A theme that has become Central in white supremacist rhetoric and apologetics goes roughly thus:

“I’m not a racist. I just want to be able to celebrate, perpetuate, and promote the best interest of my own culture. I want to have white pride. I want to isolate and maintain white culture. Why is that so wrong? If black people can have black pride and Black Culture, why can’t I have white pride and white culture?”



The first thing that’s odd to me about this article is the inherent logic that because black people are doing something (that is, experiencing and promoting their cultural identity in a certain way), we should do it too.

The Achilles heel of this argument is the idea that because in America there exists an overarching “Black Culture”, there must also exist an overarching “white culture.” I would argue that there is not. And here’s why.



White people are not a single ethnicity. For those that are new here, ethnicities are actual genetic differences between groups of people, races are 5ish large categorisations based on appearance alone. There’s some broad correlations between the two, but the latter category is essentially meaningless, except to predict and mediate how people interact with each other. One’s race doesn’t necessarily correspond to one’s ethnicity. Country singer Willie Nelson would be almost unequivocally identified by anyone as white (his race), but ethnically is also Native American.

White people are not a single ethnicity worldwide. They are not a single culture worldwide. They are Poles and Basques and Danes and Uzbeks and Scots. They are the Irish, the Romanians, the Greeks, Spaniards, and the Khazahks. When these different cultures and different came to America, they brought their own cultures with them. They kept speaking their languages, making their food, and celebrating their holidays. For any white American, your culture is alive and well. The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and the Roman Catholic Church are here for the Irish, the sons of Norway and Norwegian dancing classes are here for the Norwegians. Your music is here, your art is here, your food is here. There are Italian restaurants, German beer, and a “little Kiev” in major American cities. Any child in school can study Spanish or French or German.



It is an enticing idea to think that an entire racial group has a monoculture. We often elude erroneously to “Asian culture” or “Asia” as if we can generalize, but we cannot. In the same way that whiteness breaks down into Scandinavians and Romanians and bulgarians, “Asian” breaks down into the Thai, the Japanese, and he Hmong. They also came to America with their cultures, their ethnic enclaves in inner cities, their restaurants, their temples. Not only did they differentiate themselves, we differentiated them. With a ban on Chinese immigration, and later forcible incarceration for Japanese-Americans, America reinforced not all asians are created equal.

Not all whites were created equal. President Martin Van Buren’s greatest hurdle to leap in his campaign was that he was not a native speaker of English, but of Dutch, a point that was controversial. Irish Kennedy had to fight uphill the stigma against Catholics.

This differentiation was not granted to Africans.

If you go to Africa, you will not find Black Culture. Madagascar, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the condo have their own cultures. They have their own food, they have their own languages, and their own traditions.

But when Africans were brought in chains to this country, they weren’t able to bring that with them. We did not differentiate between them, and we still don’t. And after a single generation of not being able to speak their language or recount their history, they didn’t differentiate between themselves. There is no Yoruba class in high school, there is no Ugandan restaurant on the corner. There are no Sudanese ethnic enclaves in major cities. There are no festivals, no dancing classes, no bilingual president.

In a country of Chinese and Dutch and Thai and Scottish, these people were left with only the color of their skin because they were reduced to only the color of their skin. So these slaves, and later the former slaves, made their own culture, completely out of scratch, completely new. They invented their own music, like Ragtime and Jazz and Hip Hop. They created soul food, schools and styles of dance, their own dialect, and their own fashion. When people talk about Black Culture And Black Pride, they’re not talking about some kind of overarching culture or hive mind that exists amongst all people in the world who have black skin. They’re talking about this culture that was created by black Americans in the last 300 years. And no, white people don’t have something like that. They have their same old, thousand-year old cultures.



If you’re a white person and you would like a shiny new culture, join one. You can be a goth or a crust Punk or a dumpster diver or a hippie living on a commune. Or start your own culture. Start a cult. I don’t care. Have pride. Have Portland Pride. Have Irish Pride. Have Pentecostal Pride. Go for it.