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@Blambo, not at all and I wasn't trying to say you were overtly emotional.  It's just that while I too take snide look at what I perceive as 'false claim of authenticity', it's relation to ethnicity is largely lost on me probably cause how I grew up?  I'm just having problem taking in anything cultural as this fixed thing with a point of reference for 'authentic' since what was suppose to be mine changed so drastically.

 

So for me everything that tries to invoke 'cultural authenticity' just slides right off cause it's mostly meaningless unless we are talking about historical artifacts for research purpose or IP stuff so original creator (and I can't see ethnicity having any bearing on stuff that's been done by people who are long dead) gets the credit I guess?  This goes back to the idea of cultural appropriation being completely lost on me cause of above stated reasons.

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I basically feel like I have zero cultural identity!

 

My culture is, at best, nerdiness, I guess, but that's fucking lame because anyone can be a nerd. Not everyone can feel like they have, you know... a culture to be a part of. A greater sense of belonging.

 

I often find myself resenting where I grew up because I hold no affection for any of it. I hate where I grew up, and I have no, whatever, American pride.  Maybe things would be different if I'd grown up on the west coast (or east coast? it's possible!). Midwest just ain't for me at all. SPORTS! Nah. Texas also ain't for me.

 

I also often find myself, while watching things (mostly anime (weeabooooo), just because that's most of what I watch, but it can definitely happen with anything) longing for that feeling of belonging to a larger Thing.

 

So absorbing fake cultural authenticity is all I have!

 

This is half sarcasm, but also half real. I don't really know why I wrote this up. It's a constant frustration of mine. It's sort of tangentially related to what's going on. But not really.

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I imagine that you would have a better chance realizing your cultural identity if you lived abroad for a while.

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I lived in Japan for six months. I've also lived in various and wildly different parts of the US for at least a year.

 

Besides, I'd have to have a cultural identity to realize in the first place. I don't. I'm a cultural chameleon. I blend in with where I am (unless I hate it, like Dallas). But I have nothing to go back to.

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For what it's worth, I feel the same way as you Twig.

 

I mean, we have things like football, Thanksgiving, Hollywood movie star crap, and whatever other things one might typically identify as "American culture". I participate in some of it and find a lot of it dumb and pointless. But none of it has any meaning to me beyond "a thing that caught on at some point because a sizable portion of people propped it up as something important".

 

Every now and again, even though I hate sports, I will watch the Super Bowl and we'll make some snacks or something. I guess that might be a good example of participating in American culture but to me it feels more like playing pretend (i.e. pretending a football game has any real importance and getting invested into it) and it could totally cease to be a thing in our country and I wouldn't care one bit.

 

Maybe if I didn't loathe so many things about our country and what it deems important (seriously, almost everything I see associated as "American" is just immediately off-putting), I might find more of a sense of belonging and understand what it means to be part of a culture and for it to feel meaningful and important.

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I wonder if that sense of culturallessness (sure, of course that's a word) plays into how some Americans see other cultures.  That's not me judging, just a genuine curiosity.

 

I don't perceive any kind of American culture, not really.  I'm always going to be a Kansan, and a farm kid.  Those are identities, but I don't know if they cross over to true cultures. 

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I associate my culture with its claim to strive for naive egalitarianism for the sake of egalitarianism. My wife is learning Korean right now and she keeps discovering all these assumptions of hierarchy embedded in the language (honorifics) that I have no respect for whatsoever. I think my culture atleast claims that egalitarianism is more important than tradition even if it fails to be egalitarian in reality.

There's a lot of examples of particular mixes that I associate with my culture, I'm not well aware of other cultures, but in my experience, there are so many little subcultures that have a dynamic with local hegemonies. There's a huge amount of culture where I am, just pay attention to greetings and small-chat for a bit and ask yourself if it's heavily influenced by the specifics of your locality.

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I feel pretty much the same way as Twig and Zeus. I don't feel any afinity towards a cultural group to which I de facto belong, and therefore I don't think 'authenticity' is a thing that I have access to. I've come to terms with this, though. It's not really something that causes me any psychic pain.

 

My parents were expats abroad when I was growing up, in a couple different countries, so that might contribute somewhat to my ambivilence towards 'American' things. The cultural identity that people who grew up in my situation have crafted for ourselves ('third culture kids') is more embarrassing than anything else. Like many white and mostly-white cultural identities, it smells a little bit too much like the imperialism that it's a direct result of.

