Seeing the Invisible: Whiteness, Intersectionality and Nacirema Culture
Josh Ayer • Oct 20, 2021
A BLIND MAN’S GUIDE
“Is there such a thing as white culture? Whites may have culture but not from their unified whiteness – as part of other groups that happen to be white.
-Shawn St. Peter
Enter the Nacirema
In 1956, anthropologist Horace Miner published an ethnography which would change the teaching of anthropology forever. Body Ritual Among the Nacirema
described the, arcane, masochistic and perplexing range of ritual practices undertaken by the Nacirema
people in the maintenance of their physical and spiritual selves. The style and language of the article were typical of ethnographic writing at the time. The actions of the subject population were characterized as “rites” “and “ceremonies,” taking place at “shrines,” “temples,” and the particularly mystifying “latipso.” The various actors were denoted with such terms as “holy-mouth-man,” and “vestal maidens.”
All told, it is a predictably exotic way to welcome students into the world of anthropology, and since then has been an early feature of almost every Intro to Cultural Anthropology class ever taught.
In short order, though, most students come to realize that “Nacirema” is simply “American” spelled backwards. The “latipso” temple, where the medicine men and vestal maidens conduct their holy ceremonies, is no more than a “hospital,” – backwards and absent an H – at which doctors and nurses perform medical procedures. The shrines are bathrooms.
By framing their baseline culture as something exotic via language and association, Miner reminds us of the many dangers inherent in cross-cultural study. If we’re not careful, we can render the subject culture permanently alien to us and unrecognizable to itself, even and especially when the subject culture is our own.
Thus, when questions regarding the nature – even the existence – of White-American Culture arise, I’m immediately reminded of the lesson of the Nacirema. We must start by dissolving illusions -- that minority cultures are neither inherently nor permanently alien, and that our home culture is as much a culture as any other and subject to the same deconstruction.
For the former, the challenge is seeing the forest through the trees; we have historically struggled to see the big picture, in which Black-American Culture is as much American culture as any other, because we are so aware of individual difference. For the latter, we can’t see the trees through the forest; we are so totally enveloped in the big picture – the white Euro-American culture that has be the normative baseline for almost all of American history – that we cannot pick out its culturally-specific loci for difference. Until we interrogate these obstacles, Black-American Culture will remain forever a curiosity and White-American Culture will remain forever invisible. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable.
As a standard for comparison, I have chosen Black-American Culture, for reasons I will disclose later.
The (Shamefully Abridged) Literature Review
Increasing across the past 30 years at least, efforts dissolve such assumptions about minority cultures have become conspicuous in their ubiquity. In entertainment, social media, politics, marketing – effectively, in every aspect of daily life –these efforts work visibly on behalf of a few particular minorities. Black, Hispanic, Female (paradoxically 51.1 percent of the country) and LGBT populations have become widespread, even statistically disproportionate, features in entertainment media. Major companies leverage their (minority) race-positive programs as a means to entice consumers. Whether searching Google or academic sources, race-positive and inclusivity-oriented articles on American minority cultures number in the thousands. Very much by hook or by crook, we have entered an Age of Inclusion.
There is a paucity, though, of race-positive, inclusivity-oriented sources on White-American Culture. In a Google search for “white culture,” the first hit insists that there is simply no such thing. Subsequent hits –those which acknowledge its existence– almost invariably describe it in entirely negative terms; those rare potentially positive traits are eventually parsed into the negative. Some articles only address White-American Culture in the frame of white supremacist groups, and those that remain refute the errant white-positive traits the proofreaders missed in other articles.
Indeed, were some extraterrestrial anthropologist to perform a lit review on the white variant of Homo sapiens, they could not help but identify us as Earth’s fundamental problem and direct their government to blast us off the planet. Send the Vogons, they’d say.
The Argument for Existence
Would they be right? In an Age of Inclusion characterized by Black and Middle Eastern ASU students
chasing White students out of designated “multicultural spaces” while decrying the very existence of a white culture; by college professors
advocating for all black ( thus, white-excluding) celebrations for certain holidays; and the popular reemergence of a 70s era legal theory
which effectively describes how America itself is an entity of inextricable white supremacy; is there a place for a white culture? Does it even exist? Should it?
