real thing that is under attack. The more accurate depiction of reality is that the thing called "whiteness" is a collection of Western Enlightenment ideas and cultural norms, some of which may be arbitrary "white" values, but a lot of others of which are universalist ideas that should not be thought of as "belonging" to any one culture or race. Liberal democracy is a universalist idea. Should non-whites reject democracy because democracy is "white"? This is what you should go after: these ideas don't have a color, debate them on their merits not on their association with white people.
"MAGA right is literally trying to embody the image of the American right conjured up by the most insane leftists" - This mainly happens because MAGA worldview is inherently reactionary & grievance-based. If you somehow insult them, they'll try to do everything in their power to live up to that insult to an extent your insult becomes a fact.
"these ideas don't have a color, debate them on their merits" - a big section of MAGA literally hates Vivek Ramaswamy. Despite him trying his best to fit into their "ideas" of good guy, they hate him to an extent him posting pictures with his children on X is met with absolutely hateful replies targeting his brown skin!
America has been based on identity politics since the 60s civil rights legislation and only non whites can benefit from it. Blacks and Hispanics cost the US economy 1.6 trillion dollars annually.
Liberal Democracy is definitely not a universal thing.
The identity politics being referred to is one that could only have emerged through the 1960s Civil rights legislation which has assigned victimhood status to "oppressed minorities "-LGBTQ,white women etc
Referring to the identity politics written into law by White segregationists, White slaveholders, our Founding Fathers etc. Those guys began identity politics! Thanks for your answer.
So I would have agreed fifteen years ago, but after the slew of editorials from major sources like the NYT talking about how replacement is a good thing and ethnic pride (for EVERYONE EXCEPT YOU) is important, woke movies, TV shows, etc. where the white guy is always the bad guy or an idiot, not to mention things like affirmative action that, ah, certain pundits wrote excellent books attacking, I could definitely see how white people with no other ethnic marker could feel under attack. And, well, when you feel under attack, you get paranoid. Besides, at some level of minoritization (45%? 40%?) whites become like any other group. We're not there yet but I believe we did cross that line in the youngest populations and I can see why people are getting upset.
That white-nationalist fringe was always there but it only really started getting significant numbers of supporters in the last few years. For whatever reason (probably an evolutionary adaptation to tribal conflict being common), people tend to get very antsy when they see their group being outnumbered and high levels of immigration combined with antiwhite messaging on the left have probably flipped that switch for most white people.
Similarly, for men, while there are plenty of men at the very tippity-top of society, feminist attempts at equalization have done enough damage to the men at the very bottom they are starting to get upset. A lower-tier young guy can't get laid, until recently wasn't going to be allowed to move up in his job due to DEI quotas, and if he tries to talk to a woman can be filmed on Tiktok and lose his job for 'harassment'. The fact that Epstein was running a sex-trafficking ring, Bezos and Zuckerberg are billionaires, and Trump has serial wives doesn't really help him much.
I'm starting to wonder if we need to work on developing a wholesome cultural identity for white people, sort of like how people take good probiotics in order to outcompete bad bacteria.
Hitler was a dishonor to the white race. Norman Borlaug not so much.
I've thought that. I don't think you could get wholesome people (however you define 'wholesome') on board at this point. I think we're at the juncture where the culture/race/gender war has escaped containment and all you can do is pick sides and hope yours wins.
I suppose our best hope would be if a person of color like AOC started saying it. "Hitler was a dishonor, why aren't you proud of Norman Borlaug instead? Shows how decrepit your white nationalist ideology is." It could then turn into a left-wing talking point, and then left-wing whites could say "yeah, Norman Borlaug was pretty cool", and then we could get broad consensus on some sort of compromise based on that.
Right now the progressives in the position of both trying to criticize white culture and also claiming it doesn't exist, which is sort of untenable. I would say refuting white nationalists by saying "why aren't you proud of what's actually good in white culture? why do you embrace the bad stuff?" would be a much more effective strategy since it doesn't have that internal contradiction to it.
What's the solution then? Lower class people (of call races) are more likely to cling to ethnic and religious identifiers to describe themselves. You have an increasingly non-religious group that you're telling "unlike the other ethnicities, you're not allowed to identify with your group. but we're allowed to criticize your group". That breeds resentment.
Honestly the only true fix is Singaporean style speech laws that totally ban insults to anyone's race or religion - for BOTH minority AND majority groups.
Would never happen here, but I think it's the only thing that could potentially work.
I think the way critical race theorists try to collectivize all white people, and attack "whiteness" is wrong. I just don't think the response to racial identity politics is to do more identity politics. This is the sort of bad thinking that critical theory promotes. Instead of thinking of people as individuals, the critical theorists want people to think in in terms of the relative power of collective groups. Low class vs. high class, white vs. black. They fundamentally do not believe in the project of treating people as individuals. They think that's propaganda designed to oppress people. Everything is collective. People are wedded to their racial identity and the route to power (and distribution of resources) is through collectively organizing with your identity group. That's all there is. If you're saying ok well our group should also organize politically as a racial identity group, you're basically buying into their worldview.