 

Anyway, I don't lose any sleep over being a white man "with no culture", as the meme goes, simply because I know people who understand where I come from and I can belong to them. So to speak. I find my camaraderie in a handful of people and that's enough for me.

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I identify with this too, but I hate the term ex-pat.

 

Just call an immigrant an immigrant.

 

For context, I lived in Portugal for 8 years and lived in Canada for 6. When I came back from Portugal at the age of 15, everyone pretty much treated me like I was a foreigner. I was subjected to pretty much the same curiosity and casual xenophobia when I returned to me 'home' country.

 

"True" Quebecois really hate English people and you'll get a lot of shit from them for being a foreigner who also happens to be English.  For most of my time there I might have been a middle class worker in tech (QA) but when you sit in a bar drinking with people (with a head full of dreadlocks) they don't give a shit, you are - at best - a joke.

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Well I'm glad that at least I'm not the only one!

 

I wonder if that sense of culturallessness (sure, of course that's a word) plays into how some Americans see other cultures.  That's not me judging, just a genuine curiosity.

 

It's certainly possible. Although I've definitely heard people talk about the culture of New England compared to the culture of the West coast. Or the culture of Southern California versus Northern California. I'm from the Midwest. I know that's a culture that some people identify with. I don't...

 

I'm not sure there's One Big American Culture that really fits into any clean mold, unless it's "we interfere with the world's shit and often cause more trouble than we help solve". If that seems overly negative, it's probably because I see America in an overly negative light. Which certainly doesn't help when I'm trying to think of a culture I could identify with.

 

But it's not just America versus Other Countries. There's a lot of stuff in this thread about black culture. That's a group of people, and not necessarily a place (though we often speak in the context of black Americans, just because a lot of us are Americans).

 

I'm a white dude. What's my culture? If I had to make a list of white dude culture characteristics, I'd struggle to think of anything positive... (EDIT: For the record I don't want to be part of a "white dude" culture, anyway. Just using that to sort of emphasize my thoughts here. Read over this and realize how ridiculous the implication was so I had to clarify!!!)

 

Anyway, I don't lose any sleep over being a white man "with no culture", as the meme goes, simply because I know people who understand where I come from and I can belong to them. So to speak. I find my camaraderie in a handful of people and that's enough for me.

 

 

Ideally I'd feel the same. It's true that when I have a solid group of friends around me I often forget that I have no Big Culture (I'm sure there are more correct or intelligent words or phrases to use for these things, but I'm an idiot, so forgive me). But it still seeps through. I'm immensely envious of people who have that solid community on which to stand, even if they don't necessarily have that immediately available group of people.

 

---

 

End game is this is why I always find it so fucking stupidly difficult to empathize with things like cultural appropriation. There are standout cases where I'm like "yeah that's fucked", but a lot of times I see these things and I'm lost as to what I'm even supposed to be without enjoying and partaking in and riffing off of someone else's culture.

 

I don't want to start another argument about cultural appropriation. Please don't do that. It's just an example.

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@Blambo, not at all and I wasn't trying to say you were overtly emotional. It's just that while I too take snide look at what I perceive as 'false claim of authenticity', it's relation to ethnicity is largely lost on me probably cause how I grew up? I'm just having problem taking in anything cultural as this fixed thing with a point of reference for 'authentic' since what was suppose to be mine changed so drastically.

So for me everything that tries to invoke 'cultural authenticity' just slides right off cause it's mostly meaningless unless we are talking about historical artifacts for research purpose or IP stuff so original creator (and I can't see ethnicity having any bearing on stuff that's been done by people who are long dead) gets the credit I guess? This goes back to the idea of cultural appropriation being completely lost on me cause of above stated reasons.

Again I'm not trying to vilify the "false claim of authenticity" itself because I want to preserve the sancitity of cultural boundaries or anything, I'm just saying that posing something as authentic food but then butchering it speaks to the priority of the marketer, which is selling authenticity and the idea of the culture that exists in society. I'm trying to say that this has misrepresentative effects in culture, in the act of attempting to represent something so fluid and diverse. I fully recognize that ethnicity is complex and reflective. But I don't see how that prevents me from making observations about situations in which that is not the cultural norm.

Though I do see what I'm saying as a nitpicky point that's so broad to be relevant to anything, haha.

To your second point, I'm also trying to make an effort to care less about a perceived cultural heritage in my personal life. It's just kind of difficult for me since I grew up in a predominantly Chinese community but also went to mostly white schools and have met people (Chinese or otherwise) who have invoked a sense of otherness in "them" and myself.