Matthew 18: 20
As the umbrella “American Culture” has already undertaken vigorously to dissolve the misapprehension that minority culture is inevitably alien, let us start instead by dissolving the idea that White-American Culture does not exist.
Simply, it is impossible for a people to exist without culture. Distilled, culture
is everything about a species that biology doesn’t cover. Beliefs, ideas, institutions, communication, family structure, naming convention, aesthetics, material artifacts – it would be impossible to list here (or anywhere) all the tangible and intangible things of which culture is comprised. It is that thing which allows us to function at a more complex level than lower-order animals and manifests in decreasing complexity as we examine creatures of decreasingly complex cerebral development. It is evolution’s ultimate survival trait and the only non-biological product of biological evolution.
Culture differs across space and time and is transmitted among and beyond us. Cultures constantly create themselves and each other. They can add, subtract, divide and multiply. When two people meet, their cultures necessarily affect each other. Thus, as sapient, social animals, no human group, however small, can be said to be without culture. Like Jesus, where two or three gather, there it is.
Definitively, then, White people have culture. But do they have White culture? Adjusted to the context of race, culture can be said to be all of the above, shared to varying degrees between individuals with a similar phenotype – that is, a shared physical trait or set of traits appearing more commonly in one group than another. Our Age of Inclusion focuses upon skin color, but across space and time it has been any number of traits, some that we Americans wouldn’t even notice.
Cogitas Ergo Sum
As culture need not be wholly positive, our first defining clue toward a specifically White-American culture is all those articles which condemn it. In the ASU video (the inspiration for our covering this topic), the self-identified Black woman assailing two White male students – in the course of insisting that “White is not a culture,” – characterizes White-American Culture as self-centered, racist, violent, and other “White cis-male bullshit.”
In his CNN opinion piece, “There is No White Culture,”
Stanford University Professor Richard Thompson Ford disavows the existence of a White-American Culture in response to an (incredibly anachronistic) document briefly posted by the Smithsonian Museum of African American Culture & History
in 2021. The document affirmed, if scathingly, the existence of a White culture. In the course of refuting it, though, he proceeds to attribute characteristics to the culture he says doesn’t exist. According to Ford, White-American Culture (which he equates to White supremacy) “take[s] credit for the labor and accomplishments of other races, whether that labor involved physical toil extracted without wages or intellectual and cultural work copied without attribution.”
He goes on to say that “no group in history has worked harder for less reward than Black people,” an assertion which, I strongly suspect, could and would be readily denounced by more than one culture throughout history, and rightly so.
Their unflattering nature notwithstanding, the very acknowledgement of a group (defined here by phenotype) having (shared) nonphysical traits at all certifies that group as having a racial culture of its own, however odious the author might find it. And the traits he attributes to the apparently-imaginary White-American Culture parrot his peers.
Across over a dozen pages of Google returns, almost all sources agreed that White-American Culture is one of domination, racism, self-centeredness, cultural appropriation, oppression, violence, greed, rigidity, blandness, and reactionism. On the rare occasion that some arguably positive trait emerged, it was typically contextualized in a way that would denounce it, if only that such value (i.e., individualism, hard work) was forced upon non-white cultures or appropriated from the same.
In her book, The History of Whiteness, Princeton Professor Emeritus Nell Irvin Painter describes white culture as “a toggle between nothingness and awfulness.” As awful as they seem to think us, though, even shared awfulness is sufficient attribute to denote the existence of our culture. To approach a discernible They, we must have a shared culture to discern.
The Trouble with Roomba
Despite these sources, one would be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that White-American Culture itself and the products thereof are or have been a wholly negative, sinister force. In anthropology, such valuations have been anathema for decades at least, if not since its inception. If such is not the case in popular media, it isn’t the for the first time.
Rather, we are in the other half of the pendulum-swing regarding how race is represented for popular consumption. For the greater part of our history, popular media focused on the negative aspects of race-based minority cultures. Bear in mind, though, that reversing the pendulum does not reverse its effects; rather it only makes sure the bitterness
gets spread around.