I think that assumes that everyone in the other racial groups is also playing identity politics, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. There have been political leaders who have been able to appeal to people on broader principles. Also I think most normal humans don't really like identity politics. Most people would rather have some sort of system that is universally fair. They don't like being divided into racial identity groups any more than they liked "class warfare".
I suspect that is an urban legend. E.g. if you look at college admissions, black people have a big advantage, but women actually have a disadvantage relative to men.
45 %of white women attend college as opposed to 38 %of white males. Hiring and promoting white women has been the fastest route to achieving the DEI and ESG targets of companies in the last number of years.
Possibly, but I'm not a member of any female-identity-based political group. And I don't go around thinking of myself as belonging to some collective female interest group. Really. I'd rather not. There's a lot more to who I am as an individual than my junk. There's something fundamentally psychologically stultifying about being expected to go around conforming your identity to arbitrary political groupings defined by gender and race. Fuck that shit. That's not who I am. I'm not a "white female" first, and everything else last.
"But if the same person tells me he is proud to be a white American, he’s probably a fascist."
I love how you downplay the existence of anti-White racism and then come out with this quote. You guys really lack self awareness. Proud to be Black is okay but proud to be White is not okay. So blunt.
So many bad arguments in a single post it's pointless listing them all out, but I'll mention that no one serious is claiming that there is one comprehensive, monolithic white culture. The left likes to claim that there is a monolithic black culture, and so you assume that we are equally foolish. Maybe slow down and actually listen to the other side without freaking out about fascism and white supremacy and you can learn something.
The "probably" part implies he's drawing inference from the statistics at hand. And, it's not unreasonable at all.
"downplay the existence of anti-White racism" - Where exactly does he do that? Racism is omnidirectional, yet nobody embraces it as strongly while in power as MAGA does.
"I'll mention that no one serious is claiming that there is one comprehensive, monolithic white culture" - MAGA does exactly that. Like EXACTLY that, They do in fact claim monolithic comprehensive white native culture.
There are no statistics regarding race and commitment to fascism. He is just trying to rationalize his racism. Considering that Biden institutionalized racial discrimination in hiring and grant funding, I would say that the left embraces racism much more than MAGA.
No, right wing people do not claim that there is a monolithic white culture. We talk about "white culture" as a shorthand for the common cultural values contained by all or mostly all cultures of European ancestry. But we all understand that French culture is not the same as American culture, for instance.
I find it interesting that white progressives are all very quick to condemn "whiteness" but then doubt such a thing a "white culture" exists. It's like the old coloured people versus people of colour thing all over again.
The main thing about bourgeois liberals and proggies is that they treat culture like an accent, so that everyone has one but them. This comes from the rampany oikophobia that curdles the soul of all proggie liberals. They become rootless, feckless and gormless beings with less understanding of their own cultual inheritance as each year goes by.
And therin lies the problem. In the past political liberals might at least respect in their own cultural traditions and mores. But since the rise of progressivism, which has declared all the old ways evil, they have lost their understanding of and sympathy with their own culture. This has left a hole in the average proggy's psyche. They usually try to fill that hole through the practice of conservatism by-proxy. This involves the reverence of the traditions of other cultures, the more primitive the better. Hence, here in Australia we are constantly reminded that we live on land that was occupied by aboriginals who had a culture that was 40,000 years old. In fact they have adopted land acknowledgments asa new kind of prayer, refusing to admit that it's all bogus posturing.
One problem we run into regarding this whole identity notion of race/ethnicity mixed with culture is what you can or cant celebrate.
"Other groups are not merely allowed to have and celebrate their own culture, they are encouraged to do so. Meanwhile, whites are told that celebrating their culture is doubly stupid, stupid because it is racist, but more stupid still because it does not even exist.
But like that elusive electron in a quantum mechanics experiment, white culture does exist when critics look for it. It exists and it is wicked, the bloody heritage of unceasing conquest and exploitation."
This is the underlying issue. Whiteness and white this and that is bad, horrible, historically guilty etc... but whiteness isnt a real culture or actual identity to celebrate. (Race activists will tell you this.) https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/white-culture-and-its-discontents
Ultimately I often ask - what does a culture or a supposed race based identity look like if theres no one around to blame, compare to, oppose, whatever?
In essence positive identity thats not founded or rooted in being opposed to something.
Being proud of something doesnt mean looking down on someone or something else - "whiteness", "blackness" or whatever group.
Leftists in particular can't seem to grasp that. Maybe its because of their overall worldview when it comes to self agency vs systematic intersectional oppressor vs oppressed framework that often blurs those core presuppositions.
I fail to see anything that is primarily white culture. That is, something that's white and not part of another culture. Like you could say country music is white culture, but it's probably southern American culture first. And you could say pumpkin spice lattes are white culture, but it's really basic bitch culture first. Grandmas lasagna is primarily Italian culture. Teriyaki chicken is primarily chinese culture. Nothing is primarily white culture.
"White" may align pretty closely with European origin, but that's not what it means. The concept of a white race is really just a circle with fuzzy boundaries drawn around the people who tend to look like they colonize places. Anything they're trying to claim as "white culture" is at best a culture that primarily is associated with some group that falls within that boundary.