As a side note, it's really sad to me that I'm slowly losing my ability to fluently communicate in Chinese to people I care about, so that's definitely source of a lot of waxing prideful about Chinese culture or whatever. As much as a prescriptive ethnicity is "untrue" it's a difficult thing to let go sometimes.

I also think it's kind of folly to completely throw out the idea that cultural differences exist in a gradient across human existence, just because there doesn't necessarily exist discrete boundaries between them. I know that's not what you're saying, but I've often been led to this argument by people who don't feel the effects of cultural appropriation or equate it with cultural assimilation or acculturation.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough before, or if I'm assuming things about your argument.

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Culture to white people, or at least in my experience seems to be informed by some association through nationality of your parents or by choice. Most of my friends consider themselves Italian or irish, to the point that if you ask them what they are they will only say they are American in the company of non Americans. Otherwise they seem to consider their culture as being related related to their job or hobby. I just don't tend to see the same idea of a shared experience as being central to it. The ideas tend to be more rooted in where you came from or your goals than your experience.

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Culture to white people, or at least in my experience seems to be informed by some association through nationality of your parents or by choice. Most of my friends consider themselves Italian or irish, to the point that if you ask them what they are they will only say they are American in the company of non Americans. Otherwise they seem to consider their culture as being related related to their job or hobby. I just don't tend to see the same idea of a shared experience as being central to it. The ideas tend to be more rooted in where you came from or your goals than your experience.

That may be true for more than just white people, I think. Issues tend to come up when people mush the mundane collection of things that make up a shared experience into a fixed identity.

Gonna stop derailing the thread, heh.

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As a side note, it's really sad to me that I'm slowly losing my ability to fluently communicate in Chinese to people I care about, so that's definitely source of a lot of waxing prideful about Chinese culture or whatever. As much as a prescriptive ethnicity is "untrue" it's a difficult thing to let go sometimes.

 

haha hear hear, I can barely read Korean text now (I mean, I can read everything because of how easy Korean texts are to read but there is a notable pause between translating the text into sound then into something meaningful in my mind) and it's definitely a thing that pops in my mind as something lost on me in a sense that is more than just a skillset.

 

 

That may be true for more than just white people, I think. Issues tend to come up when people mush the mundane collection of things that make up a shared experience into a fixed identity.

Gonna stop derailing the thread, heh.

 

idk I'm quite enjoying this kind of talk~

 

 

End game is this is why I always find it so fucking stupidly difficult to empathize with things like cultural appropriation. There are standout cases where I'm like "yeah that's fucked", but a lot of times I see these things and I'm lost as to what I'm even supposed to be without enjoying and partaking in and riffing off of someone else's culture.

 

Perhaps this is our culture, that we all collectively feel left out of this collectivism that tends to go around.  Sounds kinda odd saying it, but guess that's how life rolls sometimes~ (except of course, I don't feel the desire to belong because I think that sense of belonging is actually an artificial one, like national identity)

 

Like going back to origin of this, food and language is often considered as one of primary way of identifying a culture, and I guess that's telling of my culture in a way since I mostly ate taco, spaghetti (yep, cooked by my Korean mother) and assortment of junk food.

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I would feel similar to Twig, and the following is not something I feel overt pride for, but having recently moved to Texas it's been made most apparent that I'm culturally "italian new yorker"

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I think cultural identity can be a bit like an accent. You can't always hear your own. But as an Australian, American cultural identity and the subtle ways it exhibits itself in americans is fairly apparent to me. Americans have all sorts of cultural traditions! They have particular folk heros, they have proud and shameful history, they have traditional dress (leather jacket and jeans and wayfarers, for instance) that they mostly don't wear but sometimes invoke (like most other cultures), they have unique holidays like thanksgiving with very specific rituals, the list goes on. I don't find it that different from any other immigrant culture in Australia, except they don't tend to think of themselves as immigrants. 

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I think cultural identity can be a bit like an accent. You can't always hear your own. But as an Australian, American cultural identity and the subtle ways it exhibits itself in americans is fairly apparent to me. Americans have all sorts of cultural traditions! They have particular folk heros, they have proud and shameful history, they have traditional dress (leather jacket and jeans and wayfarers, for instance) that they mostly don't wear but sometimes invoke (like most other cultures), they have unique holidays like thanksgiving with very specific rituals, the list goes on. I don't find it that different from any other immigrant culture in Australia, except they don't tend to think of themselves as immigrants.

