(Spoiler: It Is Not The Fact That It Upsets White People)
Per KnowYourMeme, a 2013 Tumblr post started the meme, “White People Have No Culture”.
In October 2013, deactivated Tumblr user diefuhrerin submitted a post titled “”White People Have No Culture'”, followed by a series of photographs featuring various cities, artworks, events and other culture from areas historically populated by white people. Over the next four years, the post gained over 1,600 notes.[2]
Know Your Meme
The post, in its original form, was supposed to be a defense of White people. That they do, in fact, have culture.
The original Tumblr post referenced by KnowYourMeme was reposted by the Tumblr account “SJWhypocrisy” (yes, apparently Tumblr, like the mouth breathing term “SJW”, still exists).
I’ll spare you the travel, and their post the traffic, and share some images contained within the original Tumblr post “White People Have No Culture”.
Below each image is context I added that, importantly, did not exist in the original post. Note especially, the years listed.
It might surprise you that not one of these images depict something created by a White culture.
It might not surprise you that someone on the internet grouped an almost-impossibly random selection of images under one broad banner.
I also find the collection of these images – the wide swath of history and culture they pull from – very telling: they are an MRI-like map of this person’s idea of Whiteness.
Like everything on the internet, the originally-sincere (assuming OP wasn’t trolling) was destined for an ironic re-designation sooner or later.
KnowYourMeme traces the origin of the ironic reinterpretation of “White People Have No Culture” to a 2015 post by The Fat Jew, which almost guarantees the ironic use of “White People Have No Culture”, started before The Fat Jew’s post, because The Fat Jew is nothing but a copyright infringing used-car salesman of an aggregate account, apologies to used car salespersons.
Here is the post that “started” it all.
It might surprise you that this picture of White people in Snuggies is, actually, an artifact of White culture.
Somewhere between 1790 and 1828 Johann Frederich Blumenbach, a professor at (of course it’s Germany) German University Gotteingem, lined up a bunch of skulls (60) from a variety of the world’s peoples, and chose a Georgian-born, Moscow sex slave as the most beautiful.
This skull, chosen based on Blumenbach’s personal aesthetic preferences, was a skull from the South Caucasus region – “between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and mainly occupied by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia”.
It might surprise you that this skull is the skull of the first White person.
More accurately, this forgotten skull was the first Caucasian, a term that – as problematic as it is – is the foundational classification for our current understanding of what it means to be White.
So why are the pictures first posted on Tumblr in defense of White culture, not actual examples of White culture? And why is the silly Snuggies family actually White?
“Whiteness Is Severely Under Theorized”
To give an all-too brief summation of Whiteness (what else is a weekly blog taking on culture, but often, “all-too brief”), I want to quote author-of-this-sub-section’s-title Neil Irvin Painter, author of “The History of White People”, writing for NBC news in June of 2020.
Before the Enlightenment, people classified themselves and others according to clan, tribe, kingdom, locale, religion and an infinity of identities dependent on what people thought was important about themselves and others. Before the Enlightenment, Europeans could see human difference, they could see who was tall, who short, who light-skinned, who dark, differences they explained according to religion, cultural habits, geography, wealth and climate, among the most usual characteristics, but not race.
Neil Irvin Painter for NBC News
What led me to find this NBC News article by Painter was something I read in college. Which is another way of prefacing my inability to find an exact quote online, or without re-reading several Studs Terkel books.
I remember a passage, perhaps from The Good War perhaps from Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American in which a White man, being interviewed by Studs Terkel, described a memory he had as a child, right after the end of World War II.
He was living in New York I think, maybe Brooklyn, maybe not, and he described a scene very succinctly: after the war, the Italians, and Irish, and other ethnic Whites in his neighborhood, all started playing together in the streets. Sometimes that meant chasing black kids out of their neighborhood? I seemed to recall a detail about that. The part that still sticks with me today is that, after the war ended, “we were all White”. The kids in his neighborhood were no longer Italian, Polish, Irish: they were White.