There never was a common European culture, especially if you include Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, until the 1990s at the earliest after the fall of the Berlin wall. Trying to treat Europeans as a common people is just not historically accurate, so of course they have no common culture.
Great read overall, would like to note some observations/remarks herewith:
1. This article contains the most accurate definition of MAGA / WigNats I have ever seen. It's so on point, I have restacked it separately.
"...people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in"
2. The point about western culture vis a vis white culture is quite underrated, I believe. It should have been underlined by Dems, like a long ago. MAGA / WigNats are openly antithetical to what made western culture the default setting across the globe in many aspects. Eg. India, UAE & South Korea, all celebrate Christmas every year. However, MAGA wants to cut white people/west off from Indians, Muslims & Asians alike!
3. As someone who's an interest in US politics as a topic despite having no direct horse in the race, I have watched enough Charlie Kirk videos to understand what MAGA truly represents! It represents a grievance-based outrage culture where the key "intellectuals" come up with a new grift every month. MAGA is so laughably ridiculous that Charlie Kirk married Erika, & his followers tried their best to brand her as trad-wife. Just to have an ugly feud erupt between her & Candace Owens, another MAGA "intellectual". The most spectacular piece of Charlie Kirk's legacy after his demise will be this ugly catfight between his wife who's heading TPUSA after him & his girl BFF(?) who's another podcaster/influencer like himself who believes in witches & curses!
4. I hope the future Dem POTUS & their administration embrace the healthy elements of western culture strongly enough to make sure these hateful grifters will never find a meaningful space in US politics. Despite Trump being in power, I still strongly believe that MAGA / WigNat is a fringe element of the overall white population & it should be marginalised as such going ahead...
In the era of the "Know-Nothing Party", the WASPs were scared of being erased by the Catholic Irish and German immigrants, and if anything they're now the basis of white identity. Culture trumps bloodline, and those who emphasize the latter are revealing their priorities.
Back in 2017 Biden was extremely excited when speaking of the future America where his kind would become an absolute minority in the near future due to non stop immigration of non whites. His regime duly opened the southern border to flood the country with at least 10 million of the desired POC.
Blacks and Hispanics cost the US economy 1.6 trillion dollars annually.
Hanania and his readers are largely Asian immigrants with a desire to establish themselves at the centre of America. He wants this future more than Biden
Whites are already a minority among Americans born over the past decade. A lot of this discourse is just the predictable outcome of whites no longer being the core or mainstream in the US. There's already a depoliticized notion of white culture that more people, including whites themselves, are becoming aware of as whites no longer define American culture broadly. Specifically, it includes pastel shorts, touching dangerous animals, college football, and attending white Evangelical churches. Hence, when a black person, Asian, or Hispanic is into those sorts of things, he'll often be called "whitewashed."
Something I think goes unappreciated is how nice it is to not have a white culture. The idea of being culturally shoved into a box because of your skin color genuinely sounds abysmal.
The left won't say it because it means criticizing minority cultures. The right won't say it because they're jealous of how liberals treat minority cultures. But at the end of the day, the fact I can basically just decide what cultures I'd most enjoy being apart of without worrying of someone will accuse me of "acting white" or "not being a real X" is very relieving. Putting aside all the other weird race shit in academia, seeing virtually every single black person in the social sciences being focused on race was somewhat depressing, just because lots of those kids would have probably loved other topics if they weren't culturally encouraged to focus on everything through their own racial experience.
I bet Blacks in America are even acutely aware of the distinctions between African immigrants, Carribean immigrants, and US-heritage blacks. They just don't talk about it that much.
I know Hispanics often express frustration that everyone thinks all Hispanics are basically the same culture when actually Mexicans, Venezuelans, Brazillians, and Argentinians have huge differences. There's an enormous continent down there.
"I bet Blacks in America are even acutely aware of the distinctions between African immigrants, Carribean immigrants, and US-heritage blacks. They just don't talk about it that much. "
They talk about it a lot, actually. African migrants often complain about the xenophobia shown by “native” African Americans.
Yeah, just another example of how identity politics tries to falsely shove people in these boxes. Maybe "native" African Americans actually have more in common with white people or Hispanics than African migrants.
My daughter spent years teaching high school in almost exclusively African American high schools in Irvington and West Newark N.J. During several summers she worked for Yale Young African Scholars on location in Rwanda, Ghana, Zimbabwe and other places giving SAT instruction and other college prep “bridge” work for elite African students preparing for study abroad.
She would be the first to tell you how bewildered Africans are when they come here. There is a cultural abyss between Africans and African-Americans that is comparable if not more pronounced than with other Americans.
Where you were born and raised matters vastly more as it relates to culture than what you look like.
>I can basically just decide what cultures I'd most enjoy being apart of without worrying of someone will accuse me of "acting white" or "not being a real X" is very relieving.
On the flip side, you can get accused of being a colonizer or engaging in cultural appropriation.
The notion that any race considered in it’s entirety to have a single coherent culture is utterly without empirical basis. What does a Tanzanian have in common with an African American from Detroit? A Finn with a Sicilian? A Filipino with a North Korean? A Sri Lankan Sinhalese with a Kashmiri Muslim?