These days, that same bias has turned its eye on the majority. This is no mean feat; while in both real and proportional decline, White Americans still account for between 60
and 76
percent of the U.S. population, between three and six times that of Black Americans, the next largest racial group. The white population peaked in the U.S. at 89.8
percent in 1930 and, in colonial times, at 100 percent as of 1610 (with a total population of 350).
These figures are noteworthy for two reasons. The first – and likely, most obvious – of these is that such overwhelming numbers, combined with being the incepting Western population in what would become the United States, define a clear path by which White culture became the most defining embedded culture in the United States for most of our history.
Second, the numbers caution against what I call the Nacirema Effect: being at once the largest, oldest and, as a result, most historically agentive American culture, white culture tends to confound analytical observation as a culture distinct from American culture overall.
Divided We Stand, Too
The popular objection to the existence of White-American Culture distinct from American culture overall is that American white people do not make up a unified culture, deriving as we do from a plurality of ethnic and geographic traditions. White Americans did indeed come to their Americanism by way of a multitude of countries and even continents. Discovered by Italians, founded by the British, colonized and peopled largely by the French, the Dutch, Scandinavians, Germans, Spanish and the peoples of the northern Mediterranean, one can easily see White Americans as a disarticulated hodge-podge of disparate, often conflicting cultures. And, in fact, we are.
But culture is by nature both fluid and diverse, always growing and changing through cross-cultural interaction, lived experiences, environmental stimuli and more. In our etic (from outside) view, Great Britain might seem like a fairly cohesive, unified culture, one of many such which prevent White American culture from being seen as cohesive or unified.
In reality, though, Great Britain is comprised of English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and other groups, each with their own culture and traditions. England alone descends from Angle, Saxon, Pict, Celt, Breton, Gallic and other tribal peoples. In 43 AD, the Romans colonized England, adding quite systematically their beliefs and values to England and other British isles just as they did almost all of Europe. The Norse and their culture invaded and colonized England starting in 793. And all along the way, expanding trade routes brought people and their cultures from all over the known world to English shores.
While it may be hard to see the difference from our perspective, England’s is neither a unified culture nor one of purely “English” descent (its namesake, the Angles, notwithstanding). This has been the way of the human world since human precursors first began to leave Africa over 1.8 million years ago. No unified culture can be said to exist today, nor in the past, and likely not in the future.
Even Black-American Culture is not entirely unified in origin or history or practice. Despite the efforts of Black- and White-Americans alike, no trait of Black-American Culture (not even skin tone) can be said to manifest universally across all individuals subscribing to it.
Thus, a lack of unity cannot be said to obviate the existence of White-American Culture, as it has not done so for any other.
(Mis)appropriation
Another popular argument refuting the existence of White-American Culture is that those traits which might be construed as White culture are regularly practiced by many or most Americans of Color as well. This, too, is true. In the United States, such cultural markers as the English language, suburbanism, Western scientific ways of knowing, democracy, triune government, institution-based graduated educational structure, personal-family naming structure, the nuclear family, Judeo-Christian-derived laws and values, and countless white-invented technologies and aesthetics are all regularly employed by people of color both at home and abroad.
Certainly, Black-American Culture has made clear contributions to American culture and others worldwide. Such musical forms as Jazz, Rock n’ Roll, R&B, Rap and others have been widely adopted by races and cultures throughout the world. Elements of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), a distinctly Black English dialect, are common features of American popular culture and abroad. Inspired by Ghandi, the uniquely effective, uniquely peaceful form of protest developed and deployed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been leveraged to influence governments worldwide, perhaps most prominently in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Black-derived Soul Food has found its place among the world’s preeminent chefs. Ranging from attire and hairstyle to family structure and religion, the influence of Black-American Culture on America and the world is undeniable.
But while both groups’ cultural influences have been enjoyed both by one another and outside cultures, that sharing is parsed very differently for each. When White-American cultural markers appear in cultures of color, it is characterized as a function of imperialism, colonization, slavery, dominance, exceptionalism and even violence. When Black-American markers – really, when any non-white cultural markers – appear in White culture, they are called appropriated, uncredited, and stolen.
