Idiot of the Week: White People Have No Culture

Self-loathing white people are some of the most disturbing people to have ever drawn breath. Drama queens might be the best way to describe them, for they obsess endlessly about things they haven’t done, they elevate petty problems to the world stage and bury major ones behind a veneer of political correctness. A white kid wearing dreadlocks is the end of the world. But recognizing that ISIS lobs gay people off of buildings for amusement is probably racism (even though, paradoxically, Islam is not a race). Sanctimony is their religion, Social Justice their crusade, and endless self-hatred their spiritual diet.

Here’s a window into the insane mind of one of these cretins: White People Have No Culture. And it cries out in the darkness of colossal ignorance for a proper fisking. Let us begin our descent past an event horizon of stupidity, a singularity of dedicated ignorance…

I traveled to Standing Rock in November of 2016 with my friend, hauling over 5000 dollars worth of winter tents, clothing, food, and gear. My full time job allowed me to stay barely a week, and my ego, mixed with a hefty dose of white savior mentality, convinced me that my training as an EMT, and my lifetime of experience with direct action and social justice, would make me useful. Fast forward 5 days, and I was crying in the driver’s seat of my car, while my amazing friend listened quietly as I grieved for something I didn’t know I had ever lost.

First of all, our intrepid SJW makes sure to inform us that she was once possessed of the white savior mentality but, apparently, no longer possesses it. She is reformed, made more pure through the enlightenment of social justice, presumably. And then, after taking a vacation from her job, spends her time crying about it. This is Social Justice compressed into the most simplistic and yet still-accurate analogy I can think of: it is distilled, purified, bad-feels. If you want to have a bad time, if you want to feel like shit and cry after taking a vacation, by all means, have yourself a helping of Social Justice.

Standing Rock is an incredible place. An indigenous led prayer ceremony, populated by resistance movements from every corner of the globe, many of them bound to each other by shared and distinct traditions of dance, song, storytelling, and way of being in the physical world. Like any indigenous and overwhelmingly powerful place, white people had decided to take it. White people, like me, were arriving to SR in droves, some of us even dressed like it was Burning Man, forcing our way to seats right next to the sacred fire, putting our pasty faces too close to elders and demanding that they teach us their culture, clumsily mimicking centuries old dance traditions, jostling for position in the lines for free food, taking up so much space that the medicine tent had to be guarded 24/7, and young Dakota men were placing themselves in front of elders to protect them from the onslaught of questions and poking and consumption an demands for emotional labor and reliving centuries of trauma. By the time we arrived, SR elder organizers had begun holding twice a day orientations, where each of these things was addressed, and indigenous folks were demanding that white people stop colonizing their space. Yes, colonizing their space.

Fun fact: I didn’t colonize their space. Neither, I suspect, did any of my readers. I don’t stay up late at night worrying about the rituals of others, or figuring out ways to justify crashing their party. Social Justice Warriors do this all the time. They’ll push aside the very people they claim to cherish in an effort to seek out media attention, or some such thing. Look, if you want to go to some sacred event, and the practitioners are okay with you doing it, by all means, have a good time. It’s not my barrel of monkeys, mind you, but you do you. But here’s a hint… if you feel like crying in your car and writing articles about how people like you suck after you attend the event, you did not have a good time. So maybe, I dunno… do something else next time you get a week off from work? And here’s a bonus: you won’t be colonizing their space. I mean, I hardly even know what that means – SJW parlance is a strange and foreign language – but you can’t do it if you don’t go, I presume.

“White people have no culture.” This is partially true. It is also untrue. This statement is a form of denial, and also a source of grief. White people do have culture. Our culture is that of colonization. Of genocide. Of taking. Of envy and of fear. The majority of white people can name no more than two generations back in their families. The majority of white people barely know where their grandparents were from, much less who their ancestors were.