There is a confusion and conflation with white identity, which never was much of thing until recently. It arrived in its current form likely as backlash to other identitarian movements, and to a perceived loss of influence. Oddly, those areas where whites are an impending minority status and where there is much racial admixture (I’m from LA) the cries of white identity are more muted. But in the very white areas like Kentucky and Missouri, much louder..
As you correctly point out, white identitarians are merely making a political statement.
Quite a bit in any multiracial environment. Drop a Swede, an Ashkenazi Jew, or a Frenchman in an African town and locals are going to see three Europeans and not split hairs over whether there’s ’a white culture.’ More salient is the fact that being American means very little other than sharing a common currency and economic zone.
The Africans would see three white faces. That’s it. With quite a bit of time and interaction (and a DeepL language translation app) they ultimately might understand that these three white people are very different indeed.
It’s a truism that to people largely unexposed to different races, the people of those different races look to them largely the same. Similar appearance does not necessarily translate into similar culture.
Except they aren’t that different at all in an environment with racial aliens. Their intra-European differences are minimal compared to those between themselves and the sub-Saharan African throngs around them.
You state it as if it is self evidently true without saying why. Perhaps because of color and physiognomy.
I don’t where you’re from but in my world it’s very self-evident. My world is urban America. No one is autistic enough in my world to split hairs over race. Everyone knows who is black, what whites are and what Mestizos are. Only people removed from everyday reality or in some spectrum has an issue with it.
I am a living refutation of what you’re saying. Physically, I look African-American. However, I am a second generation immigrant and grew up in a very different cultural environment than most black Americans. I knew from a young age that black American descendants of slaves and my own family were not the same ethnicity. We spoke a different language, ate different foods, wore different clothes, worshipped differently, played different sports, danced differently, etc. When people I met later in life simply assumed I was a black American with a typical black American background, they quickly realized how little they knew once they got to know my background a bit more. Furthermore, black Americans were not closer in culture to my family than white Americans.
We were talking about culture. I give up.
"they ultimately might understand that these three white people are very different indeed."
They are all WEIRD, presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World
Well considering they're way more likely to be able to communicate with the Frenchmen than the other two, you probably picked the worse example. Have you ever been to Africa?
Having been once been under French colonial rule doesn’t make one French. What are black crime and sexual assault statistics in France versus Arabs/North Africans and native French ? The French government doesn’t disclose crime statistics by race and ethnicity unfortunately.
I didn't say it made you French, do you know how to read?
You were implying so you idiot.
But that reverses the argument on its head. The 3 people will still have less in common among each other than they do in the view of the other culture. They might find common ground in commenting on their surroundings, but they remain very different overall.
No, you’ve got that backwards. Their differences are considerably minimized in an alien environment with a non-European population.
"A Sri Lankan Sinhalese with a Kashmiri Muslim" - Not just that, I am very sure a Kashmiri Muslim will have a very different cultural setting that a UP Muslim or a Karnataka Muslim for example. Similarly, a Kahsmiri Hindu will have a lot of cultural differences with a Andhra Hindu or a Bengali Hindu! This cultural variety can be easily observed in food, attire & traditions. Just India, in itself, has rich enough diversity & variety of cultures that you don't even have to compare with people from other countries to come to the conclusion you have pointed out...
Well there is the view that races don't actually exist, but ethnicities do exist - I view I share.
In biology there are intraspecific classifications such as subspecies and “distinct breeding populations” that over time lead to morphological and other intraspecific distinctions that are measurable. But these definitions are fluid and populations can merge erasing differences.
We are a species of primate and the same genetics apply to us. Intraspecific differences are a continuum and likely to be eradicated overtime as populations merge. I’m virtually 100% white British Isles. My grandchildren are part Mexican, Askenazi Jewish, Parsi Indian, and Scots Irish. But 100% human and adorable!
I agree with you!
Your comment on the social overlay triggered an interesting question. So it seems to me that what makes humans unique is we are aware of the various subspecies or distinct breeding populations (ie “races”) and indeed we make a huge deal about them. I wish we didn’t.
I am unaware of any research on the question of whether subspecies of other animals are reluctant to breed with other subspecies. (I.e., nonhuman racism).
My experience is that there does not appear to be evidence of animal racism, but I’m now going to check to see whether any empirical work on this question has been done.
Here is what Claude says…
Thanks for the nice comment.
Yes it’s very simple really. I spent many years as an environmental lawyer for nonprofits trying to enforce the Endangered Species Act.
Apart from the decelerated pace of evolutionary change from long human lifespans, the dynamics of human races are no different than the ever changing dynamics of various subspecies of songbirds called gnatcatchers.
For most animal species, when distinct populations or subspecies come into contact, the default tendency is actually to interbreed quite readily, not to avoid it. Hybridization in nature is far more common than the classic “biological species concept” implied. Genomic studies over the last two decades have revealed pervasive gene flow between what were considered distinct species, let alone subspecies — the revelations about Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture in modern humans being just one famous example among many. Wolves and coyotes, polar bears and grizzlies, various duck species, Darwin’s finches — hybridization turns out to be the norm rather than the exception across much of the animal kingdom
As if ethnicities aren’t connected to race. The logical extreme being that Congolese and Bangladeshis could be German too.
