This was a chance discussion. I grabbed the words because they seemed illustrative. If we identify as White, or are identified as White, or pass as White day to day, do we have a White culture?
We each have multiple overlapping shared cultures deriving from our family, history, geography, migrations, sexuality, friends, education, experiences, faith and active acquisition. However, if we are White, all of these are influenced, if not wholly owned, by a culture that we can call White.
The concept of White is only loosely linked to skin colour and has nothing to do with genetics: race is a wholly social fabrication. Rather, the essence of Whiteness is power sourced in violence. White culture is intrinsically bound up with the last five hundred years of European colonialism and expropriation, enslavement and genocide, and delusions of supremacy. Whiteness is tied to the chance development of capitalism in the coffee houses and markets of London and Amsterdam.
White culture is so pervasive that we can take it to be universal and normal across much of the world. Indeed it is intrinsic to the idea of White culture that it is normative and holds us all to arbitrary standards. As a White person it can be hard to see this, looking at our culture from within as it were, just as we cannot readily perceive the curvature of space-time though we and all things round us are affected by gravity. Moreover, our inability to see White culture is wilful: we corrupt our vision and obscure our history and thus reproduce our cultural memes.
Capitalism is a powerful cultural mechanism that alienates us from our heritages, commodifies our identities and stories, and sells these back to us as pared-down, corrupted, corporate-owned and controlled shared dreams.
kestrelart 