Why Don't White People Talk About Whiteness?
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- čas přidán 3. 04. 2023
- Let's break the ice on the subject. Have you seen any helpful creators out there talking about whiteness and where we might be headed post-whiteness? Share below!
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"White culture", in America, is inextricably tied to American culture and the American Dream, and that's in part at least why I think white Americans struggle to talk about it. It's been sold to us as this big, beautiful thing that we're all supposed to want and strive for.
This vid was recommended to me very randomly but I am glad I watched it. Your points are very interesting, and as a non white and non American, it is also very new to me. Please keep up
Wow I am so glad you made this video. I am black but I have had similar thoughts about this issue but as it relates to being a child of African immigrants. I feel like we are told that we need to forego our ethnic identities for American racial categories. Many African children of immigrants feel the need to assimilate into African American culture because that is what it means to be black in America.
I think of European immigrants who came to America in the 1910s and 1920s and how many of them stopped speaking their native language to their children. So that they could assimilate into English speaking America. It’s quite sad and honestly you should talk about at the heart of it I think every American can feel this at some level.
Thank you for your comment! I agree and I hope that more people will push back against assimilation. We can restore languages, food cultures, ask our parents and grandparents what they practiced before and challenge the idea that tradition should be left behind. We are all quite unique and not monoliths just because of our skin color or continent of origin.
I think I still have a lot of growing to do on this topic. My knee jerk reaction when you said black genocide was "Oh no, that's too strong of a word" but why? Why do I think that? I don't have any evidence to back that up. And I definitely don't know enough on the topic to make that sort of call.
It definitely is a conversation we need to have more. I've tried to keep my subs list very diverse between queer and POC people, and I have learned a lot but I'm very much still learning.
I'm a Black American genocide educator. Black American genocide is taught in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
love this! so true, i’m obviously not white but something i’ve always wondered as well…
Tim Wise is a great speaker on whiteness
I know in my late teens and currently early 20s, it always felt like something was missing. I'm a White American. And (White) American Culture always feels so hollow. Its hyper-individualistic. And solely relies on stealing content and culture from Black People (examples being music, fashion, slang, etc.).
My great-grandparents and even my grandparents came from different European Countries. And fully assimilated into the USA. They stopped speaking their languages. They stopped celebrating their traditions. They became American. And while my parent's take pride in that, and view that as the natural course for immigrants. I cannot help but see it as death. Cause they really left us with nothing. At this point, I am either too far disconnected from those cultures to ever try to reconnect. And/or their are too many bad memories with certain parts of my family to even try to reclaim any heritage or culture from them.
I feel like there is a hesitancy from White Folks to even voice this concern/absence. But ironically, I see mostly People of Colour bring this up. Foreign Man in a Foreign Land (a Black CZcams Creator) in one of his recent Foreign Friday Vids talks about how Whiteness stole Culture from White People. And tbh, that missing culture actually really hurts.
This conversation is something I have difficulty with talking about irl. Because at the end of the day, White People still have White Privilege. And this grievance is nowhere near the worse offense of White Supremacy or Whiteness. I do remember in College having a Conversation about Identities. And feeling just hurt when I took some pride in my ancestry being primarily from Eastern European Countries only for the other people to be completely ambivalent and even annoyed. Idk. I guess my culture will always feel absent and hollow. And that's somethin' I may have to live with. Sorry for the long reply.
It's funny that you brought up Foreign Man because I watched his video right after I posted mine and I was glad to see we are on the same wavelength. He's great.
I appreciate your comment! I agree that it is hard to bring it up. We have to be careful not to position ourselves as the victims of white supremacy and whiteness because our ancestors did choose assimilation and did choose to join an oppressive class. But we can still feel the cultural death that came with that and then try to put together what we can. Our work here has to be in tandem with antiracist work because we can't divorce whiteness from white privilege.
And of course everything I say here is open to feedback because I am still figuring all of this out myself.
Girl I feel you, I am black but I am struggling to connect to my African culture right now so I get it. Everyone’s cultural journey is different. So do it you won’t regret it in the end.
@lizardbytheriver1567 Thank you for sharing this. This has helped me understand how other people view these kind of things and makes me wonder how much of this can be boiled down to differences in viewpoint or personality. I too am from the US and would be labeled as "white" and my family comes from the Ellis Island wave of immigrants from the 20th century. My family has assimilated since then and the vestiges of my family's ethnic cultures are practically nonexistent in me and my siblings. I however, have no sense of loss or longing for these cultures and do not struggle with any absence of meaning from this. How much of this could be attributed to the different ways people view culture? Some people may attach spiritual meaning to culture in a way that others do not. I view culture as a shared collection of ideas, with all cultures eventually evolving over time. Mainstream American popular culture evolves very quickly, with each new wave of immigration contributing something unique to the mix. The culture I inherited in America was very different from the American culture my parents grew up in and the process continues in a state of ever evolving flux. I happen to love that. Some people may find that destabilizing and feel rootless. Being from New York, I may be more accustomed to the cosmopolitanism of it all. I also love that "American" is not an ethnic identity and stands in direct opposition to the "blood and soil" ideas of old. I don't understand why I should have some innate connection to a foreign culture that is entirely alien to me just because my lineage traces back there. Ancestral connections? I'm not spiritual so that isn't something that I believe in. Genetic connection? Idk that's a bit too creepy of a road for me to want to venture down.
I find our different feelings and experiences on this matter fascinating and I think it emphasizes the importance of not generalizing our own personal feelings out to any larger group. People are different. And intragroup feelings on a topic can often vary even more than intergroup feelings. But it's important to do what makes you happy. If that means rekindling a connection with your family's culture, then all the more power to you! But not everyone shares that feeling and that's ok too. You only get one life so live it however you see best.