To address what I see as the nub of white identarian anxiety, there must be sequelae when a hitherto majority group loses its majority status. Eventually, that group will lose some if not most of its cultural centrality and dominance.
In earlier times, this anxiety was assuaged by the concept of the melting pot, newcomers would gladly adopt American (white) culture. Indeed, many immigrant parents are unsettled as they see their children growing up "American,” in a process that seems fundamentally out of their control. Ironically, one might speculate that antisemitism has done a lot to preserve Jewish identity in the United States.
But what it means to be American is not standing still. Until the 1960s, baseball was by far our most popular sport, but now it's football. All of us, including white identarians, are along for a ride od cultural development controlled by nobody.
I write this as a white person whose birth culture was always a minority, namely, Pennsylvania Dutch, specifically Church of the Brethren, an offshoot of the Mennonites.
One thing that has helped me understand American "White" culture is the concept of the 4 Nations of White Americans at the time of the founding: New Englander, Mid-Atlantic, Appalachian, and Southern. Each of these classical regions has its own culture, which spread to other parts of the country, and even to other ethnicities.
Things like which of the 4 Nations you belong to, religion, your specific ethnicity, your city/town/state, your family, and your profession - all of these things impact your interpretation of the human experience.
Thank you for reminding me of that typology--it is a good one.
I feel blessed to belong to a 5th nation. We Pennsylvania Deutcher knew we were different, and we knew it was important to stay different. I have never once felt I had to conform to anyone else's ideas about anything.
Incidentally, I had a few relative (dead now), who spoke German as a co language, even though our ancestors had been in the country for 200 years at that point.
Great point. The past is a foreign culture. We're all experiencing cultural change from within whether we want it or not. Lots of people in America grow up in religious or ethnic subcultures that are pretty distinct from mainstream culture. Having a tolerance for diversity and change isn't just beneficial for immigrants but also different generations.
I like how these people talk about immigrant or black crime then wax nostalgic about the Scots Irish. We are literally the most violent white demographic in the US by a wide margin. Our origin is literally as lawless bandits that the English tried to buy off by using us as thugs to control Ulster.
Because the scot-irish crime rate is infinitesimal compared to black crime rate
The black crime rate is infintesimal in comparison to the white crime rate compared to the male crime rate in comparison to the female yet we don’t use that disparity as a reason to assume all males are one step away from murder. And much of (but not all of) the black crime rate disparity is that blacks have a much higher proportion of their population in the peak crime age group. The median age of black people is 10 years younger than the media age of white people. And it is conservative @Wilfred Reilly who has pointed this out.
Nobody said "all black people are one step away from murder". However, objectively speaking, their crime rate is disproportionately higher compared to that of white people, even after adjusting for age and social class. There's a reason even white liberals tend not to live in predominantly black areas.
Look at the most common age for blacks and whites. The most common age for a white person is 58! For a black person it is 27. This is going to have some significant bearing on crime rates. Age disparities in murder rates are more profound than racial ones. Again, not saying this is the whole story or anything but definitely brackets things. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/
even adjusting for race and social class, black crime rate is higher
But it cuts way back on how stark that disparity is. Age matters more than social class. Age disparity in crime it profound. A 20 year old white man is more likely to kill someone than a 40 year old black man. I have also lived in cracker southern places with no black people at all and you also were suspicious of teenage boys wandering aimlessly about.
Oh yeah, I have no problem with any of that, but what exactly would we like to see differently in terms of policy or whatever in light of that fact? Men are 94% of criminals but in my daily life it changes not at all how I interact with men except maybe in some unique circumstances. And men get actively mad (rightly so) about being stereotyped by group data. And yeah, white southerners are many times more violent that whites in other parts of the country. There is data on this. Mississippi has a white murder rate of 6.3 per 100,000. Compare that to Massachusetts at 1 per 100,000. So should we treat white southerners, relative to white yankees, the same way you would like to treat blacks relative to whites on this information? Are you scared to live in the South among whites given the 6 times higher murder rate? So yeah, there are dopey liberals who aren’t realistic about negatively valenced disparities but most of us have a pretty good grasp on levels of analysis.
It's not as if women can live in women-only neighborhoods. And most men don't really get acticely mad when they are stereotyped as being more violent than women, because we all know (and accept) that it's true. I don't want to treat Black people any specific way (nice strawman), I'm simply showing statistics that explain why the crime rate among white people is considered less threatening than that among Black people.
And I should add a black neighborhood is defacto a neighborhood with a huge disproportion of men in prime violence years. Would I live in an all black neighborhood with white neighborhood age demographics? Certainly! If your average neighbor was 50 years old? Shit, probably be better than a white neighborhood. Bunch of old church ladies in fun hats. And I have lived in majority black middle class neighborhoods and my black neighbors LOVED the police. Called them over almost nothing all the time. Were way more suspicious of unknown black teens in the neighborhood than I was.
