I think the traditional explanation is that it's not like any other, but rather the undifferentiated norm against which others are measured: that is, saying nothing is the same as saying "white." Absent signifcant changes in the cultural pool, that's going to remain true.
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
I'm curious as to whether that remains the case in Hawaii, a state which is majority-non-white and reportedly somewhat hostile to us honkies. Can anyone speak to this?
this is part of why it was so consciousness-raising to see Richard Pryor in his first concert-videos doing imitations of white people being white.
Deeply embarrassing and cringe-making, and at the same time hilarious, to realize that white was not unmarked, at all, could be observed, could be categorized, pigeon-holed, ridiculed.
Yeah, bracing stuff. Hard to believe it was so long ago, and so little has changed, racially, in America.
I don't mind / like it when my white friends refer to their whiteness as an ethnicity. Like when we're deciding what to eat, and my white friend feels like eating some bread-based food, like Italian or hamburgers or something, it's fine for her to say, "no, I don't want Vietnamese tonight, I want to eat whitepeople food." It puts white people on the same level as everyone else, whereas if she were to say, "I don't want to eat ethnic food," it would normalize whiteness as the expense of other people(s).
I've never seen the embarrassingness of an affirmation of one's own whiteness addressed in the context of freedom-from-ethnicity as a facet of white privilege
I recall that about fifteen years ago the student paper did a wonderful April Fool's story about establishing a white ethnic theme house on campus; it so carefully walked the line of believability that it had me going for at least three paragraphs.
The trouble with whiteness is that there are many people like LB, except less aware of its anomalousness than she is, who have no particularly awareness of other particularities. I, on the other hand, while just as "white," am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality, and how each sets me apart from "whiteness" in certain ways. Yesterday's Polish immigrant is white, and his grandchildren might be as disconnected from other particularities as LB, but not in the meantime.
Don't other aspects rush in to fill the void left by "whiteness"? Sit down and I'll tell you a thing or twelve about my great home of Texas, and all the funny things that (white) Texans get up to.
Funny: I'm being asked to participate in a survey about my Texas ethnicity, primarily because Susan identified me on her blog as a fellow member of the great Texas diaspora.
Iranians were the original Aryans (the words are close cognates) so Ogged is white. However, he has to own to his ethnic responsibility for the Holocaust.
If I understand what you're saying, it's a catch-22. If we say "I'm just boring plain old American", we're defining "American" as "white with bad cooking" and anything else as "other." If we say, "I'm proud of being white", we're proud of having... well, bad cooking and we sound like the white pride crowd.
My background is somewhat like LBs. I know we're Sicilian on one side, but it doesn't show up anywhere except the first names of some great aunts. Pittsburghese accent, bad cooking, mushroom soup casseroles. I can make a great spaghetti sauce, but I learned it from my mom who learned it from my non-Italian dad. The other side -- no idea at all really. If I were to say 'I don't have an ethnicity', I think I'd mean nothing more than 'there's nothing that marks me as belonging to a small in-group.'
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
I think that there are real distinctions within whiteness. I am reading Etnic America by Thomas Sowell and I am becoming more convinced of the lasting effects of ethnity in America. Sowell points out that Irish-Americans disproportunately become lawyers. It also includes stereotypes that I never heard before such as how fun loving German-Americans introduced picnics, dancing and sports to the US. Thank you, fun loving German-Americans.
This book is supposed to be good too, but it is 972 pages long.
It is true that ethnicity is hidden in a way that race is not.
Suppressed bestiality is one of the main causes of various sorts of crippling mental disorder. Often the damaged individual is completely unaware of his or her bestial urges, and the therapist has to push his therapy skills to the max in order to "draw them out". Only then can the healing begin.
We were talking about Albion's Seed here just last week. The lasting quality of the Scotch-Irish mindset in that book made a profound impact on James Webb, explaining to him aspects of his life, culture and attitudes he'd never understood about himself before. He wrote a book about it. He's now running to unseat George Allen, another guy with more in his background than "whiteness" to think about these days.
