Apparently it has something to do with confusing there/they’re/their.

My culture has nothing to do with my skin color

US whiteness is a social construct that serves to justify and reproduce marginalization: white supremacy. It started out excluding the Irish, Italians, the Spanish, Slavs, etc and shifted over time in order to maintain anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity. So it is far from just one thing and is simultaneously very recent. It would be best described as a culture of domination and capitalism, being a product of the US’ industrialization and then economic subjugation of the planet. Whiteness is about who you are better than and how entitled you are to a good life, or at least one better than non-whites. White culture is tolerating and even engaging in genocide so long as it is against non-whites. White culture is trying to pretend oppressions don’t need justice on any timeline that might inconvenience a white person. White culture is jingoist. The image of a warlike America has a white face.

As white people were largely drawn from European immigrants, they sometimes have watered-down elements of culture from “the old country”, Americanized to the point of being unrecognizable. Those elements were usually watered down because their immigrant ancestors were not considered white at the time so they tried to hide or erase identifiable cultural elements. Name changes. Modifications to food. Going to the whiter church. Skipping traditional holidays.

And of course, much is just white supremacy under capitalism. Processed industrialized foods. Commercialized holidays and events. Workaholic myths of paths to success. Everything cheaper or subsidized to their benefit and treated as an entitlement. National chauvinism and racist warmongering. Colonizer mindsets.

Do you know nothing of county/state fairs and various city festivals? Crab and crawfish boils? Rodeos? School shootings? Taco Tuesday?

But seriously, you are framing culture in the context of race and that is un-American. American culture is all cultures that we integrate. Other countries that are more homogeneous in their heritage only have their culture from their heritage, America has their culture and like 5 other ones that we draw from to make a culture as diverse as our population. Americans, regardless of genetic heritage, enjoy a rich tapestry of culture as our culture.

Go to another country and try to find Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Arabic, German, and Irish food. I can drive in a direction and hit all of those in any major American city and stop in somewhere for a burger or pizza. That is American culture.

Go to another country and try to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Eid, Hanukkah, Christmas, Holi, and Kwanza. I can do that every year. That is American culture.

You say that is everything and nothing, I say that is America and I am proud that we can’t be so narrowly defined and have the freedom to enjoy all the cultures our people bring to the table.

As a white American male, not once have I considered my own “white American” culture. Kind of hard to wrap my head around the idea. Maybe because I don’t at all relate to what I would consider “white America” - like country music, corn fields, guns, fear of others, etc. So, yeah, there’s a diversity of white American culture across the country.

I also don’t have any emotional connection to the places my ancestors were born. So, at the same time, I reject stereotypical white American culture and my own heritage.

My culture is my family, my friends, my community and the things we do to pass the time and to strive to be better neighbors. It’s not based on color, or nationality, or heritage. It’s more about zip code than anything else.

But I recognize I’m in the minority. A lot of my friends are really into football and tailgating, etc. That’s not something I’ve been able to go all-in on. It seems cultish to me and I like to keep my head above ground.

Personally, I’ve never had a strong desire to fit in or belong to a group. I enjoy the freedom of flexibility and decision making based on my own lived experiences rather than the experiences of others.

To your point about ethnic events, the greatest thing about the US is the diverse culture. I would hate to be part of a monoculture like you find in the vast majority of other countries. It feels a bit like indoctrination to me.

Ehhh, I don’t think there is a unifying “white” culture.

Plenty of regional cultures that are predominantly white, and definitely city level ones, but that’s different from a “white culture”.

Hell, it’s hard to even say there’s am American culture because it’s just so damn big. Even regional cultures, like the general southern culture I came up in, I can’t say is a single one. There’s to much different between adjoining counties sometimes, and states can be even further apart.

If I point to the Appalachian culture I’m also a part of, you can’t really rely on that as much as you’d think, because five hundred miles in the mountains is a huge barrier to culture connections, even though much of the population shares common ancestry that informs the local cultures.

So, nah, I can’t buy the idea of “white” culture any more than I can any singular racial culture. They just don’t work when in reality, though they’re temping on paper.

Shit, even “ethnic” cultures vary too much between specific cities to rely on them translating fully, so why would arbitrary skin color groupings? The Irish folk here in the hills have kept and/or adapted the culture of their ancestors different than those in Boston, or New Orleans, or New York. Just looking at my maternal and paternal families, there’s enough differences that I wouldn’t give credence to an Irish, Scots-Irish or German culture being fully passed down in the same way.

The UK is way smaller than the US, and every city has its own distinct culture. Some are big enough cities that there’s multiple versions in each one.

If I had to lay claim to a national culture of the US, it would have to be adaptability. The overall culture of the US is to take what comes here and mix it around until it sticks. And that’s not a very distinct thing at all.

Basically, your instincts are right and the question in the last line of your post is a good one. Here’s why:

“Whiteness” doesn’t come from biology or culture. It’s really just a way of describing a hierarchy that was set up by European empires and early corporations at the dawn of capitalism to justify the enslavement of people around the world, the colonization of their lands, and the exploitation of their natural resources for profit.

This hierarchy is used to steamroll over the huge number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds people have, in order to label some “white”, others “black”, others “asian”, and so on. There can be no “white” culture (even within one country), because the boundaries of who is accepted as “white” have shifted more than once in the past few hundred years and could easily shift again. For example, look up when and why Irish people and Italian people were accepted as fully white and look up the “contingent” whiteness that Jewish people have had in the US. See How the Irish Became White, for example.