Okay, cupcake, I’m going to stop you right there. I can name generations of my family going back to the 12th century. I know where my family came from, what they were about, and have some idea of the kinds of people they were. My father’s family descends from the British Raleigh family (yes, that Raleigh family), and has been lurking around the Virginia area since the 1600s, living on the old land grants all the way until the time of the Civil War. We’re distantly related to Thomas Jefferson, and the Randolph family as well. We were tied in to many of the First Families of Virginia. My mother’s family traces back to Armenia, where they escaped the genocide and fled to America. I still have my great-grandfather’s naturalization certificate and some of his effects. I know that my great-grandmother came from the Trebizond area, and probably had some Greek in her, too. My great-grandfather, on the other hand, came from a family that lived in Cilician Armenia since Byzantine times. Of course, no Armenians live there anymore – all who stayed were exterminated. There are many other family stories I could share, but this post would get extremely long. In the South, most of us take special pride in our family trees, though. It is, dare I say, a cultural thing.

So speak for yourself. That your family is so dysfunctional you have no connection to your roots doesn’t mean it is that way for all of us, or even most of us.

The majority of white people have no traditions, and the ones we have, are rooted in consumption and the superficial application of organized religion, both of which are steeped in histories of violence. Christmas is about a severed tree dropping dead needles on heaps of plastic crap, grinding the gears of our capitalist economy, a formerly pagan ritual that has been bastardized and twisted into a stressful display of wealth and excess. Easter is about disposable plastic balls full of processed sugar, many of which are left for years to mar the sterilized landscapes and rigidly decorated city parks and backyards. Valentine’s Day was created exclusively by the greeting card industry to make you spend money on disappointing gifts and unhealthy treats for your unsatisfied monogamous partner. Independence Day is a too long period of time where daily explosions and worshipping of war trigger people and animals with PTSD, and create an alarming amount of pollution, maimed limbs, and death. Thanksgiving? Don’t even start.

Let’s analyze a few of these points. Christmas, they say, incorporates elements of pagan beliefs. There is some truth to this. As Christianity swept the late Roman Empire, people who converted often kept some of their preexisting traditions, where those traditions did not conflict with Christian belief. The same happened when Christianity spread to the Germanic peoples and the Slavic peoples. So this wasn’t a case of white people having no traditions, it was a case of white people practicing cultural syncretism, deciding to keep some preexisting traditions when they converted to Christianity.

The author then complains about superficial consumerism invading these holidays. This is true, to a point. There are those people who have forgotten the cultural origins of these things, Easter in particular. But again, the author is assuming it is this way for white people in general, and not merely this way for her. My friend Francis is quite a sincere Catholic, I am sure if you told him that Easter was about sugar and plastic eggs, he would be quite confused by the idea.

I’m not even going to go into Independence Day as a worshiping of war, maimed limbs, and death. The idea that fireworks ought to be banned has been discussed to death elsewhere. The author definitely exaggerates her points for dramatic effect, though.

The closest thing white people have to culture is our disturbingly fanatical obsession with sports, which we use to justify things like property destruction, vitriolic hatred for people we don’t know, and even accidental deaths. These are the same things that we justify with our constant military assault on developing and impoverished communities, at home and abroad.

Lolwut? What does enjoying sports have to do with property destruction, or vitriolic hatred for people we don’t know? The author then tries to make this a military issue? She’s delusional, or on some very interesting drugs.

Which brings me to my main point: The culture of white people is the culture of death. It is a culture of endless war, desensitization to human suffering, and the upholding of a brutal individualism fueled by greed. It is a deep, dark hole of grief and of loss. We don’t even know what we lost. We don’t know our ancestors. We don’t have stories of creation and hope and family; only stories of destruction and genocide. Our coming of age ceremony is a school shooting. Our song is a ballad about rockets and explosions. Our elders die alone surrounded by their stories of family members who no longer visit them. Our cities were built by the blood of slaves, on top of the graves of native people.

