What does it mean to be "white?" Is there a uniquely "white" culture? (cross-post from GD)

[YoungDemCA]

To illustrate the point: I am white. How do I know this? Well, I have light, fair skin, and my immigrant ancestors came from certain parts of Western and Northern Europe - England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and likely others. Furthermore, I come from a solidly middle/upper-middle class background, with parents and grandparents who mostly grew up middle class themselves. That's not an explicitly "white" thing, but if you're an American whose parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents (as is the case for me) who - over time and from generation to generation - acquired or otherwise benefited from their parents having acquired certain historically significant levels of education, property, economic opportunity, and overall social mobility - you're almost certainly a white American. For even the wealthiest and most educated Americans of color don't have the multiple generations and overall levels of social and cultural capital of white Americans.

But going back to the ancestry issue: My European ancestors not only came from many places and particular cultures within Europe, but included both Catholics and Protestants. Those things were certainly very important in terms of social and political dynamics and cleavages in both Europe and in the US in the past, but nowadays, for the average middle-class, suburban or small-town white American? That doesn't matter. Being "white" within the American context not only erodes those particular historical identities, but - more pertinent for this topic - is a synonym for not having your skin, your blood, your history, your very identity being "polluted" by the presence of color.

Because how else could I, a liberal Democratic voter living in the San Francisco Bay Area whose ancestors were from the aforementioned countries, have anything that makes me more similar in any respect to small-town or suburban Republican-voting fundamentalist Protestant of "Scots-Irish" or "American" ancestry in (pick your state) than I am to my (also American) neighbors who are of Indian, Iranian, Israeli, Chinese, Mexican, and a wide variety of other ancestries? (and FWIW, people of those particular ancestries easily make up the majority of my neighbors and my community - Euro-Americans like me are a MINORITY here, as we are in the world as a whole...)

Would love to read any responses in THIS group specifically.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. My biracial granddaughter's cousin gets really angry if you tell

her she's white. She says paper's white and she doesn't look like that. She's 6.

[Kind of Blue]

2. "Because we have forgotten who we really are and we've accepted white as the poisonous substitute."

"I want to suggest that this entire experience (Europeans crossing the Atlantic) was traumatic though it might not have been understood as such at the time. The bonds of kinship, language, culture, tradition, the sources of a people's strength, were, within a few generations, erased, and replaced with the anemic, synthetic, mass-produced, depression-inducing, misery-making, freedom-addicted, money-loving, control-hungry, spiritually-starving, Earth-hating, de-animating modern excuse for a culture.

Whiteness, that shroud used to smother and then cover the vestiges of European indignity that survived the hellish voyages across the Atlantic, was now wrapped tightly around them as a sense of identity, a toxic mimic of what they had once had.

Whiteness both is and isn't a culture. It's not a culture in any meaningful way we might understand culture in its life affirming function as in the good cultures of bacteria in our guts that keep us alive or as in a deeply rooted indigenous culture. It is a culture in that it has features, patterns and exhibits behaviours that are knowable and predictable (largely to those who are not white).

But, whatever we might call it, it is empty. It is hollow. It has no connection to the Earth. It has no connection to place. It is homeless. It is rooted in privilege. And it is a false god being worshipped. There is a white shroud, wrapped carefully around the mummified corpse of the ones from whom we truly came and we are worshipping the shroud and not those ones within it.
http://healingfromwhiteness.blogspot.ca/2017/05/whiteness-is-deified-trauma.html

And a well-written historical account at the same blogspot http://healingfromwhiteness.blogspot.ca/2014/03/cultural-amnesia-how-celts-became-white.html

"The Gaels Arrive in America . . . And Become White . . . After Not Being Allowed to Be White"