Why the double standard?
Obvious in these terms is the historical power differential. Look at the words. Those used to describe white uptake of non-white culture reflect power and advantage; for the reverse, they describe victimhood and disadvantage.
Indeed, the White European relationship with both the modern and ancient worlds has at times been one of imperialism and conquest. Greeks, Romans, Macedonians and Phoenicians (and their Carthaginian descendants) all engaged in highly successful empire building and martial expansion, stretching at times across three continents. So, too, did the non-white Mongols, Inca, Maya, Chinese, Indians, and others. Along with trade, migration, exogamy, and more, conquest is one of the many vectors of culture change.
During the age of European Imperialism, Black Africans were being sold into slavery and distributed throughout European nations and holdings. Thus, the unique cultures which arose from such tend to contain a defining interest in the power spectrum and relationships of dominance and victimhood. Essentially, this is the unfortunate relationship in which Black met White.
It is this abiding interest which ends up characterizing White intercultural transaction – in either direction – as a function of aggression, and this history which insists that all such transactions must be an artifact of power difference. Regardless of whether we force our culture upon others or not and regardless, too, of whether or not we stand alone in that practice, it seems we shall be colored with such a brush for as long as relative power remains a focus of Black-American Culture.
As the historically most agentive racial culture in the United States, setting the standard for mores and folkways occurred naturally and without predominating intent or effort. As past efforts by white reactionaries to exclude Black people from cultural participation have eroded into obscurity, the idea of forced acculturation of the Black-American community has receded into nonexistence. While statistics have positioned White Americans to exert a strong influence on American culture, the undeniable, perhaps even statistically disproportional, influence of Black-American Culture on the same reveals that whatever traits of White-American Culture the Black community may adopt are adopted voluntarily.
Forced Acculturation
To the contrary, it seems that White-American Culture is today forced to accept the cultural characterizations laid upon it by Black-American Culture. Deriving from that same focus on power difference, it demands that we self-identify as racist, domineering, violent imperialists hell-bent on subjugating the world.
In the aforementioned graphic
from the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, White-American culture is characterized as controlling, subjugating, materialistic, bland and intolerant, among others. This graphic has been used at “diversity” workshops across the country.
Another worksheet, funded by Cuyahoga Arts & Culture
and based upon the research of “Racial Equality Trainer” Tema Okun, claims that the traits of White-American Culture include, “Either/or thinking,” “power hoarding,” “transactional goals,” “defensiveness,” “priorities and timelines that perpetuate white supremacy culture,” and “white mediocrity.” A similar worksheet
from Okun is distributed by the City of Seattle as part of its “Race and Social Justice Toolkit.”
In a public magnet school, 8-year olds were given a worksheet
entitled “(Begin to) Understand the Concept of White Privilege,” which enumerates the percentage of White people in powerful positions. While the school district claims it is not part of the curriculum, the school’s PTA alleges that the worksheet was intended for parents to “create awareness and empathy,” and sources the sheet to a popular guide
to social justice. While it does appear in that source, the attribution at the bottom of the sheet comes from an article
entitled, “”No, I Won’t Stop Saying ‘White Supremacy.’”
And in an interview
on NPR about her new book “So You Want to Talk About Race,” author Ijeoma Oluo provides guidance to White people about how to discuss race with their parents. She advises “to start first from a place of your own ignorance that you once had.” The long list of the author’s publications also contains a book entitled Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.
None of these are isolated examples.
From the cradle to the grave, then, in the new millennium, White people are forcibly acculturated to hate themselves. What we take from other cultures is appropriation and what we share with other cultures is aggression. In schools, at home, at work, on the radio, with public and private funds and from public and private sources, we are forced to accept that without our irredeemable racism, imperialism, mediocrity, greed, and supremacist aspirations, we have no culture at all.
The Mistress’s – no, Mistperson’s – Tools
Lawyer and civil-rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, the mother of Critical Race Theory, also developed another theory which has gained prominence in both public and academic spheres. In her 1989 paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique... [&c],” she introduces the world to Intersectionality. According to Crenshaw, examining discrimination and oppression along a single axis – race, for example, or gender – is inadequate to deconstructing and subsequently responding to the unique mix of identities embodied by an individual. Rather, she claims, an individual represents an intersection of many identities and, as such, experiences the world in unique ways.