I realize this rough paraphrasing won’t hold up in journalistic court (so to speak) but I include it because I know for a fact, that I think the way I do because I read an interview that contained a story along the lines of what I paraphrased above.
[ I hesitate to share this memory of a quote, even though, like I mentioned, it changed the way I think about Whiteness, and chose to include it to help reinforce the value of memories. A small push back against our societal over-reliance on the written word (yes, I know I’m writing this).]
And so, after digging and digging and not finding the quote I was looking for, it was a blessing to find this passage, years later, from Neil Irvin Painter.
their too easy to think of Irish, Italian, Slavic, or Greek immigrants and their children as “becoming” white. But that rhetorical construction ignores how Americans thought about whiteness before the 1940s. Then, race scientists and ordinary people thought there were several white races, such as the Celtic (Irish) race, the Northern Italian Race, the Eastern European Hebrew race, the Southern Italian race, and so on, which were ranked high to low beneath the Anglo-Saxon/Saxon/Teutonic/Nordic white race on top, depending on when you were speaking and to whom. Adult male immigrants of these supposedly inferior white races could vote when Black men born in the U.S. could not.
Why were the 1940s such a turning point? Because Nazis in Germany were committing racist crimes while arguing that Jews were different racially from Germans, that Jews were not Aryans, which an embarrassingly large proportion of Americans also believed, e.g., Henry Ford, an ardent anti-Semite.
In the 1940s, with another world war looming and national unity a top priority, experts taught Americans that whiteness was unitary, a key point used to prop up anti-Black segregation.
NBC News
So, if Whiteness as we know it today didn’t start until the end of World War II, then every single image in the original “White People Have No Culture” was created before our current idea of Whiteness.
I don’t mean to be obtuse, I know what OP was trying to say.
The original intent of “White People Have No Culture” was to share the accomplishments and artifacts of European ethnic and national cultures – with many pictures even predating our modern concept of Europe. Next to none of the cultures depicted would have thought of themselves as White. They are simply cultures developed by people with low melanin, or generally, white skin. Which is not insignificant. But even a generous reading of those images – that they were depicting the forebears of our current White culture – is problematic.
The unification of Whiteness after World War II, like the melting pot theory of America before it, both assume from their participants one thing: an erasure of their past.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, while discussing the unethical Chipotle delivery business model, the department at Ford Motor Company charged with keeping its employees in-line both in and out of the workplace, was a wild ass group.
One of their top priorities was, with immigration from Europe on the rise in the early 20th century, making sure every employee spoke English.
Their graduation ceremony was bonkers.
The culmination of the Ford English School program was the graduation ceremony where students were transformed into Americans. During the ceremony speakers gave rousing patriotic speeches and factory bands played marches and patriotic songs. The highlight of the event would be the transformation of immigrants into Americans. Students dressed in costumes reminiscent of their native homes stepped into a massive stage-prop cauldron that had a banner across the front identifying it as the AMERICAN MELTING POT. Seconds later, after a quick change out of sight of the audience, students emerged wearing “American” suits and hats, waving American flags, having undergone a spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.
Japolnik
The on-the-noseness of this whole situation is almost unreal, almost fascistic: the lie must be big in order to be believed. The imagery cannot imbue any doubt, the ceremony has no room for nuance. Its boldness is its strength, it overwhelms rational thought.
So to does our idea of Whiteness.
Whiteness is not rational. It is a collection of images that feel true. Images from all over geographical Europe, throughout wildly different time periods in the continent’s development.
So, what is, actually, a symbol of White culture?
Snuggies, Highway 100, and Larry Bird
The Snuggies picture shows a jovial, goofy family wearing ridiculous, comfy looking garments.
The carefreeness on display – the goofiness, the ability to let one’s guard down – is a freedom largely reserved for White people. (The co-option and terribly awkward regurgitation of the Black-originated “raising the roof” gesture is just too perfectly White for words. And this 1998 Orlando Sentinel, Sinbad-focused article opining the gestures origins is amazing.)