I'm highly suspicious of "Albion's Seed", because it exaggerates the British component. Minnesota and Wisconsin were first settled by Brits, but they were completely overwhelmed by Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, Irish, and a bunch of little niche ethnicities too. Minnesota, though very white, still has the lowest British ancestry of any state.
brown people have ethnicites which explain important things about their identities, but white people are just people, and anything they do is a statement of their personal identity
This seems related to the 'fundamental attribution error' of believing the actions of others are indicative of the type of person they are, rather than the result of the specific situation/environment.
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
Is unrealistic. What, we're going to ban the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Kwanzaa?
8: I know talking about whiteness isn't offensive when it's done in that manner, but it's embarrassing. It sounds too much like white-supremacist vocabulary.
19: Oh, sure there are distinctions within 'white American' -- as IDP says, I'm more a New Yorker than I am anything else. But meatloaf-eating-white-people is as coherent a group as lots of other things that get treated as ethnic groups -- 'Latino' anyone?
I started and stopped and started again. I grew up in a very ethnic community...German, Mennonite, Italian, Poles, Scots...as a rare but undetectably Irish descendant. We were blue-collar/farm but not Nascar. To claim there is a "white culture" distinct from all the subcultures seems to me like saying there is a "Hispanic" culture that blends Mexican-Americans with Brazilians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans.
I am trying, but my "whiteness" doesn't feel like the patriarchy. My meatloaf is not an act of oppression. I don't use Hunt's tomato sauce but Kraft cheese.
John Emerson, have you ever read Randolph Bourne's "Transnational America" and the critique of assimilation and the melting pot ideology in it?
I thought Albion's Seed was suggesting that the British Cultures he described explained a great deal about the American cultures which descend from them, whatever the ancestry of the people living in them now. Areas of predominantly foreign settlement, like Minnesota, would be obvious exceptions. An example is the way the late Dale Earnhart, whose name suggests some German ancestry, expresses the Scotch-Irish inheritance better than I do, even though I have quite a bit of that in my background.
Speaking of meatloaf, one of my sister's best friends in grammar school was a white girl. Our moms got to be good friends, and they had something of an unspoken deal: my sister, who loved meatloaf, would go over to this girl's house on nights when the girl's mom was making it for dinner, and in exchange, whenever my mom made lumpia shanghai, she would make an extra plate for the girl's family. The first time I ever had meatloaf, I was in college, and I thought wow, that girl totally got the better end of the bargain.
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
3: I can't, personally, as I was three when I left. But my (oh-so-Scandinavian) looking mother still fumes about how she had to bring my (stocky Japanese, often mistaken for Samoan) father everywhere to get decent service.
I think the white/non-white dynamic was much more of a "snub the oppressors" type thing than a "brown is the new white." But, like I said, it's all second-hand stories.
18, 26, 31: Have to agree with Neil here. But I'm not sure I agree with the premise - I can't think of any non-white people I know* who (non-ironically) talk about how "all Japanese people raise their kids" or anything. And is there a such thing as a typical white holiday custom? Or is it a typical American holiday custom? Christmas in Germany is (or at least was, who knows anymore) demonstrably different from Christmas in America, despite the whiteness of both dominant cultures.
*This is admittedly limited. Asians are, after all, the "model minority."
40: Sure, I'm talking about ethnicity rather than 'race'. The meatloaf-eating ethnicity I'm talking about isn't 'white' in any sense that would include Germans living in Germany -- it's White American.
One place I notice this in in Romance writers, who appear to under huge pressure to Anglicize their pen-names. It is funny to go thru hundreds of ttles(don't ask) and never see a Jacewicz or Pellegrino or Grogan.
If the W,M-E background ever becomes sufficiently outnumbered that its members will be constantly aware of their otherness, then it will be an ethnicity. Right now it's a kind of negative ethnicity, because the norm is still based on it.
Umm guys... here abouts "Effnick" is the girl in the funny looking traditional costume from the next valley. All white, mind you.
Given that the Austrians were only ever any good at subjugating other "white" nations, until the minor mishap at the beginning of the last century, there is a refreshing robustness to, shall we say, identification with european heritage.
Some, of course, find that unattractive.
Hereabouts, some whites are more priveleged than others. Ask a Sinti.
Heh heh - JP's post reminded me of when I went to a friend's house and they expected me to eat rice with a fork. I came home and told my Mom all about it.