While somewhat reductive, I will use myself as an example. I am white and male, both of which allegedly impart privilege. I am also predominantly male-attracted, which allegedly imparts disadvantage. I am well educated, which would impart advantage, but most of that education came later in life, which erodes the credential somewhat. These and other potential identifiers of mine – areligious but raised in both Judaism and Catholicism, native to an affluent part of New Jersey, divorced, childless, of primarily Lithuanian and Slovak descent – conspire to produce a unique experience (or non-experience) of oppression.
For instance, were a straight man to rape me, I would experience that as a gay man. Were he a straight neo-nazi, I would experience that as a Jewish gay man. And so forth. Each of these experiences would be unique to itself and could not be accounted simply under Homophobia or Antisemitism.
The theory is a common feature in feminist and social science literature, and appears prominently among the works of civil justice writers, including that vast cadre of writers forcing an acculturation of self-hatred upon White culture. And it has its merits.
Oppression aside, though, elements of the Intersectionality framework can help to examine how a majority culture can effectively vanish into itself. By examining the intersection of culture, subculture, and cultural embeddedness, we can gain a greater understanding of how White culture can exist simultaneously with American culture yet still affirm the multiplicity of ethnic and national heritages within it.
For instance, the Lithuanian, Slovak and Jewish cultures populate my palate with rich, inexpensive cuisine, conceptually similar to Black-American Culture’s soul food. However, my upbringing in North Jersey adds Italian, British, Irish, Hispanic, Portuguese and seafood-based cuisines to the mix. The affluence of my hometown and my attending culinary school refines my palate with Haute-Cuisine, and its proximity to New York City enriches it with both street foods and a wide range of ethnic cuisines unavailable in less diverse areas.
While being American ensures that I’ve had no shortage of hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, French fries, and subs (though not Hoagies or Grinders, being from North Jersey), these do not eliminate any of those other foods from my tastes; nor do the presence of such foods eliminate hot dogs and such or make them less American.
To the contrary, the confluence of cultures in America produces a range of cuisines that are uniquely American. Consider pizza. The most iconic of Italian pizzas, the Margherita Pizza, couldn’t make its Italian debut until Americans started exporting tomatoes, which were a crop specific to America. In turn, modern American pizza couldn’t make its American debut until Italy started exporting Italians. As pizza made its way across the country, it passed through a variety of regions and cultures, each contributing to its development according to their own traditions and/or circumstances. Even here in remote Wyoming, we find pizza in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Neapolitan and (wretched) franchise styles. And not one of these makes pizza any less Italian.
Today, there is a marked difference between Italian and Italian-American cuisine, or Chinese and Chinese-American, Mexican and Mexican-American and so forth. And yet, Chinese remains Chinese, American remains American, and Chinese-American is identical to neither but has features of both.
Of the oppression of Black women, Crenshaw says, “... the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism.” Like me and pizza and Kimberlé Crenshaw, White-American Culture represents an intersection of cultural identities greater than the sum of its parts. It is American but does not represent all Americans. It is European but has developed outside Europe for centuries. It is identical to neither but has features of both.
White People Be Like...
So far, we’ve argued against the nonexistence of White American culture. But now that we’re certain it exists, what the hell is it? With the help of Intersectionality, we can peer through the forest to see the trees.
While there are innumerable cultural markers related to White-American Culture, let these three stand as analytical examples. I fervently hope that presenting a framework by which to both see and deconstruct it, we may move toward constructive, mutual, non-judgmental discourse on the topic.
We are Diverse
Just as one earlier source proclaimed she would “not stop saying white supremacy,” I will not stop saying white diversity. We are so diverse that it makes it hard for some to acknowledge that we are actually a culture. We are a mall food court of cultures, and our defining feature is sitting in the middle of it all happily savoring foods from every stall.