For a moment, I almost felt sorry for the author. While I generally feel quite secure in the knowledge of where I come from, who I am, and the history and culture of my ancestors, she clearly does not feel this. I could discuss this topic for hours. Today’s modern urbanite “cosmopolitans” have only the most superficial understanding of culture and history. The author knows that her knowledge of “indigenous” culture and history is woefully lacking, but she doesn’t stop to consider the possibility that her understanding of European cultures and history is similarly lacking. Imagine standing beneath the Hagia Sophia and saying “white people have no culture.” Imagine walking into the Pantheon in Rome and suggesting that white people have no understanding of their history.

Some years ago, I took a trip to Europe with my wife. We visited some friends in Cologne, and then explored much of the surrounding area, including Aachen, where I took a tour of the Palatine Chapel – Charlemagne’s old church, partially decorated in Byzantine style. There is a throne there with stones sourced from Jerusalem, it is said, and upon which many of the Holy Roman Emperors sat. That evening, we headed back to Cologne and found ourselves stopping for a quick bite to eat. By the bathrooms in this restaurant there was some ancient Roman ruin, a stone which had once marked the center of their coliseum, upon which the cleaning lady had set all of her cleaning supplies. This was strange to American sensibilities. People walked by it without noticing, the cleaning lady couldn’t have cared less that it existed. But over there, many things are thousands of years old.

I’ve often noted that the “cosmopolitans” who claim to love all cultures are really more like cultural tourists. And in a moment of guilt, they look in the mirror and realize how much they don’t understand – but the admission is brief and fleeting. It is an SJW crying in her car, blaming everyone who looks like her – perhaps thinking that she can push off some of the weight of her guilty feelings by diffusing it across “white people” instead of just herself.

And remember, too, that “white people” implies unity where none exists. There is no unified “white people” culture, to which all adhere. Spaniards practice something different than English, who are different than Icelanders, and so on. If the author is looking for a white monoculture, she is bound to be disappointed. That is a fool’s quest to begin with.

“Violence pervades this culture. Americans not only engage in violence, they are entertained by it. Killing takes place in America more often than the Sun rises, currently at an average of 87 times each day. Going to war in Afghanistan is less dangerous than living in Chicago.

At this point, I feel I should point out that Chicago is run by Leftist cosmopolitans. Her people, not mine. If there is a culture encouraging violence of this sort, it comes from the Left.

Romans went to the Coliseum to watch people being killed. In major cities, Americans just look out their windows. Baseball, once America’s national game, a benign, soporific sport, has been replaced by football which is so violent it destroys the brains of those who play it. Violent films, euphemized as action flicks, dominate our motion picture theatres and television sets. Our children play killing video games.”

Baseball hasn’t been replaced. What kind of crack is this guy smoking? It is possible for someone to like baseball and football. Or, in my case, to have little affection for either sport (I prefer racing and hockey, personally – yes, the latter is heresy for a Southerner, but the former is well-respected enough). Also, while football does indeed lead to many injuries, the players are generously paid for the risks they take. How many people would take that money in exchange for a risk of personal injury? Violent movies are usually produced by Leftist Hollywood, and video games aren’t real. The idea that there is a connection between real-life violence and video games has been dunked more times than I can count.

We do not get to achieve enlightenment; we lost that privilege centuries ago. We buried it in graves on land upon which we were strangers. This loss is real, palpable, and painful. There is a profound level of fear inherent in white people and the way we desperately grasp that which is not ours. This hole cannot be filled by our self delusion, and it represents generations of isolation and grief. It is our own generational trauma that we carry with us and pass on to our children. It hurts, and we do not know how to assuage that pain.

There wouldn’t be a national trauma if these people would shut up. Also, if she feels he is living on stolen land, then she should leave. I’d be happy to pay for a ticket to somewhere else – anywhere else, really – provided it was one way.

So we take. We take the traditions, costumes, dances, songs, and agency of marginalized groups after we have decimated their populations and destroyed their homes, and we polish these items so the suffering cannot be seen. We take their words out of context, and we use them to make money and to fake solidarity. We take their circles and stories and we wash them with our whiteness, and we struggle to fit them into our bloody box. We take their lands, their trails, their mountains, their rocks, and we climb and walk on them, snatching frenzied glimpses of what we want to call connection, enlightenment, transcendence, and wondering why they slip through our grasp. So instead, we get high on endorphins and call that “good enough.”