Yes this! And just like I would be pretty put off if someone repeated a really bad, exaggerated version of my accent to me all the time.

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I think the idea that Americans don't have a strong culture probably comes from the media's general presentation of American as default and others as exceptions. It subtley conditions you to think of things you do as just things all people do instead of things american people do.

 

I absolutely have a strong irish culture. I don't identify with plenty of stuff (no interest in our sports, I don't watch much of our TV) but I'm still clearly of the culture because of things it instilled in me growing up. Having a relationship with someone from another culture is a good way to notice the fundamental differences in your societies.

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To be clear, I didn't say there wasn't an American culture (I think there is, but it's more regional than widespread, for the most part). I said I don't identify with it. It's not my culture. It's not one I belong to.

 

For example!

 

 

They have particular folk heros, they have proud and shameful history, they have traditional dress (leather jacket and jeans and wayfarers, for instance) that they mostly don't wear but sometimes invoke (like most other cultures), they have unique holidays like thanksgiving with very specific rituals, the list goes on.

 

I can name a couple folk heroes but I don't care about any of them. They're also so completely unimportant and never come up in every day life. I think they did more when I was younger, in movies and junk, but now they're nothing.

 

I... don't think that's traditional dress, so much as it was the fashion at one point, and much like all fashion, it comes and goes. I've never worn a leather jacket in my life.

 

I don't give a shit about Thanksgiving. Its entire purpose is to eat a lot of food. It's also ostensibly about "giving thanks", but, well, since this is America and our culture is over-eating, nobody cares about that part. I like eating, and I "celebrate" it by inviting people over (or going somewhere to meet people) and eating a lot of food, but I could do that any time, and I often do.

 

Those things exist, but they aren't mine. Also they feel largely superficial, to me, like they're not strong elements of culture, they're just something America pooped out to say "yeah we have something too". That's not entirely fair, I know, but that's how it feels.

 

To reiterate: I'm not saying America doesn't have culture. I'm saying it's not my culture. My lamentation is entirely for my own personal lack of identification with any form of culture. I am nothing.

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A good book to read about culture is Watching the English. It's by an anthropologist and it's an anthropological study of English culture. Lots of people (English people especially) find it very eye-opening to see their culture described "from the outside," so to speak (the anthropologist is English but her descriptions bring to light the ways that English culture is its own thing, like Claire Hosking is talking about). I remember once years ago I stumbled on a website that was like a Cliff Notes version of world cultures for diplomats - it had an entry for most countries on earth with basic things like how to be polite, typical customs at meal times and when meeting people, and other stuff like that. It was fun to browse around but the real revelatory one for me was America - seeing all of my habits and folkways described in blunt language from the perspective of telling an outside the motions they have to go through to fit in was really interesting. I realized that I take a ton of things for granted.

That said, I also think that a lot of things are at work that "dilute" America culture, so to speak. In addition to SuperBiasedMan's point about America exporting its culture so much, America is a HUGE FUCKING COUNTRY, which means there's a lot of variation in "American" culture, but at the same time America is an immigrant nation that has had a hodgepodge culture for as long as it has existed, which means that it also has a strong homogenizing tendency that works at cross-purposes with the tendency to split itself apart geographically.

I also think that white people, at least in my experience, tend to be fairly happy to identify with the non-American portion of their identity, like itsamoose's friends. People who don't pass as white (Hmong, Indian, etc.), again at least in my experience, tend to be a bit less happy about highlighting the difference, probably because people give them so much shit for not actually being American because they're not white people. Nobody asks white people where they're "really" from in America. Meanwhile black people get shit from both directions - you've got people saying "go back to Africa" and at the same time white supremacy has spent the past few hundred years erasing all traces of African culture that it can, leaving a black American whose family hasn't recently arrived with not a lot to go on, so to speak, apart from being American, which means being a member of a society that has discriminated against you and your culture literally since day one.

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I think cultural identity can be a bit like an accent.

 

Yeah! This is an analogy I also wanted to make. It's easy to forget you have one, particularly when your environment and your media reinforce the idea that you're just talking normal, and of course the easiest way to be reminded of it is when you stand out or are made fun of for your pronounciation. They're also similar in how some varieties arbitrary became the norm and are now seen less as a specific, unique thing and more as a general marker of prestige, like good job you have made it beyond your roots and are a global citizen. Despite their origins, I don't think a lot of people would still look at jeans as a culture-specific garb so much as a general symbol of western capitalist hegemony.