There are probably a lot better sources, but the reason Fat Joe and his (friends) don’t dance, “they just pull up their pants, and do the rockaway” is due, in part, to White Gaze.
If you’ve ever been the only black person at a party, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Once the music comes on, all eyes are on you. You might have two broken left feet and a bad back, but in that moment, every white face turns to you, waiting for you channel the spirits of Michael Jackson, James Brown, and Bobby Shmurda into a dazzling display of exotic dancing majesty. You could do jumping jacks at this point and people will copy you, in hopes of absorbing some of your coolness. You’re automatically hip, even if you don’t want to be.
The Guardian
But beyond the goofy shit White people are almost singularly known for, the Snuggie itself is a modern creation, created in a truly, capital “W” White Society.
I mean the guy who invented the Snuggie is named Gary Clegg. Gary Clegg. A name so White, if you say it three times in the mirror Klansmen appear in your bathroom. (No, I am not implying that Mr. Clegg is an active Ku Klux Klan member.)
Here are a few other things that are truly, capital “W” White creations.
Whatever the fuck you call this shit: the highways full of chain stores found in the inner-ring suburbs across America.
In these cases of car-centric, fast food biways, both the mass of chain restaurants and the vast, grotesque-grey highway are White creations.
Why does this ugly bullshit qualify as White?
Because highways full of cheeseburgers (which sounds way better than it looks) were originally developed as part of America’s subsidization of suburbs, a government-funded exodus following World War II. A migration fully endorsed and made possible by the US Government via multiple aid programs including the GI Bill gave us all the ugly scenes above.
Are there a bunch of ugly ass modern looking buildings in your nearest large American city?
Congratulations, those are also, actual artifacts of a White culture.
Though Brutalism originated in England, the term first used to describe the work of Peter and Alison Smithson, it’s all over America, and it’s all post-World War II.
Chances are good that if you went to college in the United States after, say, 1975, your campus featured at least one imposing, bunker-like concrete building in the architectural style known as Brutalism
Slate
Not just Brutalism, but the entire idea of sub-divisions is a White construct (see, again, the GI Bill).
And how could I forget the things making up many of these subdivisions: the ranch home.
I do not like ranch-style houses. I’m sure your ranch-style house is a beautiful home. I’m sure you’ve made it your own. I just probably don’t like looking at it from the outside.
So what would be the modern, White equivalent of the kind of fashion we saw in the “White People Have No Culture” post that kicked off this essay?
Business casual.
From the invention of the suit (arguably made fashionable by Beau Brumell at the beginning of the 19th century), a direct line can be drawn across Western history, to today’s business casual attire.
But what clothes and behavior are deemed a suitable balance of casual and business, is a construction of White culture.
As Shahamat Uddin writes,
I am sitting in the waiting room before a job interview. My foot is tapping incessantly while I tug on the too tight tie constricting my neck. My face is clean-shaven, all piercings removed, and my body is coddled underneath the slim-fitting suit jacket I just purchased from Macy’s. In my head, I am practicing my straight voice, going over the English words that I struggle with daily. I catch a reflection of myself in the window across the room and, at first, I don’t recognize myself. I see a shell of who I am, an individual transformed to fit the historically white standards of business professionalism.
The Tulane Hullabaloo
The energy people of color expend code-switching for their White colleagues is well documented, and a response to the inherent bias of what we call Professionalism – that stodgy, unemotional state of detachment we’re all supposed to have in a white collar work place.
Professionalism is, perhaps of everything I’ve shared here, the greatest example of White culture. Probably because it combines so many facets of personality: it reaches into your closet, onto your person.
in white and Western standards of dress and hairstyle (straightened hair, suits but not saris, and burqa and beard bans in some countries); in speech, accent, word choice, and communication (never show emotion, must sound “American,” and must speak white standard English); in scrutiny (black employees are monitored more closely and face more penalties as a result); and in attitudes toward timeliness and work style.
Stanford Social Innovation Review
White culture has a history of flattening history and divorcing the self from the body, of over-valuing rational thought, and devaluing emotional intelligence.