Within the shared phenotype of white(ish) skin, we hail from thousands of cultures across Europe, Asia Minor, and the Levant. Some of us come from white cultures imbedded in majority non-white cultures, or from individual lived experiences in majority non-white nations.
Most of us are children of a plurality of heritages, with parents whose lineages trace to different countries and cultures. Most of us both experience and enjoy the fruits of disparate cultures in various forms and by various means.
We come to our Americanism at different moments across over 400 years of history; some of our lineages were here from day one, while others just got here today. In each case, we come here from unique circumstances and enter into circumstances equally as unique when we arrive.
We readily share our individual heritages with others and, in turn, enjoy exposure to other traditions as well. We revel in finding new ways to combine and reinvent the heritages we experience to produce something uniquely our own; when I was a kid, our Christmas tree had menorah and dreidel ornaments on it and Hannukah presents underneath, complete with a train set and Christmas village.
We are Pioneering
We all of us share a history of choosing to leave where we were and head into the unfamiliar. While some denounce us as imperialist and aggressive and colonizing and expansionist, the flip side of that coin denotes a people willing to venture forth against adversity in spite of isolation, deprivation, and peril.
Our European ancestors spread out to all corners of the world and, as Americans, we explored all corners of the continent, the planet and beyond. At the time of this writing, I sit only a few miles from where the Oregon, California, Bozeman, and Mormon Trails
intersect, and I have to wonder how those pioneering Americans, most of them White and all of them Free, would react to learning of their nonexistent legacy. I know their local descendants aren’t too keen on it.
That the outcomes of these explorations varied from windfall to disaster didn’t perturb us in that pioneering spirit. Even in a world now explored almost entirely by first-world interests, we continue to engage in world exploration for the purposes of medical, anthropological, mineral, environmental and physical innovation.
And that spirit is also conceptual. Americans account for 161 of Brittanica’s
321 Greatest Inventions and almost all of those were White Americans. We regularly risk our fortunes, reputations and even our lives on new technologies, entrepreneurial pursuits and artistic innovations, and the products of our risk tend to benefit the world.
We are Plagued by Guilt
Aside from skin color, perhaps the most prominent Intersection among White Euro-descended Americans is a history of Judeo-Christianity and, with it, a tradition of guilt. Indeed, both academic and popular spheres readily identify such unique formulations as Catholic
guilt, Protestant
guilt, Jewish
guilt and, of course, White
guilt.
Faith-based guilt manifests both as a product of sacred texts themselves and among the sensibilities of the cultures which embraced them. Both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible seem obsessed with sin and a polarized conception of good and evil, right and wrong, sacred and profane (maybe Okun was right). Both Christian and Jewish traditions organize themselves around formalized judgement, guilt and repentance.
In Judaism, Yom Kippur is dedicated to repentance for sin and is the faith’s holiest observance. Jews are called upon to contemplate the sins they committed throughout the year and repent for them. For those committed against God, one must engage in personal conversation with the Divine, acknowledging and subsequently begging forgiveness. One must also seek absolution from those people against whom one has transgressed directly, acknowledging one’s sin to that person, begging forgiveness, and making amends.
For Christians, humans are so innately sinful that the human aspect of God had to be executed for those sins to be forgiven. Indeed, the Book of Genesis marks the start of a self-determining, intelligent humanity as resulting from Eve’s first transgression against God. Christianity insists that everyone is born with her “Original Sin,” and that sin must be washed away with Baptismal water.
Christian repentance occurs throughout the year in the sacrament of Reconciliation; while some denominations accept a conversation with the Divine as sufficient for absolution, others (Catholicism most prominently) require the penitent to confess their sins aloud to clergy.
Inevitably, as religion has typically been a tool for the transmission and enforcement of cultural mores, religions obsessed with sin and repentance produce cultures obsessed with guilt and failure. For example, the iconic Protestant work ethic, shared among a majority of white American immigrants over the years, values “hard work, discipline, frugality as expressions of one’s faith in God.” Thus, even beyond the thousands of sins enumerated in Scripture, any acts of leisure (beyond the Sabbath’s day of rest), self-indulgence or conspicuous consumption are failures in the eyes of God.