Another reason there is no white culture is because, even for people accepted as white, whiteness has erased the cultures they brought to America when they immigrated by forcing them to conform to its rules. Think about how badly even light-skinned immigrants were treated by others whose families had been in America for generations. The immense pressure to look, sound, and act “American” and “white” to avoid being bullied at school, to be able to get good jobs, and to be seen as “respectable” in the neighborhood, meant for many people that they had to give up large parts of their culture to be accepted. This compounds over the generations, until we end up with people asking questions like the post you’ve made right here.

Racists proudly defend white (or “western” if they’re cowards) culture. They’re completely unable to see how whiteness has stolen big pieces of the cultures of everyone it touches. It has bleached them into a blander, more sterile version of what they once were.

My culture’s cuisine

I remember fondly the image of my father, just come in from a cold new england winter, snow on his beard and cheese log on his shoulder

To me, white American culture is capitalism.

I grew up in the south.

Sunday dress was a thing. Modern day, it may not have been as special because you didn’t wear the same two outfits all year. But it’s still different from funeral and wedding attire.

Sunday meals were special too. Maybe we didn’t always go out for food after church, but guarantee there was BBQ involved. If not BBQ, then fried, and/or with a salad filled with carbs and mayo.

Uh, speaking of Sunday, you could say being a Christian is a big cultural thing. My family rebelled a bit, we were Catholic.

Don’t bother Daddy while he’s watching his sports. Don’t put more work on mommy (no dirty clothes, keep your shoes clean). Mowing the lawn takes all day because we live in the boonies (or you don’t have a lawn because you live in a triplex).

All holidays are Christian. And you spend them with extended family.

American culture is exposed to everyone due to the internet

I would define the American culture to be highly individualistic and xenophilic (to a point), cuisine generally being borrowed from Germany, France and Italy with most famously their Burgers

Christmas and Thanksgiving is very ingrained, and whilst you might claim Christmas is very universal (partly thanks to America) Halloween isn’t, and it’s mainly celebrated in USA and mostly USA only.

in America, community is more loose of a term than anywhere else, and independence is a must-have skill to have, this is why the trope of being kicked out as soon as possible from a household is so prevalent even though this doesn’t seem to happen as much, or at all in other nations unless in very dire circumstances

America is generally depicted with the stereotypes of either southern conservative god-fearing people who attend protestant mass, or Californian liberals who seemingly accept anything and everything, enjoying luxury and being very upset about trivial issues, though due to individualism I can not think for the life of me a common dressing pattern, maybe military uniforms or suits

Due to how xenophilic and domineering American culture is, the media have essentially allowed for American culture to be available basically anywhere, mostly portraying itself within companies, holidays, local media and politics

I’m not technically white, and I’m Canadian which is only technically “American,” but – close enough. IMO, it’s mostly people who are not white americans that define to me what white american culture. Like, if you were to ask me “is this part of your culture?” for various things, I would say “yes” to many things and “no” to many things.

But many of the things that I would say “yes” to, other people might inform me, “no, that’s not part of your culture.” Jazz, Super Mario bros., rap music, anime, chickpea stew, spaghetti – I identify these as elements of my culture, or at least my “idioculture” as it were, but people have told me these are not part of my culture.

I think maybe let’s stop gatekeeping culture so much and let people live how they like to live. If somebody likes wearing a yukata as a houserobe and they’re not japanese, is there really a problem? It’s not like they’re pretending to be japanese.

“white"Americans”" don’t have a culture

*edit for clarity

it’s a 250 year old racist invention, I’m not gonna respect it

that’s the whole cultural heritage though, racist imperials who think they’re white dole out “recognition of whiteness” to lower castes and pretend they have a racial hierarchy instead of a capital caste system

it fucking sucks, don’t claim it

I’m gonna talk out my ass for a minute, I haven’t actually done any focused reading on most of the tidbits I’m about to discuss. Just putting together a lot of disconnected thoughts and anecdotes I’ve collected over the years

I’m remembering that the phrase “white pride” only exists in imitation of the phrase “black pride” and the accompanying explanation for why one is absolutely not at all problematic while the other is unabashedly supremacist. That explanation being that “black” references the culture common to that group of people which, in the case of American black people, can’t really be narrowed down to any one country. While it can be narrowed down (mostly) to one continent, that still represents a fifth of the Earth’s land-area and therefore includes a lot of cultures that don’t have anything in common.

So, “black culture” then is a sort of (the word I’m about to use may be problematic, I don’t know, it makes sense in my head but I’m white and have no idea how it might feel to have someone else describe me this way) “prosthetic” culture. I’m thinking, because they did lose a real part of themselves but, because there are so many others with the same culture-esque background in America, the phrase “black culture” refers to a real thing that exists.

Now, the other direction. “White culture” is problematic because, what culture is it that “white” people share? People who are “white” have a cultural history already, they don’t need a prosthetic. I know I come from something vaguely Scots-Irish. If I could be bothered to look into that more, I could surely find clubs, celebrations, or whatever kind of pageantry I wanted to validate that identity. But what cultural history do I have in common with this other random “white” person who it turns out is actually Romanian?

And that brings me to the best bit! Take all the people who are considered “white” today, put them in a room and have them discuss with each other, looking for the single attribute that their culture shares with the most other cultures in that room. I would guess (totally out my ass here, I have no idea) that the one thing most cultures have in common today even the ones currently considered “white” is that they used to be persecuted for their non-whiteness.

I don’t have any numbers for that. I’m just thinking about how, for example, Italians didn’t used to be “white”, Irish people didn’t used to be “white”, or Romanian people are still kind of struggling to be considered “white”. Or we could take it another way, Jews aren’t “white” regardless of their skin color (though of course the state of Israel is likely to sterilize anyone whose skin is too dark…) and I remember a stereotype about Catholics that sure seemed to fit in the category of non-“white”.

So, now I don’t remember what the subject of the post I’m writing this in was…

Adipose exceptionalism, tired and broken down.