Men of course mind getting stereotyped as this because we rightly understand that you can’t treat individuals according to group disparity data. Its fine in a low information environment or an environment where women will encounter so many men that the group data will win out. But otherwise we don’t like it. Men are responsible for most violence crime, but most men are not violent criminals. White men are far more dangerous than black women. My point is that if we somehow had no black people, you’d then need to make distinctions among white ethnic groups with very disparate crime rates and the group these white nationalists lionize is the most violent one!
What about Italians? I think they could give the Scots Irish a run for their money.
Maybe in the right tail but Southern states have higher white violence rates than any other states. My wife is Sicilian from NY, I'm full Scots Irish from Georgia and I ask her how can her people do all this yelling and cursing each other without fights breaking out all the time? All this honking at each other in the street and yelling insults at strangers. This would get you beaten up or killed eventually in the South. See for example https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8656339/ and https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-Directions/dp/0813319935
This is spot on. The only reason to make "white culture" a thing is because you want to play identity politics of some sort. This is part of a long line of things where it seems like the MAGA right is literally trying to embody the image of the American right conjured up by the most insane leftists. The left comes up with "whiteness" as an overarching cultural enemy, so MAGA has to go and make "whiteness" a real thing, in the form of "white culture", in the process buying into the leftist idea that a host of things that many of us would just regard as universally good values are somehow "white". You're literally endorsing the woke worldview by arguing that "white culture" is a real thing that is under attack. The more accurate depiction of reality is that the thing called "whiteness" is a collection of Western Enlightenment ideas and cultural norms, some of which may be arbitrary "white" values, but a lot of others of which are universalist ideas that should not be thought of as "belonging" to any one culture or race. Liberal democracy is a universalist idea. Should non-whites reject democracy because democracy is "white"? This is what you should go after: these ideas don't have a color, debate them on their merits not on their association with white people.
"MAGA right is literally trying to embody the image of the American right conjured up by the most insane leftists" - This mainly happens because MAGA worldview is inherently reactionary & grievance-based. If you somehow insult them, they'll try to do everything in their power to live up to that insult to an extent your insult becomes a fact.
"these ideas don't have a color, debate them on their merits" - a big section of MAGA literally hates Vivek Ramaswamy. Despite him trying his best to fit into their "ideas" of good guy, they hate him to an extent him posting pictures with his children on X is met with absolutely hateful replies targeting his brown skin!
America has been based on identity politics since the 60s civil rights legislation and only non whites can benefit from it. Blacks and Hispanics cost the US economy 1.6 trillion dollars annually.
Liberal Democracy is definitely not a universal thing.
Anyone who believes that identity politics began in the 1960s seems to have missed 200 years of American history
The identity politics being referred to is one that could only have emerged through the 1960s Civil rights legislation which has assigned victimhood status to "oppressed minorities "-LGBTQ,white women etc
We should deconstruct identity politics not lean into it.
Who's "we"?If you're a white woman you possess the potential to be able to" lean in" to identity politics quite a bit.
Referring to the identity politics written into law by White segregationists, White slaveholders, our Founding Fathers etc. Those guys began identity politics! Thanks for your answer.
So I would have agreed fifteen years ago, but after the slew of editorials from major sources like the NYT talking about how replacement is a good thing and ethnic pride (for EVERYONE EXCEPT YOU) is important, woke movies, TV shows, etc. where the white guy is always the bad guy or an idiot, not to mention things like affirmative action that, ah, certain pundits wrote excellent books attacking, I could definitely see how white people with no other ethnic marker could feel under attack. And, well, when you feel under attack, you get paranoid. Besides, at some level of minoritization (45%? 40%?) whites become like any other group. We're not there yet but I believe we did cross that line in the youngest populations and I can see why people are getting upset.
That white-nationalist fringe was always there but it only really started getting significant numbers of supporters in the last few years. For whatever reason (probably an evolutionary adaptation to tribal conflict being common), people tend to get very antsy when they see their group being outnumbered and high levels of immigration combined with antiwhite messaging on the left have probably flipped that switch for most white people.
Similarly, for men, while there are plenty of men at the very tippity-top of society, feminist attempts at equalization have done enough damage to the men at the very bottom they are starting to get upset. A lower-tier young guy can't get laid, until recently wasn't going to be allowed to move up in his job due to DEI quotas, and if he tries to talk to a woman can be filmed on Tiktok and lose his job for 'harassment'. The fact that Epstein was running a sex-trafficking ring, Bezos and Zuckerberg are billionaires, and Trump has serial wives doesn't really help him much.
I'm starting to wonder if we need to work on developing a wholesome cultural identity for white people, sort of like how people take good probiotics in order to outcompete bad bacteria.
Hitler was a dishonor to the white race. Norman Borlaug not so much.
I've thought that. I don't think you could get wholesome people (however you define 'wholesome') on board at this point. I think we're at the juncture where the culture/race/gender war has escaped containment and all you can do is pick sides and hope yours wins.
A lot of us are cross-pressured.