As White culture is Intersectional, though, we must also examine our predilection for guilt along secular lines. White guilt, typically, is that underlying feeling of guilt arising from every White American’s allegedly innate complicity in Black slavery and oppression.
Even though only 25 percent
of the White south owned slaves, and even though the Confederate south, at the outset of the Civil War, comprised less than 1/3
of the American population, every post-millennial white person remains guilty. Typically, the justification for this is that our non-slave-owning American ancestors allowed it to take place and/or benefitted from it.
Even if your ancestors arrived after emancipation, they still enjoyed “opportunities that were open to them as white immigrants that were not open to people of color.” Conveniently, the many oppressions White immigrants in the turn-of-the-century Immigration Boom faced, such as those described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, are generally overlooked or deemed somehow better than the oppression experiences of their Black-American contemporaries. Mythologies aside, such immigrants faced persistent hardship and prejudice, and many weren’t even characterized as White.
Anthropologically, we are predisposed to experiencing guilt as opposed
to shame – the former relating to transgression against one’s personal values and the latter to transgression against cultural values. According to seminal anthropologist Ruth Benedict, shame tends to be associated with collectivistic cultures while guilt aligns with individualistic cultures. Additionally, non-western cultures and cultures of color tend to be collectivistic while western and white cultures tend to value individualism.
As White-American Culture is individualistic, we predominantly experience feelings of guilt, even and especially when are actions are outwardly acknowledged as good. Thus, even if White Americans have never committed anything approaching racism, we still gravitate toward feeling personal guilt for it. As a product of a Catholic and a Jew, I am no exception, irrational though I know it to be.
Are any of these traits unique to White-American Culture? Of course not. Rather, it is the unique intersection of all these traits and cultures and heritages and histories and lived experiences that make White-American culture unique.
In Conclusion: Eybdoog, Nacirema...
Writing this article has been terrifying; and releasing it even more so. Even figuring out what to capitalize was a horror (see notes). I broke the cardinal rule, that white Americans, and especially White-American men, cannot know about race nor even talk about it. Unless our characterization of white culture is wholly negative and reiterative of popular demonization, we open ourselves up to profound and lasting excoriation from every angle, undefended by like minds lest they open themselves up to the same. Really, though, by disavowing and condemning our racial identity ourselves, we are simply taking the work of our own damnation out of the hands of others and into our own.
The peril in which I put myself, however, only emphasizes the need to talk about a culture of Whiteness as
white people
rather than leaving our own existence and definition to those whose cultures coalesced around our relative positions on the power spectrum. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum our silence creates in response to cross-cultural pressures is readily filled by those with an exclusively etic, biased view.
The reasons I chose to explore White-American Culture in relation to Black American culture, as opposed to other cultures of color or alone, are threefold. First, as Black-American culture is the largest, most visible and most vociferous in its characterization of White culture, it facilitates a deliberate examination of both culture in general and white culture specifically.
The second reason is precisely that same vile history between the two groups which imperils this writing; in too many ways to explore here, the modern-day White-American culture is as much a product of slavery as the Black. Centuries of conflict, condemnation, negotiation, accommodation and adjustment have brought us, again by hook or by crook, to this place and this time and these circumstances. To atone for our real or conceptual ancestors’ terrible sins, we dig ever deeper into the spectre of our reputed complicity, compulsively seeking contemporary and tangible acts by which to confirm our inherited guilt.
Third, simply, I was mortified by that Google search. Mortified. All of it was witheringly negative. Little of it was accurate or even truthful. Most of it was by Black-American authors. Never since Segregation has there been such a collection of shamelessly racist, hateful invective written by one American culture about another. That kind of vitriol is not the road to racial equity.
Across centuries, America – and white America -- has attempted to figure out how to account for an America shared by a plurality of colors and races. In the process of attempting to define and accept that plurality, we have effectively rendered our own culture invisible – too mundane, too conflated with American culture overall to be worthy of independent study or acknowledgement. We and others have branded us too ordinary to be extraordinary.
