if you’ve really got a brainboner for “white” culture there’s nothing stopping you from participating in any number of activities related to language, music, dance, religion, stories, martial arts, food, historical reenactment; these are all perfectly valid and in fact often celebrated, not something that gets you sent to the gulag.
not white qua white–since that’s one thing the CRT people get right, whiteness itself is basically just defined by white supremacy, there’s no there there (it is, as TUOC says, a category error)
it’s the members of the whiteness coalition who have the language, music, etc. Celebrating whiteness qua whiteness actually is not gonna be celebrated, because that pretty much will take the form of pure distilled racism. And the people who say they’re not allowed to do that–well, they’re not wrong, but there’s a reason they’re not allowed to do it. They basically want to just be racist for the sake of being racist and it’s like, no
whiteness itself is basically just defined by white supremacy, there’s no there there
I used to believe this. I really don’t, anymore. I don’t even think it’s viably coherent.
I mean, on a totally practical level, where you don’t care about things like “conceptual consistency” or “true understanding” so much as you care about “who is likely to be a horrible jerk”…yeah, it’s not a bad rule-of-thumb. For historical reasons if nothing else, the people who care about whiteness-as-a-construct are overwhelmingly unlikely to have anything useful to contribute, and you’re probably happier not engaging with them.
But assuming that we’re actually trying to get things right –
At this stage in American cultural development, “whiteness” is heavily defined by the pressures imposed by outside agency, which is closely analogous to the thing that happened with “blackness” (and for that matter “Indian-ness”) centuries before.
We abducted a polyethnic, polyglot collection of people from many different African cultures, and told them “it doesn’t matter how you think of yourselves, in our eyes you are simply Black, and that is going to define how we treat you.” And in response…they formed a new identity, shaped to deal with the new social facts that were facing them. We’ve accepted that, to this day. It would be unconscionable to do otherwise.
And by now we’ve spent a while telling white people “it doesn’t matter how you think of yourself, you are White, and that is going to define how we treat you; you have privilege, you have unearned tyrannical power, and even if you don’t perceive or appreciate this it is so.” Trying to say “I don’t identify as white, I’m Italian/Jewish/poor Southern trash/fill-in-the-blank-here” will not get any traction, it will get you branded as a clown or an oppressor or both.
How can we then turn around and say “but you’re not allowed to care about this identity with which you’ve been ineradicably stamped, or find any value in it?”
I feel enormous sympathy for anyone whose response to “whiteness is about white supremacy” is “fuck you, you don’t get to dictate the terms of my identity, you’d cry holy hell if I did that to you.”