I suppose our best hope would be if a person of color like AOC started saying it. "Hitler was a dishonor, why aren't you proud of Norman Borlaug instead? Shows how decrepit your white nationalist ideology is." It could then turn into a left-wing talking point, and then left-wing whites could say "yeah, Norman Borlaug was pretty cool", and then we could get broad consensus on some sort of compromise based on that.
Right now the progressives in the position of both trying to criticize white culture and also claiming it doesn't exist, which is sort of untenable. I would say refuting white nationalists by saying "why aren't you proud of what's actually good in white culture? why do you embrace the bad stuff?" would be a much more effective strategy since it doesn't have that internal contradiction to it.
Richard coming around to the "power plus prejudice" view of racism in 2026.
I mean, if the facts change he should change his opinions, right?
Circumstances have changed, sure, but I don't think any "facts" have.
What's the solution then? Lower class people (of call races) are more likely to cling to ethnic and religious identifiers to describe themselves. You have an increasingly non-religious group that you're telling "unlike the other ethnicities, you're not allowed to identify with your group. but we're allowed to criticize your group". That breeds resentment.
Honestly the only true fix is Singaporean style speech laws that totally ban insults to anyone's race or religion - for BOTH minority AND majority groups.
Would never happen here, but I think it's the only thing that could potentially work.
I think the way critical race theorists try to collectivize all white people, and attack "whiteness" is wrong. I just don't think the response to racial identity politics is to do more identity politics. This is the sort of bad thinking that critical theory promotes. Instead of thinking of people as individuals, the critical theorists want people to think in in terms of the relative power of collective groups. Low class vs. high class, white vs. black. They fundamentally do not believe in the project of treating people as individuals. They think that's propaganda designed to oppress people. Everything is collective. People are wedded to their racial identity and the route to power (and distribution of resources) is through collectively organizing with your identity group. That's all there is. If you're saying ok well our group should also organize politically as a racial identity group, you're basically buying into their worldview.
I agree with you 100%. But isn't there a game theory angle here? If whites are the only one defecting, they will be at a disadvantage.
I think that assumes that everyone in the other racial groups is also playing identity politics, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. There have been political leaders who have been able to appeal to people on broader principles. Also I think most normal humans don't really like identity politics. Most people would rather have some sort of system that is universally fair. They don't like being divided into racial identity groups any more than they liked "class warfare".
Disingenuous. White women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action and DEI in sheer numerical terms
I suspect that is an urban legend. E.g. if you look at college admissions, black people have a big advantage, but women actually have a disadvantage relative to men.
45 %of white women attend college as opposed to 38 %of white males. Hiring and promoting white women has been the fastest route to achieving the DEI and ESG targets of companies in the last number of years.
Possibly, but I'm not a member of any female-identity-based political group. And I don't go around thinking of myself as belonging to some collective female interest group. Really. I'd rather not. There's a lot more to who I am as an individual than my junk. There's something fundamentally psychologically stultifying about being expected to go around conforming your identity to arbitrary political groupings defined by gender and race. Fuck that shit. That's not who I am. I'm not a "white female" first, and everything else last.
Definitely. In education and employment white women are favoured over white males.
"But if the same person tells me he is proud to be a white American, he’s probably a fascist."
I love how you downplay the existence of anti-White racism and then come out with this quote. You guys really lack self awareness. Proud to be Black is okay but proud to be White is not okay. So blunt.
So many bad arguments in a single post it's pointless listing them all out, but I'll mention that no one serious is claiming that there is one comprehensive, monolithic white culture. The left likes to claim that there is a monolithic black culture, and so you assume that we are equally foolish. Maybe slow down and actually listen to the other side without freaking out about fascism and white supremacy and you can learn something.
The "probably" part implies he's drawing inference from the statistics at hand. And, it's not unreasonable at all.
"downplay the existence of anti-White racism" - Where exactly does he do that? Racism is omnidirectional, yet nobody embraces it as strongly while in power as MAGA does.
"I'll mention that no one serious is claiming that there is one comprehensive, monolithic white culture" - MAGA does exactly that. Like EXACTLY that, They do in fact claim monolithic comprehensive white native culture.
There are no statistics regarding race and commitment to fascism. He is just trying to rationalize his racism. Considering that Biden institutionalized racial discrimination in hiring and grant funding, I would say that the left embraces racism much more than MAGA.
No, right wing people do not claim that there is a monolithic white culture. We talk about "white culture" as a shorthand for the common cultural values contained by all or mostly all cultures of European ancestry. But we all understand that French culture is not the same as American culture, for instance.
I find it interesting that white progressives are all very quick to condemn "whiteness" but then doubt such a thing a "white culture" exists. It's like the old coloured people versus people of colour thing all over again.
The main thing about bourgeois liberals and proggies is that they treat culture like an accent, so that everyone has one but them. This comes from the rampany oikophobia that curdles the soul of all proggie liberals. They become rootless, feckless and gormless beings with less understanding of their own cultual inheritance as each year goes by.