 

Looks like there's been a whole big conversation since I've last been to this thread. It's a shame that some people see posting in it as something they'll inevitably regret! I have thoughts about that whole topic, I guess, but I'll keep them spoilered and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to see my meandering thought process.

 

Successfully navigating these conversations is something I'm trying to learn in various lectures and courses at the moment. I'm very interested in them, but they can also be very frustrating, so how to talk about these ideas is kind of an unsolved challenge. The high-level topics of social justice movements tend to mostly stay the same, but the discourse around them changes a lot, and trying to see what kind of patterns there are to it is fascinating. So please forgive that this is more a high-concept rant than a specific example.

 

One thing that causes confusion in these lectures, and where some of that tension here might come from, is that these conversations often ask you to hold fundamentally conflicting notions as consistent with each other.

 

For instance, one of the first things that came up in a lecture on legal gender studies is how anti-discrimination laws at once say that you can't treat people differently based on [a catalogue of factors], but also that you must treat them differently, in the shape of affirmative action laws or such.

 

How does that make sense? One the one hand, when I make a blanket statement like "women are discriminated against" (which I imagine most people here would agree with), I am also being discriminatory myself, and I don't mean that in a "what about the men?" sense. I am assuming that there is a universal experience that all women share, regardless of their differences, and I'm reducing them to that experience: victimhood. I'm also reasserting "woman" as a meaningful category that just exists, out there, in the wild, which flies in the face of so much theoretical work on how arbitrarily constructed these categories are. So in a lot of ways, that statement is not ideal: it's essentializing, it's normatizing, it's reductive.

 

And yet, most types of feminism agree that making these kinds of claims is necessary or at least justified for addressing real-world injustices that don't simply go away when people assert that they look at the skills and not the gender of potential employees, or that they "don't see" color.

 

As it turns out, not seeing things is no solution, because when you ignore these categories completely (as you might in an ideal society), you end up ignoring a lot of distinctions that other people still make based on them. It's entirely possible for somebody to have been born in the same place as me, lived in the same town as me all their life, and still be accused of not being from here based on their looks. That accusation isn't true (if you even accept the concept of nationality and ethnicity as a meaningful distinction in the first place), but it's still real. "Not from here" is part of the lived reality of this hypothetical person, no matter how absurd.

 

That's kind of similar to how I see this whole food conversation. One the one hand people are not wrong to observe that when you talk about certain kinds of dishes as belonging to a particular culture, you are also taking part in the perpetuation of their "exotic" status. On the other hand, the people who have been talking here about the complexities of cultural attitudes affecting culinary exchange didn't create those attitudes so much as point to them, so it seems unjustified to say that they are being gross for differentiating between "foreign" and "normal" food in the first place. Even if that differentiation is questionable in a lot of ways, it also appears necessary at the moment for talking about well, itself. Like how I could turn on the TV this instant and catch an ad in which an asian-looking person does pretend karate to promote fried rice, or a documentary that plays into tropes of exoticism and mysticism by looking at so many ancient, traditional recipes of different countries but never at what people there actually eat these days.

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Hah, both Blamboo and Deadpan really liked that accent analogy which is kinda hilarious personally cause during my WoW years people swore I was from Eastern Europe XD

 

To reiterate: I'm not saying America doesn't have culture. I'm saying it's not my culture. My lamentation is entirely for my own personal lack of identification with any form of culture. I am nothing.

 

Not feeling strong ties to any culture is a fine thing IMO~

 

@Deadpan, that's sort of why I sympathize with why there is such strong focus but it's also just... awful to consistently see "white privilege" every. fucking. thread about any social issues.  The discussion always boils down to what the overtly broad 'cis-straight-white-males' are doing to some overtly broad 'people-of-color' or 'women'.  And again, I get why the broad strokes are used cause we gotta talk and laying out the specifics for every possible permutation of reality is never likely to result in any timely conversation, but the sheer frequency and broadness of it just rubs me the wrong way (and those sympathies are reason why I consider this to be product of my personal preference rather than some objective shortcomings of the discussion method).

 

Edit: of course, the irony is that I too exaggerated and painted a broad stroke by claiming every thread but given that it was a non-judgmental paragraph (more of just explaining what I consider to be personal preference) I'm hoping it doesn't rub people too wrongly.

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Not feeling strong ties to any culture is a fine thing IMO~

 

What if I want that feeling?

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I guess that's another similarity: most people are really bad at placing accents and will make weird guesses based on stereotypes they have in their head.

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