I guess I just have trouble seeing how "typical American" doesn't presuppose white, and if you're going to make statements like "typical Americans decorate cookies" you just gotta suck it up, no? Whereas if you're, say, dancing, and you suck, you can totally say things like "I'm so white" without being an ass.
Maybe it's just that you're allowed to say bad things about being white. (Thinking at work, here, which is not a common occurrence, so apologies.)
I'm not saying ban all ethnic holidays or that ethnicities aren't important. But people do make stereotypes and decisions that are attributed to ethnicities rather than individual's motivation. Why do Asian children do so well in school -- I think there might be a book by that title? How can the Democrats secure the black vote? (White people get to decide, being the implication, but black people vote as a unit.)
I wonder if that increases the us/them dynamic more than a more neutral classification scheme would.
MAE, about your bumper sticker issue, I can imagine an attachment to inherited values, felt to be under pressure from trends in modern society which the holder is ambivalent about or hostile to. But I can't imagine a respectable way to identify that with "white."
I'm saying, in other words, that some of the alienation and grievance may be justified, but identifying it with "white" isn't
46: Not so sure about that. The Latino racial identity, for instance, is quite popular even in the places where it is dominant. There isn't the same sense of 'everybody is like us, aren't they?' as exists in the U.S.
I think LB had it right in the first place; this is a consequence of the recent racism taboo which has caused embracing 'white culture' to seem like an embrace of privilege rather than of heritage.
57: Yes, it can be locally dominant, but never loses sight of not being so in the country as a whole. It's when white is clearly not dominant in the country as a whole that the polarities would shift.
I'm white, and so don't experience the discrimination that a lot of visible ethnic minorities do. But I still "am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality" and of ways in which my background sets me apart from mainstream English culture -- living as I do, in England.
Not all visibly white people are entirely of the ethnic and cultural mainstream.
To put a different spin on it: my son's HS 15 years ago was pretty attentive to multiculturalism, at the formal level, at least. So there were various special groups for each minority, but none for the white kids. It all makes sense in the big political picture, but as it impacted actual individuals it meant that one and only one group was left out. Theoretically, of course, the 70% of the kids who were white were dominant in the overall community, and in reality to a considerable extent, but steps were taken to keep the overall community multicultural too.
The real split was by class. Middle-class Japanese- Chinese- and Vietnamese- American counted as white. I'm not sure that there was a single middle-class black in the school, but they would probably count as white too. One middle-class Vietnamese girl born in the US was admired because she went out of her way to help out the new Vietnamese refugees; not all of them did.
I have some difficulties coming to grips with the "lack of irrational detriment = privilege" equation. Probably because I'm basically on the 'wrong' side of the line in so many ways. There are a number of irrational detriments to which I am not subject: I'm not female, not short, not so tall I face discrimination, not 'of color,' not 'ethnic' (ie 'white' but non-Anglo), not illiterate, not handicapped (differently abled?), not poor (or lower middle class), not stupid (most days), not overly religious, not a member of a religious minority, not an abuse survivor, not Southern, not so fat as to draw discrimination, not an employee, etc. I am sorry for none of the above -- those attributes that are optional I have intentionally created -- only that people different from me in any of these attributes have suffered on account of that difference.
And yet there are endless ways that people who want to can say that I'm not one of them, or not good enough. I'm not Hollywood good looking. Not very good at plenty of tasks, from auto mechanics to carpentry. I'm not rich, really. I'm not from old money. I'm a terrible dancer. I didn't (couldn't) go to an Ivy League law school. I don't tell jokes well, and my stories drag. This is just the beginning, of course. McManus has a string of adjectives for me which the reader is free to imagine.
Obviously, I can't (and don't) sit around saying 'oh poor me' -- because I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either. The fact that I can walk through a Metro station un-ogled neither provides me with any net gain (over, say, walking through an empty station) nor does it add to the ogling that a woman walking the exact rout will experience.
I think much of this has to do with (mostly) unanswered questions about how we classify different levels of identity. So, for whatever reason, the fact that you don't tell excellent jokes is on a completely different level of identity than, say, being black. Thus, we feel the latter counts as being underpriveledged in a way the former doesn't. On the one hand, this distinction is obvious, on the other, I'm not sure it's actually coherent; not only that, but you can (as you did) construct examples the highlight the incoherence much more strongly.
