What is white culture?
Normalizing White Culture
What is white culture? What do white people value; what do they/we believe in? How do white people communicate, verbally and non-verbally? How do we show emotion, how do we discipline? What are our aesthetics, our definitions of beauty? How do we experience personal space, tone of voice, and how do we value behavior or family dynamics?
I facilitate an activity in many of my workshops where we dissect white culture. I’ve lead this in exclusively white groups, as well as racially diverse ones. It invites us all to define a culture that is rarely categorized. It asks us to do to white people what is often done to every other racial group. Generally speaking, white people feel confused and uncomfortable during this activity, while people of color find it to be easy and even liberating to name white culture and “break it down.”
If you’re white and these questions bring up feelings of anxiety and defensiveness, I get it. It’s uncomfortable to put us all in a box, right? Especially if it’s the first time you’ve been asked to describe white culture, it can feel jarring and confusing. I’ve been there too. When I was younger, I knew I was white, but I had a strong resistance to accepting that I was a part of this culture. I grew up feeling like I was different because I was raised without wealth, without economic comfort. I was different because my mom was an immigrant, who came here after I was born; she was more rooted in an ancestral land. One without the generational stains of slavery and indigenous genocide. I thought I was different because my mom was different.
These excuses about why I didn’t fit into white culture soothed me. They made me feel like I didn’t have to relate to or take responsibility for my people, specifically the ones who more clearly fit the stereotypes—who displayed behavior that I perceived as offensive or oppressive. I took efforts to distance myself from them and this culture. If I could convince myself that I was different, then maybe other people would also see me as different.
For most white people, we have simultaneously been asked to embrace our whiteness and accept its privileges, while also distancing ourselves from the culture because it feels lifeless, plain, and often not connected to anything real. Understandably we cling to our religion, our class, or sexuality, our spaces and places of difference in order to be on the outside of this blandness. If we’re aware of the brutal history in this country, we can feel that anything and everything white feels shameful, saturated in historical pain and trauma that has not been dealt with or healed. Or it’s watered down, so distant from traditions that there isn’t anything to feel proud of or joyful about.
Every time I do this workshop, I hear many familiar defensive responses. Voices of white people who identify as Jewish, Irish, Italian or other European ethnicities or cultural groups; LGBTQ or Non-Binary (sexual orientation and/or gender); poor (whether by circumstance or choice); and marginal (outside of the majority through lifestyle). There are so many other ways we self-identify that can keep us from acknowledging being a part of “white” culture. These all make sense because there is always important nuance in culture and identity which often holds both social privilege as well as areas of oppression. Nothing is ever a simple categorization of all people with one skin color having all the same ways of living, of being, of believing. Each of us represent various experiences of class, religious beliefs, family history and stories—all of which play into the unique fabric of who we are and who our families are. There are certain cultural aspects of being poor that I experienced and can recognize across all racial groups, which differ from cultural norms of people with wealth—and the same goes for the wealthy. There are cultural differences for white people who are Jewish or Italian or any other ethnic group and have not fully melted into the huge pot of American whiteness.
Even in the midst of the various ways we differ, to not acknowledge that white culture exists or infiltrates all European descendants in this country, in small and large ways, is to live in denial. Ever since American colonial law first categorized Europeans as white in 1669, people with shades of beige skin began to be systematically boxed into a racial group. Some who immigrated here were, at first, refused this categorization, but eventually all people of European descent were legally and socially “accepted” as white. We see the results of this historical classification in many behaviors—ways of acting and seeing the world. When we are in this white culture, it’s difficult to see the nuances woven into it. And to notice that we are not simply part of the culture; we ARE the culture. To accept this truth offers more room to make changes from behavior that is inherently oppressive and dominating, into behaviors that are liberating and respectful.
Cultures of largely non-white groups can often see whiteness more clearly because they witness it from the outside. This is why the white culture activity I referenced is usually uncomfortable and more challenging for European descendants than it is for people from non-European ancestral lands. The different voice tones used for various situations, the expression and understanding of body language, the word choice and sentence structure in oral communication, and the references used to explaining ideas. All of this is culture specific, but because white people don’t see ourselves as having a distinct culture, white “space” is seen as common territory in which everyone feels comfortable and safe. Many of us are taught to believe that what is normal and comfortable to us, is also that for everyone else.
When I was young, I had no idea mostly white environments would be uncomfortable or emotionally unsafe for people who are not white. This awareness didn’t set in until I was able to hear the experiences and stories of those who didn’t experience life in white skin. People of color have had to study and learn white culture for their very survival, but as a white person, I can live my entire life ignorant of the experiences people of other cultures and races have. My ignorance will probably not result in negative social, physical, economic, or political consequences for me. In fact, there will most likely be no repercussions at all.
This was highlighted as I was talking with a white, female student who was telling me about her involvement in a racial conflict that I had been asked to hold a restorative justice circle for. She recently moved to Oakland from Texas and she shared some experiences from her life that helped me to see a wider perspective on why she acted the way she did. She grew up with a lot of socially accepted racist behavior, including the use of the “n-word,” without any (that she remembers) examples of Black people speaking out to her about the harmful impact of these behaviors. She explained that she had no idea a white-majority class could make a Black student feel uncomfortable or that any Black students would be bothered by her using the N-word. She was in Oakland now, far away from her past in rural Texas, and she was learning that things out here are different than where she came from.
In our conversation, the white girl admitted that the student who she was in this racial conflict with (a Black female in her same grade), had explained her sense of being emotionally unsure and unsafe in the majority white class, but the white student was still surprised and confused by this information. It was obvious that her white veil of privilege had been torn, and she didn’t even know she’d been wearing one.
The class where the incident happened is a more academically “elite” class, made up of mostly white students. Over the many years I have worked at the school, Black and Latino students who have taken these classes expressed to me their discomfort and feeling like they can’t be their full selves. While they may get encouraged to join these classes or programs, white culture within the programs hasn’t changed much over the years. It still upholds certain behaviors, language use, tone, knowledge base, and other indicators as the norm. Students report feeling not smart enough, not having the correct knowledge base, and being tokenized or asked to speak for all Black or Brown people when certain topics (such as slavery) are brought up. Similar to this program, many educational programs, professional organizations, and businesses seek to have more “diversity,” yet they don’t make the internal changes to support and sustain this diversity. The culture of the space continues to flourish in whiteness, which doesn’t allow for the development of a healthy, culturally diverse space rooted in true equity and inclusion.
Being unaware of white culture and how it operates blocks our ability to notice how deeply it affects people who haven’t been raised in it. When people of color either don’t come into white spaces, or do come, but then leave soon after, there is little to no accountability among the white people for the role our unconscious behavior has played. Most often these failed social situations create a narrative of “othering.” The white position often states that people of color are the ones with the problem. I’ve heard statements like: “They [people of color] aren’t prepared enough, responsible enough, or focused enough to stay and be successful.” “They’re too loud, too aggressive, too opinionated, or too angry.” “They just don’t fit in.”
To dissect whiteness means to break apart the cultural aspects that have gone unnoticed and unexamined—to recognize the powerful effects of the normalizing of white culture. If we can examine our whiteness, we gain more ability to change our cultural behavior that is historically rooted in dominance. We will “make room” for people of other cultures and thereby improve our way of interacting with the rest of the world. This process can also help us find ourselves beneath the whitewashing we ourselves have been through to gain social privileges—which I think is very enlightening.