The rocks, the mountains, the trails… these things have exchanged hands since men first set foot… anywhere, really. My grandfather used to speak of Mt. Ararat. This is sort of like the national symbol of Armenia. And it lies just over the border in Turkey. The Greeks lament the loss of Constantinople to this very day. The world is full of places that once belonged to one people, and now belong to another. Put another way, we all live on conquered land. So why is America uniquely singled out for this offense? Even among the indigenous peoples, this was true. Before the white man came, they fought wars, conquered, and took lands from one another. We can say this is wrong, that it’s a part of human nature that pretty much sucks ass. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t rewrite the firmware in the human brain that leads to this sort of thing. Above all, why is America singled out for this – and the actions of all others whitewashed away (pardon the pun)?

I imagine most SJWs would lament the Spanish Reconquista. Christians taking land from Muslims, they’d say, and damn those barbaric and evil Christians for doing that to the poor enlightened Muslims. Ah, but the Muslims took the land from the Christians seven centuries prior. So who has rights to it, in the social justice world? In their world, the rights are owned by whomever can best deploy Weaponized Empathy. Bombs, guns, swords, and bows… these have been replaced with weaponized guilt, at least for the time being. I imagine sooner or later, the guns and swords will make their appearances. SJWs are not ending conquest, colonization, and such things. They are encouraging more of it. They feel miserable, and seek out someone to put them out of their misery.

And I guess that wouldn’t bother me… if it wasn’t for the fact that we were living with them as neighbors.

We want to learn something about ourselves that we lost, and so we keep taking the tokens and lives of other communities. But that one doesn’t fit, so, you know…on to the next. The cycle needs to stop. It is the responsibility of white people to face our history and to fight the culture we have created. Stop hiding behind the stories and tokens of other people, and be accountable for the brutal ways we have consolidated our power and privilege. Stop pretending like you can hike or climb or meditate your way out of this power dynamic. You are not enlightened. Let’s stop with the excuses. You are powerful, and it is time to own that and to use it to fight back against the culture of death and violence that has left us spiritually and morally bankrupt. Call out the bullshit when you see it, in yourself and in others. Stop colonizing the lives and land and stories of others. Stop perpetuating the culture of death, and instead fight for the living.

“You are powerful…” Yeah, no. Power these days is possessed by whomever shouts “I’m offended” the loudest. That may be changing, slowly, but the effort to climb that mountain is extraordinary. If you’re a straight white Christian male (or even a couple of those things) you are the devil. You must walk on eggshells every minute of every day. You never know where the next accusation of racism, sexism, Nazism, or some other such thing will come from. You don’t know if the accusation will cost you your job, your friends, your family. You can’t jump, you can’t dance, you’re square, you’re probably a loser (look at every TV commercial with a white man in it), and, like this SJW says, you are violent, evil, and have no culture. Everything bad in the world is your fault. Every political conversation is about how you suck. And if you do get past all this and achieve something anyway, you’re told that you had life on the easiest setting, and so should get no credit for any of it. Indeed, you should feel bad and give it all up for a ‘person of color.’

In the face of all this, I can kind of understand why some folks crack and wind up crying in the car, conflicted and self-loathing. Why they pen turds like this one. They hear this shit every day, and through sheer repetition, come to believe in it. They don’t have the anchor of family and history to keep them from being blown about, ideologically. The author herself admits this. Her mistake is believing that we are all like her, or that even most of us are. She conflates her personal shortcomings with societal shortcomings, her own superficial understanding of history with our understanding of the same. She believes that because she, personally, has no culture that none of us do.

To describe my own culture would take too much of my time. But if some SJW stumbles upon this post and wants to know where to begin, I recommend starting here:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

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