It is a culture that reached its Ultimate Form, its broadest levels of unification, in the United States after World War II around a very structured set of ideals; ideals of language, architecture, fashion, hairstyle. It shapes questions about what work is worthy of a living wage, and which human emotions are acceptable to display in public. White culture effects every aspect of our lives.
Now, there are a lot of positive things that White culture has created. For better or worse, I love Football. I grew up on Disney movies. I enjoy Panera and a well-fitted khaki pant. Almost all those things I just mentioned were influenced by cultures that came before our current understanding of Whiteness, certainly.
And none, certainly, can compare to this meme of Larry Bird.
I’m not just writing to shit on White culture. There is a real danger in not seeing Whiteness. Pointing out its worst aspects, often its most insidious, might help in making Whiteness more visible.
The Real Danger of Not Seeing Whiteness
When I was in college I took a class on the Poetry of Rap from Professor Alexs Pate.
During one lively discussion we touched upon the idea that, walking out of the rarefied air of a master’s level Rap Poetry course, out past the well-watered lawns of the University, out into the real world (yes, John Mayer, there unfortunately is such a thing for most people), I would be able to take off my hoodie, put on a belt, and transform into the safe White other Whites wouldn’t be scared of.
The point was, I could, at any time, shed whatever elements of Black culture I wore, and return to safe Whiteness. My skin allowed me that privilege.
During my mom’s decade-plus principalship at a Milwaukee Public School, she encountered a group of White goth kids who felt they were being bullied for the way they looked, who felt they were victims of prejudice.
Their story is perhaps more telling than my own.
My mom and I both thought the goth kid’s interpretation was ridiculous. The kids could always change clothes. The prejudice they endured was not the same as the prejudice endured by people of color.
Now, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they were middle-schoolers. But to take back that benefit, middle-schoolers suck. No matter if you’re in middle school with them, or they’re just…out there, going to middle school. If they’re a middle-schooler, they probably suck. (Take that, children whose age I am uncertain of!)
Anyways, the solution to my mom and I both seemed to be: conform or be outcast. It seems like a simple solution, but it does involve capitulation to a White norm that neither she nor I put into words.
At what exact point does the Goth become the non-threatening White teen? Is it after the make-up comes off? Or do the black nails make them not White culture enough to escape harassment?
White skin doesn’t make one 100% acceptable to White culture – as seen in the case of My Mom’s Goth Kids Tears (band name, called it). Sub-cultures can be useful to illuminate the fault lines of White culture, the places where it shows itself. The fact it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when a Goth kid becomes a full White, is part of the danger, part of Whiteness’ ability to normalize itself.
The differing levels of this White shit is why Don Draper can walk out of the hippie den, past the police, but the hippies can’t.
It’s part of the reason Dean Corll wasn’t caught murdering boys sooner. In his part of the country, as long as you dressed square (read, right wing: button ups, clean cut, shaven) you could pretty much get fucked up and do whatever you wanted. But as soon as you grew your hair out, all police attention was on you.
If White people have no culture, than much of what we see around us is just “normal”. Not even like, “normal for America”, or “normal for the suburbs”. When all context is stripped, “normal” is at its most powerful.
The lack of visibility that engenders Whiteness endangers anyone who doesn’t conform, or anyone who doesn’t have the ability to conform due to skin color, language, or ability.
If you can’t see the system around you (there is no spoon?) you cannot understand where you end and the system begins.
And if you can’t differentiate yourself from the system you are in, you will think that system is you.
And if you think the system is you, you will think anyone attacking the failings of that system, is attacking you.
And when people feel attacked, they do a bunch of bullshit that kills people.
And those people being killed by the defenders of the system, more times than not, are the people who are already the most vulnerable within that system, those made scapegoat by people who are actually running the system (in America’s case, the corporate and political elite).
Our inability to see White culture as White culture, at its best, makes funny memes, at its worst, endangers lives.
And part of not seeing White culture is thinking that White culture is castles and a bunch of fairytale bullshit.