Solution to this? I have no clue. Someone else figure it out!
re 16: Texans in New York=Texpat
This is an amusing and exotic identity for New Yorkers. Who, of course, sharing a constricting island culture have no idea how parochial they are.
64: I think it's possible that you may be missing the point a bit.
I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either.
Sure. The point of calling something 'white privilege' is that someone who enjoys it isn't, individually, doing anything wrong. They (in this case you, could as well be me) didn't create the system that defines their ethnicity as the norm, and makes everyone else an outsider, and they aren't doing anything particular to maintain it. So it's not not something you should feel guilty about, as "it's not like I've been the one exacting that price" seems to imply. It's just something that's worth noticing, and examining, and doing what you can (as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm) to disassemble where possible.
Glenn, you have no idea how much better my life would be if I told better jokes. I'd be more popular, maybe even a household name. Money, power, groupies, the works.
The point is that I can point to someone who gets something I don't get. They are privileged, hence I am underprivileged. Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards. When I stick up my hand, I get a cab. Not everyone can say that. I think, though, that one would say of this situation that a person who cannot get a cab is 'underprivileged,' and a person who can get one is 'normal.' Given that the goal with this sort of thing is that everyone becomes 'normal' with respect to haling cabs.
Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards.
I think we already *do* attach minimum standards, those standards being that if you sound like a jerk when explain why you consider yourself underprivileged, you probably shouldn't do so.
(This is a non-specific second person usage of "you," and I don't mean to insult any person in this thread).
I don't perceive 'white American' as a category having enough common characteristics to count as an ethnicity. Regional differences (Texan), cultural (Greek American) , and class overwhelm 'whiteness' in every respect except as compared to blackness. Our Asian-ness, i guess.
How that could be anything but a bad idea, I can't imagine.
A lot of white people might feel more comfortable reinforcing norms if they think they're societal norms rather than ethnic norms. Or in other words, if 'white American' becomes recognized as an ethnicity then white Americans will stop believing that non-white Americans are different because they're stupid.
71: But that's only if you see the world through a white-normative lens. A lot of people accept "Asian American" as an ethnic category, despite the fact that that group contains internal variance on almost every axis that matters to people (language, skin color, religion, food, cultural norms, holidays, etc.). But they are "not-white," and so constitute a discernible group.
3, 40: I think the idea that local people in Hawaii are generally prejudiced against haoles is mostly bullshit. Being haole is a minor advantage in some ways and a minor disadvantage in others but mostly just not a big deal one way or the other. OTOH there are subcultures that don't intersect much with the dominant culture (or what seems like the dominant culture to me), so I don't doubt that others' experiences differ from mine.
I suspect that a lot of white mainlanders think they're experiencing hostility when what they're actually seeing is reserve. There is no shortage of well-off, over-entitled mainlanders who come here expecting to have their asses kissed in various ways, partly because they're spending a lot of money and partly just (IMO) because they're very accustomed to having brown people kiss their asses in ways they're not even aware of. I think there's some tendency to assume that a white person who doesn't have obvious markers of being from here may be one of those over-entitled assholes until proven otherwise. Proving otherwise isn't hard, but if you never try you're likely to continue to be treated with reserve.
Related, and again IMO: many white Americans absolutely cannont stand the existence of forms of status and hierarchy from which they're completely excluded. It bugs the living shit out of some people that a white person coming from the mainland will never be an insider in exactly the same way that a brown person who grew up here can be. To me, BFD, but to some it's horrifying.
Although, I suppose there is the pull of a certain type of 'Norman Rockwell' 1950s bourgeios American whiteness that's found in the media and which, to my outsider's eyes, does seem to specific enough to be a particularly American form of white identity -- even if in reality it was never really shared by everyone, even those who were white and boureios. It's certainly distinct from, say, Englishness or Scottishness (white or otherwise). And does seem distinctly white rather than more generally American.
