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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • Basically, your instincts are right and the question in the last line of your post is a good one. Here’s why:

    “Whiteness” doesn’t come from biology or culture. It’s really just a way of describing a hierarchy that was set up by European empires and early corporations at the dawn of capitalism to justify the enslavement of people around the world, the colonization of their lands, and the exploitation of their natural resources for profit.

    This hierarchy is used to steamroll over the huge number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds people have, in order to label some “white”, others “black”, others “asian”, and so on. There can be no “white” culture (even within one country), because the boundaries of who is accepted as “white” have shifted more than once in the past few hundred years and could easily shift again. For example, look up when and why Irish people and Italian people were accepted as fully white and look up the “contingent” whiteness that Jewish people have had in the US. See How the Irish Became White, for example.

    Another reason there is no white culture is because, even for people accepted as white, whiteness has erased the cultures they brought to America when they immigrated by forcing them to conform to its rules. Think about how badly even light-skinned immigrants were treated by others whose families had been in America for generations. The immense pressure to look, sound, and act “American” and “white” to avoid being bullied at school, to be able to get good jobs, and to be seen as “respectable” in the neighborhood, meant for many people that they had to give up large parts of their culture to be accepted. This compounds over the generations, until we end up with people asking questions like the post you’ve made right here.

    Racists proudly defend white (or “western” if they’re cowards) culture. They’re completely unable to see how whiteness has stolen big pieces of the cultures of everyone it touches. It has bleached them into a blander, more sterile version of what they once were.