I would suggest Innuendo Studios as a good example. He does very deep breakdowns of the alt right movement and has several videos on whiteness which I found to be extremely insightful.
I'll check it out!
i am also frustrated by people talking about the most fundamental things when it comes to oppression like it's the most groundbreaking thing, that hasn't been talked about for years - yes, i understand that some people might just begin with their anti-discrimination/anti-racist journey but how do we want to progress if mainstream's default question when talking to white people about racism is: "do YOU think that's racist?"
I think it's great that you talk about whiteness and racism because it breaks the silence you talked about which upholds whiteness as normative. Let's intervene white supremacy.
Critical Whiteness Studies can give us input we need to then take action, speak up and disrupt the system.
Check out news items on the Welsh movement to regain their sovereignty from the UK. For obvious reasons it bares similarities to other Indigenous movements for sovereignty, however, the context is more specific to the Assimilated White experience of which you speak.
I had never thought to look into what Wales was doing, thank you for the suggestion! My closest context was learning about the decolonization movement in Ireland around language.
yes 1000 percent more people do need to talk about this!👍
As a White American AMAB(You'll see why I added this a little later on), this pretty much hit the nail on the head. American whiteness as a construct is a lonely thing that has taken quite a while to disassemble for me, I've been doing quite well but there's still a lot of work to do.
Personally, I realized that Black and First Nation Americans probably had a much better grasp on whiteness than white people did/do. From that realization, I thought to seek out advice on how to deconstruct whiteness. I eventually found one African American tiktoker who I deeply admire(though have shamefully forgotten the user/name of), who told it as he saw it. He didn't sugarcoat it for the sake of white comfort, though he did give reassurance where he felt it would help.
He had a phrase that I quite like, it went something like; "White people must heal other white people." And one of the ways that he mentioned/encouraged would help heal white people from the effects of white supremacy, was reconnecting with one's own roots. Not only would one be reconnecting and filling the white void with a culture (and a way more collectivist culture at that), but it could add the necessary cultural differences to put distinctions on different groups of white peoples, which would take away from a sort of monolithic culture of whiteness and alleviate some level of hardship from everyone in America.
My family's voyage to America is one of Prussian, and Irish History. I of course look for my closest connection to either root and find it is very Irish, as I don't really want to reconnect with Prussia of all things. (It might be worthwhile to see what German(ic) roots I can pick up on though).
What I did not forsee on this journey of reconnection, is that there is practically no greater non violent tension than that of the Irish homeland and the Irish diaspora. Holy SH!T was I not prepared for that.
Much of those in the Irish homeland are so quick and unwilling to shun any aspect of Irishness from Irish diasporic identities, especially Irish American identity.
I understand that when they say they're Irish, they are talking about being born and raised in the homeland and it's culture. It has come to my attention that those in Ireland get either confused, angry, or even amused when a diaspora says they're Irish considering it doesn't fit with the description they've formed in their heads. They get so worked up over semantics. When a diaspora says they're Irish, they're talking about either their ethnicity and/or their heritage, it's the same for all in America. Some are Chinese Americans, some are Chilean Americans, Mexican Americans, Italian Americans, and Irish Americans. We say "I'm x" instead of "I have x heritage" because that's just easier to say and everyone here understands that you mean heritage/ethnicity.
Regardless, whenever I tried to ask the Irish in the homeland about learning and hopefully participating in the culture, they just shunned me off and told me quite a bit. I've heard things from "you're just white american" to sh!t like "no go fûck off and keep your americanisms/racism out of Ireland (?!?!?)" And I guess I understand why a few thought about the racism thing because a lot who do claim their Irish heritage do use it to further the white machine, but me reconnecting is in part an idea I had thanks to the Black and Native American's encouragement. They just called me that out of thin nothing. (Note that they did also seem to be ignoring the fact that racism is prevalent in Ireland too, claiming racism is only a thing in America.)
I tried to explain to them that perpetuating the denial of any of my Irish root and the idea of me just being white american would feed into the white american machine, but of course they didn't give a d@mn and told me to stay in America.
Not only all that, but I am AMAB, and am very likely trans. I doubt you don't know what's going on with trans people in America, but I'll give anyone else who reads this a rundown:
Trans people are very much under attack in the US right now. With trans existence being outlawed in 1/10+~ of US states. Anti-Trans bills are being released at an alarming rate and the propaganda is being fueled. Surprise surprise, it's the rich-white-patriarchal-cis-yougettheidea system.
So this hyperidividialist machine built by and for the people of my skin color is, hurting me, a person of their skin color. So I'm basically faced with potential death if I stay here, but if I try to reconnect and do what I can to weaken the white machine, those in the homeland find a new inventive way to say screw off, don't bother, don't come here, and push me back into a purely American identity. (I've seen multiple of those from the homeland tell 1st gen emigrants and those with dual citizenship to buzz off, fyi.)
It's all a big mess but I just wanted to share some thoughts of mine, whiteness just feels so lonely, and even when I try to find good collectivity in my roots, I'm told to buzz off. I'm told that reconnecting would be good for me by both Black and Native peoples, but the people of the country I seek connection to aren't open to it at all. (sometimes they even speak on the Black and Native peoples behalves tho, which is a little disgusting)
I probably didn't articulate some of the later parts the way I wanted but generally the sentiment still stands. Whiteness feels very empty, very void of connectivity.
bcuz they are ashamed deep down.
That's a fact