Right. If CharleyC gets a cab and Random Black Guy doesn't, it might help if the cabbie were perceiving the difference between them as Ethnic Guy I and Ethnic Guy II rather than Normal Guy and Ethnic Guy, if you see what I mean.
and 71: You don't think? There's a hell of a lot of local variation within any ethnicity, but that doesn't mean we all don't recognize Eddie Murphy imitating a white guy, or know what ordering a baloney sandwich on white bread with mayo means.
71: For that matter, the colonial descendents of every country which was colonized by Spain considers itself to have a common heritage. So why can't the colonial descendants of just one country colonized by England have one?
as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm
Part of my worry with this is something like this: I don't have a small ingroupy ethnicity; grandparents did, but I don't. The dialogue here suggests that I should say my ethnicity is 'white American' so I can think of it helpfully as not 'default', but as part of a culture.
But doesn't that run the very real risk of saying 'to be American is to be a white person with no strong cultural ties to another group'? Everyone else is hyphenated, but I'm *authentic* American. This is what's worrying me, and why I suggested that this is the wrong way to go, to think of whiteness as just another kind of ethnicity.
Agree with Cala and Carp, I think. Right now, "white" is far and away the dominant culture in this country. But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm. Make it another "ethnicity" and you'll see people using that distinction to exclude people--in the ways in which there are arguments about whether someone "is really black," or "really Asian." Sub-categories of white--Italian, Irish, etc.--would seem to serve the purpose you want, at least somewhat.
78: See, I see that as the effect of those like you and I claiming to be the default, rather than members of an ethnic group. "White American" isn't necessarily the best name for it, given your concerns -- just "White" makes it sound like a racial, rather than an ethnic group. "Whitebread"? (And of course, the same person can be part of two ethnicities. I have family that's more 'Irish-American' than I am, but not less 'Whitebread'.)
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm.
I'm not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
I don't know about NYC. In DC, the cab driver is stopping for me because he's guessing that I'm not going to take him to a part of town he doesn't want to be in. The joke is always on him, because I'm going someplace even worse -- the near 'burbs. Twice a week at least, once I'm in the cab and we're going, and the driver really figures out where I want to go: I get let off right there. A block away from where I started.
I wish I lived in a world where the cab driver would make no assumption about a black patron. I'm not clear what you think I can do about that -- not ride in cabs? I am not in the same situation as you, LB, with respect to ethnicity: all my life I've known of mine. And it's not generic white, or at least that's not how I've ever understood it. So my acknowledging an ethnicity isn't going to solve anything, any more than my deploring the cab driver who doesn't want to drive to certain parts of DC will.
I guess, to be fair, I have to say that my ethnicity is a background norm because my ancestors came to North America and killed nearly everyone of different ancestry.
73 -- Exactly. I would never use the term Asian-American to describe someone who, to my knowledge, self-identifies more specifically. It's one of the outermost of the concentric circles of our identities, and too overinclusive for anything other than comparison to non-Asian.
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
The issue is that there are two ways to de-norm whiteness. One is to make it an ethnicity among ethnicities, and the other, which is, I think, America's fitful, unfinished, imperfect project, is to both drain it of meaningful "ethnic" content and make it so malleable that it can incorporate the parts of the other ethnicities that we, as a nation, have all decided are pretty ok. I might have mentioned before the European who pointed out that "white" Americans walk, to the European eye, like black people.
I very much doubt that the "ethnicity among ethnicities" approach can work, because of our historical circumstance: whiteness is still dominant, and trying to mark it off from other ethnicities will end up fixing a particular conception of whiteness that will lose the ability to slowly assimilate what's now "outside" it. That's pretty much the same as killing America, you barbarian.
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
As a moral quality, of course this is right. One can't ignore, though, that what you share with Cala and with me, and I suppose with some others here (but way less than all) is something you also share with a substantial majority of the population.
To pick a different example: People who go to church (or other worship venue) at least once a month, regardless of genetics, are the American norm by sheer dint of numbers.
m not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
In the movie White Men Can't Jump, there's a scene in which the black character tells the white guy that he can't really hear Jimmy Hendrix, because he's white. It's sort of funny, and you hear things like this all of the time. It's even funny if the black guy means it. Jimmy Hendrix--who the fuck cares? Now imagine a white guy saying to some black guy that he doesn't get Shakespeare because "it's a white thing." It wouldn't be funny. Not getting Shakespeare means something more important than not getting Hendrix, and it does so because the dominant culture is white, and what it values most is what is most valuable.