And therin lies the problem. In the past political liberals might at least respect in their own cultural traditions and mores. But since the rise of progressivism, which has declared all the old ways evil, they have lost their understanding of and sympathy with their own culture. This has left a hole in the average proggy's psyche. They usually try to fill that hole through the practice of conservatism by-proxy. This involves the reverence of the traditions of other cultures, the more primitive the better. Hence, here in Australia we are constantly reminded that we live on land that was occupied by aboriginals who had a culture that was 40,000 years old. In fact they have adopted land acknowledgments asa new kind of prayer, refusing to admit that it's all bogus posturing.
One problem we run into regarding this whole identity notion of race/ethnicity mixed with culture is what you can or cant celebrate.
"Other groups are not merely allowed to have and celebrate their own culture, they are encouraged to do so. Meanwhile, whites are told that celebrating their culture is doubly stupid, stupid because it is racist, but more stupid still because it does not even exist.
But like that elusive electron in a quantum mechanics experiment, white culture does exist when critics look for it. It exists and it is wicked, the bloody heritage of unceasing conquest and exploitation."
This is the underlying issue. Whiteness and white this and that is bad, horrible, historically guilty etc... but whiteness isnt a real culture or actual identity to celebrate. (Race activists will tell you this.) https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/white-culture-and-its-discontents
So which is it?
I think theres something to be said for Albions Seed and the 4 different types of initial settlers in the initial waves that came to America if we want to actually think about culture. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/)
Ultimately I often ask - what does a culture or a supposed race based identity look like if theres no one around to blame, compare to, oppose, whatever?
In essence positive identity thats not founded or rooted in being opposed to something.
Being proud of something doesnt mean looking down on someone or something else - "whiteness", "blackness" or whatever group.
Leftists in particular can't seem to grasp that. Maybe its because of their overall worldview when it comes to self agency vs systematic intersectional oppressor vs oppressed framework that often blurs those core presuppositions.
I fail to see anything that is primarily white culture. That is, something that's white and not part of another culture. Like you could say country music is white culture, but it's probably southern American culture first. And you could say pumpkin spice lattes are white culture, but it's really basic bitch culture first. Grandmas lasagna is primarily Italian culture. Teriyaki chicken is primarily chinese culture. Nothing is primarily white culture.
"White" may align pretty closely with European origin, but that's not what it means. The concept of a white race is really just a circle with fuzzy boundaries drawn around the people who tend to look like they colonize places. Anything they're trying to claim as "white culture" is at best a culture that primarily is associated with some group that falls within that boundary.
There never was a common European culture, especially if you include Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, until the 1990s at the earliest after the fall of the Berlin wall. Trying to treat Europeans as a common people is just not historically accurate, so of course they have no common culture.
Great read overall, would like to note some observations/remarks herewith:
1. This article contains the most accurate definition of MAGA / WigNats I have ever seen. It's so on point, I have restacked it separately.
"...people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in"
2. The point about western culture vis a vis white culture is quite underrated, I believe. It should have been underlined by Dems, like a long ago. MAGA / WigNats are openly antithetical to what made western culture the default setting across the globe in many aspects. Eg. India, UAE & South Korea, all celebrate Christmas every year. However, MAGA wants to cut white people/west off from Indians, Muslims & Asians alike!
3. As someone who's an interest in US politics as a topic despite having no direct horse in the race, I have watched enough Charlie Kirk videos to understand what MAGA truly represents! It represents a grievance-based outrage culture where the key "intellectuals" come up with a new grift every month. MAGA is so laughably ridiculous that Charlie Kirk married Erika, & his followers tried their best to brand her as trad-wife. Just to have an ugly feud erupt between her & Candace Owens, another MAGA "intellectual". The most spectacular piece of Charlie Kirk's legacy after his demise will be this ugly catfight between his wife who's heading TPUSA after him & his girl BFF(?) who's another podcaster/influencer like himself who believes in witches & curses!
4. I hope the future Dem POTUS & their administration embrace the healthy elements of western culture strongly enough to make sure these hateful grifters will never find a meaningful space in US politics. Despite Trump being in power, I still strongly believe that MAGA / WigNat is a fringe element of the overall white population & it should be marginalised as such going ahead...
An Indian whose foundational culture is the caste system. The irony.
In the era of the "Know-Nothing Party", the WASPs were scared of being erased by the Catholic Irish and German immigrants, and if anything they're now the basis of white identity. Culture trumps bloodline, and those who emphasize the latter are revealing their priorities.
Back in 2017 Biden was extremely excited when speaking of the future America where his kind would become an absolute minority in the near future due to non stop immigration of non whites. His regime duly opened the southern border to flood the country with at least 10 million of the desired POC.
Blacks and Hispanics cost the US economy 1.6 trillion dollars annually.
Hanania and his readers are largely Asian immigrants with a desire to establish themselves at the centre of America. He wants this future more than Biden
Whites are already a minority among Americans born over the past decade. A lot of this discourse is just the predictable outcome of whites no longer being the core or mainstream in the US. There's already a depoliticized notion of white culture that more people, including whites themselves, are becoming aware of as whites no longer define American culture broadly. Specifically, it includes pastel shorts, touching dangerous animals, college football, and attending white Evangelical churches. Hence, when a black person, Asian, or Hispanic is into those sorts of things, he'll often be called "whitewashed."