Remarkably culturally illiterate take.
On the one hand, white people have plenty of cultural identities. St. Patrick’s Day parades, Oktoberfest, Columbus Day festivities, various cities with a ‘Little Italy’. We have lots of very public celebrations of lots of different white diasporas, those white people feel pride in their heritage and no one gives them any guff for it (…OK not no one, Columbus has fallen out of favor, but Italians get plenty of cultural recognition elsewhere).
On the other hand, ‘white people’ qua ‘white people’ don’t have a real cultural identity. There isn’t a white culture to celebrate. And that’s related to the first point: white cultures have mostly come to modern world intact, so instead of white culture we have Irish culture, German culture, Italian culture, etc.
You’re confused because maybe you think, “but black people get a culture!” And they do, because their ancestral cultures typically did not survive into the modern world, cultural memory having been lost in the destruction of families that was caused by slavery. The vast majority of black people in the US are descended from slaves, so even though their ancestors were enslaved from different cultures in Africa, those cultures were intentionally destroyed by the slave trade, and now there is an actual common shared heritage that unites the vast majority of black Americans in ways that the vast majority of white Americans are not united. (And note that descendants of more recent black immigrants often don’t consider themselves as part of that culture, and vis
At the time of slavery, white Americans would not have considered themselves as part of the culture, any more than modern Germans and modern Irish would consider themselves the same culture. Their descendants inherited their cultures from their families and communities, which remained sufficiently intact to preserve their ancestral cultures.
But culture is messy, so I’ll give you that there are white people who lost their cultural connection along the way, or feel that they did. I don’t know what proportion of white people in the US feel that way, but it’s not zero, and there is a nascent culture there, though more recent and less unified than black culture. And it isn’t defined by whiteness in the way that black culture really is defined by blackness, because the unifying filter of slavery really was defined by blackness, whereas the unifying feature of this American non-ethnic-Whiteness was something more diffuse and attenuated, and largely only realized in the past few decades in reaction to the public recognition of other cultures and the feeling of being culture-less (which, again, is not shared by a lot of white people).
But if the liberal position on race and ethnicity does not pay much attention to that culture, it’s because it’s more concerned with being pluralist, ecumenical, inclusive. The liberal position was to include other cultures, to talk about other cultures. If it did not talk about mainstream American culture, it’s because that culture was not other, that is the culture in which other cultures are being recognized.
You’re channeling O’Reilly’s War On Christmas boogeyman when you claim that liberal approaches to race and culture were primarily about suppressing whiteness as a race or a culture. It’s not a description of the world, it’s propaganda promulgated to shape politics. Now, sadly, that resentment has become a part of some American’s culture. But that isn’t a white culture either.
Your life is contingent, don’t generalize too much from it. You could have made different choices and stayed upper middle class.