I'm not sure if that's clear. Part of it is that this all seems sort of self-evident to me, so I'm having trouble explaining what I'm thinking.
88: I'm not sure I follow. Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about, because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England. On the other hand, I think it's entirely fair to say that I don't get Jeff Foxworthy because I'm not white, and really it wouldn't bother me.
91: I think you're really, really wrong if you believe that people only lay ethnic claim to culture that extends as far back as 1970 (Hendrix's death date). Even if that were so, the number of things produced by the culture since then that are considered important and are produced by white Americans dwarfs the number of similar things produced by non-white Americans.
Also, how can you not get Foxworthy, who is not so much "white" as "Southern" or maybe "Southern white."
Surprisingly, nobody has mentioned the accent, which is basically the delimiter of white Americanhood. Sure, one "can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white" but only if one does not speak with a black, Hispanic or Asian accent. And it's certainly not the case that anyone can wake up one day and decide to talk like the people on TV do.
SCMT, I'm not saying that ethnicity only extends as far backwards as 1970. I'm saying that telling a black person, "You don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a sensible analogue to your Jimi Hendrix example, because Elizabethan England is as much a foreign place for white people today as black people -- just ask any high school English class.
The people who work for me laugh at my jokes. That'll have to do.
Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about [culture], because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England.
That distant sound you hear is Mr. Kurasawa rolling over in his grave. This puts me into the SCMT camp, I guess, NTTAWWT, because things like Shakespeare are available to anyone anywhere. There are situations, of course, where pigmentation is going to make all the difference, or facial architecture. Or figure. Culture, though, we can choose to pick up, walk away from, be oblivious to, etc.
I don't think I "get" Murasaki Shikibu better than a white person. But, if I had grown up in Japan, reading school primers that quoted her haiku, I might feel better about making that assertion.
So I think SCMT has a valid point, inasmuch as we hear "to thine own self be true" or "a rose by another other name" etc. surprisingly frequently in our everyday American discourse.
I don't think there is any, but I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk. Everyone understands everything through the lens of their own personal experience, but not sharing an ethnicity with the artist doesn't mean that you can't really understand their works.
(I can't believe I'm actually saying this. This is one of those posts where I thought my thinking on ethnicity was more mainstream than it is.)(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
100, 101 -- FTB can immerse herself in the works of Murasaki Shikibu even today. One need not have been brought up in a culture to embrace and ultimately own it. I'm not saying such a thing can be done overnight, but one is not culturally fixed at 3 or 6 or 10 years old. I cannot imagine that there is an aspect of 'white American culture' that someone not a 'white American' cannot truly understand.
I think of the movie Meet Joe Black. Now the life Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani are living in that movie -- they're cast as white Americans, after all -- is prety distant from that of nearly all of us. I suppose you could distill from that movie some kind of experience that would be utterly alien to Japanese-, Iranian-, or Irish-Americans. Then again, whatever that was would likely be just as alien to LB with her baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread.
To pick up on ogged's 85, anyone who lives in the US can self-identify with the white norm all the way if they want: 'the british burned our capital in the war of 1812.' It might be pretty awkward to hear an African-American say 'we didn't free our slaves until 1865,' but an American descendant of Jewish Eastern European immigrants who came in the 1920s can say this. And when they do, as pointed out in 85, the norm expands.
(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
I'd say this is a way better descriptor for most of the people on here than any sort of Cracker-American attempt. Certainly describes me better than White-American could (though I have been described, much to my chagrin, as The Man by an ex of mine. So I suppose I'm whiter than I think.).
You're probably not wrong with Weirdo-Americans. But I was thinking "getting" Shakespeare was a matter of getting the beauty of the language (hence my counterexample). Which I should have made more explicit.
The Hendrix thing, I think, does make someone a jerk. Whereas I would concede as valid someone saying "you don't get Hendrix cuz you don't play guitar" or "you don't know blues."
