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.
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.
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.
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 whites faces. That’s it. Without 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.
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.
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.
I would turn the whole thing on it's head and say that white culture are those who believe that the lunar landings actually took place since the all the men that have ever landed on the Moon have been white. With this reframing, though I have a white skin color, I cannot consider myself "white".
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.
Today’s America seems to have two “white culture” undercurrents.
There seems to be a conservative white culture; driven by grievances and paranoia that is now manifested in White Christian Nationalist Patriarchy. (Basically a mindset that if you are none of these four, you are a threat to the white culture.)
Can the liberal white culture be identified as the culture that started from, and continues to evolve, the intellectual movements like Renaissance, humanism, rationalism, scientific revolution, enlightenment. This happened primarily in Europe led primarily by White elites.
Of course, Black-n-White view points are never accurate but at least the political scene in today’s America seems to fall in these two categories.
This makes sense. It's kinda funny, though--this is pretty much exactly what the critical studies people have been saying all along, just without the unnecessary jargon. Sometimes it takes a different messenger.
It's useful to have you as a writer Richard. I appreciate your truth-seeking.
It's interesting how many truth-seeking people are former dissident-right figures. I believe this is because essentially certain salient truths were repressed. But they were available online. This led to a generation of open-minded, truth-seeking people considering beliefs which seemed reasonable on the merits of truth and falsity, while at the same time a progressive movement rose which aimed to cancel those who could be proven to hold those views, even privately.
Readers of this blog may find the following thinkers interesting (though of varying quality and bent): Richard Hanania, Richard Spencer, Michael Tracey, Pedro Gonzalez, Anatoly Karlin, Ride The Tiger Yoga, Nick Fuentes, Keith Woods, Sneako, Ryan Geddie, Rashad Crenshaw, Sam Harris, Destiny, Michael Shermer, Jonathan Rauch, Paul Graham.
Hanania will be interested to know: in the 90s, Rauch presaged 'The Origins of Woke' and described the same phenomenon and identified its legal cause.
> Liberals are afraid that if they grant white culture exists, they might by their own logic have to buy into the right’s identitarian political agenda. The left’s position is somewhere between meaningless and completely false. Yet their instincts are correct in that they’re arguing with people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in.
Rashad Crenshaw in particular has a liberal commentary that accepts the existence of white culture. It's titled 'MAGA Has Lost The Culture War' on Youtube and it's quite hilarious, Fuentes-style.
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.
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.
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.
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 whites faces. That’s it. Without 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.
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.
We were talking about culture. I give up.
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.
I would turn the whole thing on it's head and say that white culture are those who believe that the lunar landings actually took place since the all the men that have ever landed on the Moon have been white. With this reframing, though I have a white skin color, I cannot consider myself "white".
There are so many things in this world you never think you're going to see.
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.
Today’s America seems to have two “white culture” undercurrents.
There seems to be a conservative white culture; driven by grievances and paranoia that is now manifested in White Christian Nationalist Patriarchy. (Basically a mindset that if you are none of these four, you are a threat to the white culture.)
Can the liberal white culture be identified as the culture that started from, and continues to evolve, the intellectual movements like Renaissance, humanism, rationalism, scientific revolution, enlightenment. This happened primarily in Europe led primarily by White elites.
Of course, Black-n-White view points are never accurate but at least the political scene in today’s America seems to fall in these two categories.
This makes sense. It's kinda funny, though--this is pretty much exactly what the critical studies people have been saying all along, just without the unnecessary jargon. Sometimes it takes a different messenger.
It's useful to have you as a writer Richard. I appreciate your truth-seeking.
It's interesting how many truth-seeking people are former dissident-right figures. I believe this is because essentially certain salient truths were repressed. But they were available online. This led to a generation of open-minded, truth-seeking people considering beliefs which seemed reasonable on the merits of truth and falsity, while at the same time a progressive movement rose which aimed to cancel those who could be proven to hold those views, even privately.
Readers of this blog may find the following thinkers interesting (though of varying quality and bent): Richard Hanania, Richard Spencer, Michael Tracey, Pedro Gonzalez, Anatoly Karlin, Ride The Tiger Yoga, Nick Fuentes, Keith Woods, Sneako, Ryan Geddie, Rashad Crenshaw, Sam Harris, Destiny, Michael Shermer, Jonathan Rauch, Paul Graham.
Hanania will be interested to know: in the 90s, Rauch presaged 'The Origins of Woke' and described the same phenomenon and identified its legal cause.
> Liberals are afraid that if they grant white culture exists, they might by their own logic have to buy into the right’s identitarian political agenda. The left’s position is somewhere between meaningless and completely false. Yet their instincts are correct in that they’re arguing with people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in.
Rashad Crenshaw in particular has a liberal commentary that accepts the existence of white culture. It's titled 'MAGA Has Lost The Culture War' on Youtube and it's quite hilarious, Fuentes-style.