If we are to be seen, must we disavow the -American
in White-American, fashioning ourselves instead as exotic and arcane a curiosity as the Nacirema? To exist, must we submit to an incipient minority-managed segregation? In consideration of and presaging accusations regarding white supremacist aspirations, I hope not. Rather, I think our greatest hope for a self-aware, race-positive, culturally-situated White-American culture lies in those same tools – intersectionality, for instance – by which people of color have claimed their identities. What a beautiful poetry that would be.
While we remain invisible and muted, popular culture and media will continue to call us simultaneously nonexistent and cancerous, both owing to and irrespective of actual history. Rather than presenting a paradox, these ostensibly mutually-exclusive assignations present White-American Culture as a blank, unspecified whiteboard upon which to scribe their own assessment of White culture, unimpugned by such inconveniences as fact or rationality. And they are scribing quite the monster.
But, as Frankenstein’s monster searched for a meaning to his existence, so, too, does White-American Culture. As with Frankenstein, too often and too easily we find that meaning in the burden of monstrosity, but it can also be found in our kindness, our curiosity, and our capacity for love. And, though our Intersecting Judeo-Christian and individualistic natures make us loathe to admit it, in our vulnerability as well.
Author’s notes:
1.) In lieu of a citations page, please find my sources via the links embedded. I swore off citation after college.
2.) Capitalization is an incredibly sensitive topic for some people. For the purposes of respect, I tried to capitalize racial adjectives when used to describe specific people and specific groups, and to leave more general referents lowercase. I’m quite certain I failed to do either consistently; for this I apologize.
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Note – this article was written by ChatGPT. I asked it to write an explainer post for my website in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. As part of this week’s podcast, I had ChatGPT co-produce it with me. It came up with script suggestions. I asked it to help me write an explainer companion post for the website. I did not really like the first one it wrote, and so I tried asking for different types of articles, asking for a particular style(witty, snarky, etc) or well know writers (Bill Simmons, Malcolm Gladwell). The below is the one by Gladwell, which I liked the best.
I have made no edits.
A primer / Explainer on the Presidential Classified document Chaos that's been happening in advance of this weeks Twisted Logic Shows!
Discover the biblical perspective on abortion and how it goes against God's instructions. Explore how our role as believers is to glorify Him and uphold His values, and that means NOT supporting anti-abortion laws.
The Transcript from the January 30, 2023 release of the Twisted Logic Podcast
Wokeness is a complex and multifaceted concept that can be seen as both a positive and negative force in society.
Social audio is a growing trend in social media that offers a new way to consume and share information. The rise of social audio apps like Clubhouse, Spotify Live, Stereo, and Wisdom has made it possible for people to engage in real-time conversations, discussions, and debates about a wide range of topics. This interactivity and engagement, which is often lacking in traditional podcasting, makes social audio an ideal platform for discussing current events, news, and other timely topics. Additionally, social audio allows users to create their own rooms and host their own events, which gives them more control over the conversations and makes it easier to build communities around specific topics.
We also introduced a new project, the re-launch of "The Twisted Logic Podcast", that leverages the power of social audio in an innovative new way. This new podcast will be a week-long conversation about a political or cultural issue that is relevant currently, and will provide a more personalized and engaging experience
Shawn and Josh go back and forth on facebook messenger talking about the new allegations by the Rust armorer's attorney that there may have been sabotage involved.
The battle over Covid-19 vaccine mandates is raging in America. In an ironic turn of events, many conservatives who opposed the vaccine and mandates have taken to using the phrase "my body, my choice" in the fight to stay vaccine free. Conservative talk show host, Dan Bongino, who is vaccinated, tells viewers to stop 'capitulating to the left' by giving up their rights to make individual medical decisions. He recently said on Fox News: "My body is mine. It was given to me by God. It was not and is not a ward of the state. I will determine what goes in it." Is he right that people should not be subject to vaccine mandates? And what about the use of the phrase "my body, my choice", is it appropriate here? And how far are we willing to take this?
Shawn's thoughts on why White Culture does not exist - part of the new Twisted Logic Big Idea Series. Will Be discussed on the live podcast on Thursday October 21
Comments from Liberish Shawn St. Peter and Conservative Josh Ayer on the passing of Colin Powell