Among my problems with perceiving "whiteness is an ethnicity like any other" are the following:
a. There are too many ethnic groups that present as "white", especially in our little moulting pot of the UsA. Within what a "non-white" person might see as "white", there are factions that do and do not see each other as "white".
b. There are waaaay too many class differences that affect such things as "what white people are like, and how white people bring up their kids, or typical white holiday customs" far more than a commonality of colour.
c. Bologna with mayonnaise on white bread? What are you, a Methodist?
Dunno about the rest of you, but I don't see any reason to affirm the colour of my skin. My Norse heritage, perhaps, but that extends more to a hatred of lutefisk, an enjoyment of Julekage and an appreciation of Hardanger embroidery. [And the occasional desire to go to ski resorts and mock downhill skiers.] But, to be honest, I like baklava better, am far more inclined to cook bulgogi than risted laks med kremsaus and the covers on the pillows on my couch were embroidered and purchased in Jordan, where I spent several years of my childhood. And I haven't X-country skied since my first knee surgery.
Do I get that presenting as "white" = privilege in this country? Of course - and believe me, tagging into a store several paces behind my non-white son would have taught me that had I not already known it. I've had sales assistants rush to help me whilst ignoring him, which I find wryly amusing, given that he dresses better than I do* and has far more disposable income these days - they should notice the former and be able to infer the latter. I doubt that it's merely veneration of my cronicity. However, he would receive more and better attention than a "white" person who presented as homeless; economic class trumps "white privilege".
Now I have to run off and make meatloaf, which I shall serve with Wonderbread, margerine and TaterTots, after which Pa and I will sit in our rocking chairs on the porch and read Scripture. Yes, indeedy.
* Him: True religion jeans, $262; A&F tee $29.50; Fossil messenger bag, $180.
Me: Levi jeans from Target $22; tie-dye tee bought at Venice Beach ten years ago $6; 22 year old Coach shoulderbag in need of re-dyeing.
I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk.
It works as a joke because it's so ridiculous. Hendrix, as opposed to many many other artists, is very accessible outside black culture. Monterey, Isle of Wight, Woodstock.
Let's take a moment to think about Little Wing, shall we:
Well she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind thats running round
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.
OK, I'm out. I'll walk to the bus stop rather than take a cab home, to lessen the quantum of oppression in the world by some little amount.
One of the things that I like particularly about the analysis in Albion's Seed is that the author's definition of ethnicity or "folkways" is expansive enough to include a lot of things that most people would probably account for as class markers. In particular, when he writes about the Scots-Irish/'borderer' culture, he's obviously not talking about whatever earl or baron was nominally in charge of the areas those people came from, but rather the broad mass of common people who produced and reproduced the culture. The other thing I've argued is that many of the 'folkways' that are identified as particularly Scots-Irish have come to be present in a broad swath of working-class U.S. culture, regardless of the ethnicity or even the race of the participants.
Regarding the story about white people seeing something worth preserving in 'white culture', there's one version at the Star Tribune (it was, after all, a U of Minn study).
I realize that I'm beating my same old drum here, but I guess it's seemed to me for a long time that the antidote to the null value of whiteness as an ethnicity in this country is class consciousness. Of course, there's some people who take exception to that, at least sort of. But even though I agree with much of Sakai's analysis, as a white person it seems counterproductive to mire myself in more depression. There's nothing pride-worthy in whiteness, to my view, but I can take courage in the example of my working-class ancestors who did so much with so little. There's also the fact, elided somewhat in Settlers that, like me, a lot of white people in this country are the products of a family tree that includes many people of color, despite which we have plenty of white skin privilege today. I guess that it seems fairly hopeful to me that some of my white ancestors were progressive enough to voluntarily start families with freed slaves or their descendents, and I think it's pretty significant that one of the things that made this possible was a shared class identity.
I still can't figure out how my Danish ancestors ate alebrod for breakfast though -- with whipped cream and raisins, too! Yecch!
A Belgian acquaintance says that he learned that the U.S. was like a tossed salad, with all the different ethnicities remaining distinct but mixing well together or something like that.
Leech, that's funny; I was thinking of citing Updike as a culture-bound author. But that just means that he's very much of his culture, as much as or more than any non-white author; it doesn't mean non-WASPs can't enjoy him. (And I find Cheever very accessible.)
