Hacker News Reader

It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.

It’s just obviously untrue too.

I'm stealing this point from Twitter, but Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth - culturally, linguistically, even genetically. There are 250 ethnic groups within Nigeria alone, most of which have little in the way of shared language or culture, and had even less before colonists drew a circle around them and insisted they were a single nation. How on Earth does it make sense to say that all black people have a shared culture, especially if you simultaneously insist that white people don't?

You may find this philosophy bizarre, and I agree, but it's important to understand that it doesn't come from nowhere; it's been brewing in academia for decades and is spreading into the mainstream at alarming speed. I highly recommend learning more about "critical race theory" if you want to understand why what many now call "neoracism" is gaining so much traction within our elite institutions.

> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does"

To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."

The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.

A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.

I tried browsing /r/whitepeopletwitter for the first time, and as far as I can tell it mainly consists of meme-like language that mocks views typically ascribed to Republicans or, in the case of race issues, white Americans that espouse white supremacy. This seems more like an expression of the political reality of some white Americans than any cultural aspect that applies to "white Americans" in general.

> The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.

I would also disagree with this premise. There were stereotypes about black Americans as soon as the first slave ships landed, despite these populations being from vastly different parts of the continent, different ethnic groups, different linguistic groups, etc. They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around.

There are also stereotypes about various immigrant and second-generation American groups today (e.g. "Asian-Americans are smart") despite most of these primarily being a result of selection bias due to immigration policies that were ostensibly racist until recently, not a result of a general cultural attribute (e.g. "superior Asian intelligence").

>They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around.

The thing that I don't accept about this argument is that this would seem to imply then that not expressing these differences could be seen as "white culture." It seems like only you try to disentangle Black Culture from American Culture, then the non-black aspects of American Culture can be thought of interchangeably with "White Culture." It's almost like a straightforward semantic thing, but it's aggressively resisted for reasons that I can't see as stemming from anything other than a prior desire to somehow elevate blacks.

Note that the argument can scale up to encompass other racial cultures as well - once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Is the because it would be argued that these cultural dimensions didn't arise because of a specifically-shared white identity? It seems pretty odd to find that relevant, however, as the specific practices of other racial cultures largely did not originate/propagate based on conscious racial identity. I think that it's really difficult to justify all of this stuff without embracing an axiomatic "white people are different" assumption somewhere in the argument.

Like, what does it matter for the definition of culture if group X and Y are different because X was "forced" to adopt different practices? Does this means that X culture exists but Y culture doesn't? That seems arbitrary to me.

> once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"?

Perhaps because on the one hand you still need to subtract so many other immigrant cultures (Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, etc.), and on the other the "melting-pot" residue is still a set of (largely regional) subcultures that don't have all that much in common (California Surfers, Utah Mormons, Mountain Westerners, Texan Cattle Ranchers, Minnesota Nice, New England Yankees, Deep Southerners, etc.), and if you subtract those what's left over is a fiction that mostly exists only in media and advertising, like the Standard American Newscaster accent that no-one actually speaks natively, although you might make a case for the existence of a generic Suburban American culture that, if it can be said to exist, only came into being after World War II.

The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though.

It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.

> The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though.

You can, and it has been done, but that's a bit more like noting regional differences within a subculture than it is, for example, like examining the differences between Americans who identify as Latino/Tejano/Hispanic.

There are fewer differences between East Coast vs. West Coast Rap and Hip-hop than there are between "Country" and "Western" music.

> It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.

There are plenty of privileges that have cultural markers that don't necessarily have a corresponding culture per-se. Rich, straight, and male privileges come to mind.

The privilege, in many respects, often simply comes from the assumption that members of your group are in some sense considered the default type of human, and that other humans are the exceptions (even if they actually outnumber the 'default') that the world may or may not choose to accommodate in various ways. That doesn't necessarily imply that the privileged 'default' groups have distinct cultures surrounding that core assumption.

Gah. Intersectionality is hard.

Perhaps a bit of nuance is in order. Rather than saying that "there is no such thing as White Culture", it would make more sense to say "in America there are many white cultures"?

>The privilege, in many respects, often simply comes from the assumption that members of your group are in some sense considered the default type of human, and that other humans are the exceptions (even if they actually outnumber the 'default') that the world may or may not choose to accommodate in various ways.

Sure, but obviously the modally-raised examples of privilege are not stuff like "'flesh-colored' crayons correspond to white skin tones." It pertains to perceived social norms and such that benefit white people as a class at the expense of non-white people. But if you posit that those social norms may constitute a shared cultural experience, then you've crossed a line? I don't buy it.

If you go on Twitter and find someone talking about hating white people for whatever reasons (shouldn't be too hard), I'm sure that many of the critiques will be cultural in nature (eg. look at all the culturally-laden digs towards "white-girl feminism".) But again, this shouldn't be taken to imply the existence of white culture? Why not?

I'm not particularly hung up on trying to prove that white culture exists in particular, but I just don't think the arguments for why black culture exists but not white culture are very good, and I think they are clearly subverted by how woke narratives collectively treat white people in pretty much any sort of critical context.

> One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper

Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?

Normalizing it for future generations. Once you grow up in a world where you only ever see Black capitalized but white not, it will feel natural to you, just like capitalizing the President is. (Not done in some languages like mine.)

In terms of Black/white, the tipping point from “good faith” to “performative” was this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/arts/television/lupin-net...

It’s a good article, and largely innocuous, and it uses “Black” to describe a (fictional) French man in France.

As a non-native English speaker and European, I find these "minor language tweaks" pure distraction. I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone -- like many European countries already do. One could also enforce more wage transparency to fight systematic salary discrimination. But it's so much cheaper to capitalize one letter.

white Black

There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.

> I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone

In fairness I'm not sure the New York Times really has the authority to do that.

Well, they could spend more paper on showing how other OECD countries tackle discrimination and even campaign for similar measures in the US.

> white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does

I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?