If there's any truth to the "You can't understand X because you're not Y" (and I think it's limited), Y has to be something much smaller than 'white people'. Is every single white person equally privy to the world of Whit Stillman in a way that black or Asian people aren't?
Anyway, given a suitable rate of intermarriage and a few generations, we'll all be a nice brownish shade (better for surviving global warming anyway) and nobody will care which line of ancestry was responsible for the family meatloaf recipe.
I've never read Auchincloss, but the idea that one must be a WASP to understand Updike, Cheever, or Irving is laughable. For that matter, the idea that you have to be X, where X equals any type of person, spirit, critter, or thingamajig, in order to understand decent (or even not so decent) writer Y is frankly stupid. Unless you can't get a translation.
I don't really think there's such a thing as culture that people "can't understand" because they're X/not Y. I think it is possible for literature to speak especially to certain experiences that are tied to your racial/class identity, be it underprivilege or overprivilege (which is worth squat when it comes to literary understanding or appreciation, IMO).
To answer my own question I think that The Simpsons, by design, speaks to the white-American identity thing in this way. It's interesting that the show is popular all over the world -- I can't imagine how many of the jokes would translate well -- but I think this is tied up in the white-American-as-somehow-universal phenomenon we're discussing.
We hippies in the 60s divided the world into "straights" and "freaks". Freaks included most minorities, if not all, but especially cultural minorities.
John Varley in the 70s divided his future culture into "Republicans" and "Democrats", meaning much the same as above. Just saying.
103, etc: The Jimi Hendrix example is a terrible example. All through his career and even today, he's was/is more listened to by white people than by black. One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
My Tex-Mexican American nephew in law identifies with John Wayne. He's a retired military lifer. He also identifies with his family and ancestors, but he's an Army man from Texas.
One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
Pretty much typical of classic rock/AOR; incredibly white, with Jimi as the token. I thought that the use of Hendrix was kind of a copout in the movie; if it had been about Sly (with reference to There's a Riot Goin' On) that would have stung. Of course the movie was written and directed by a white guy.
Jimi really wasn't the token. He was a real crossover. He played white-people hippy music, really, though he built on his R&B background.
Some of the interviews with him and onstage tapes show that he really didn't believe what was happening and felt very weird about it. Of course, he hadn't exactly parachuted into the middle of Updikeland.
I liked Updikes first short stories when they came out, but when I look at them again they seem horribly overwritten. He was always struggling with the Lake Wobegon problem: how do you write about a place where everything is arranged to make sure that nothing ever happens, and where nobody ever talks about it if something does happen to happen.
His first novel continued the struggle with that problem, writing about boring, annoying people who live boring lives, except that his short-stories were about his teen years when his characters didn't knwo yet how boring they were. The people became more boring still when they matured. I lost interest right there.
I would happily eat Danish Beer Soup. I may even save the recipe. It sounds like a great way to take care of the stale beers that don't have cigarettes floating in it.
it's not true that just anyone can enjoy updike, because updike is an irritating misogynist shithead. fine, I'll just come out with it, because I'm tired of living a lie: I'm a UHA, an updike hating american. cheever, on the other hand, is good.
The problem is deeper than that, because I like Philip Roth fine and am, in fact, capable of being an i. m. s. myself. As far as I can tell, every single on of the big late fifties - early sixties novelists was an i.m.s.
I don't rememebr signs of i.m.s.-ery in Ralph Ellison, who has always been my favorite. Probably not in James Baldwin either, but he was a little bitch. Can't remember William Styron; never liked his stuff much.
One of the very first things I read on the internet was a collection of Ellison's letters. Really beautiful stuff. I haven't been able to find it again.
Read some Updike, and then a collected Cheever stories, and was very much impressed. Never liked Roth; loved early Bellow:consider this a "some of my favorite writers point". Irving really bores and irritates me. Two Waspy(?) writers not yet mentioned, and shame on y'all:Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler.
One important (?) "white bread" author not mentioned yet:Stephen King.
Nobody cares anymore, but I'll come out and say it: I like Updike. Sure, he's written some turgid, silly crap, but it's only because he's willing to take chances, and because, early on, publishers decided to print up any old shit he had handy. So, sure, a book a year, and several short stories, and some of it is going to suck.
Rabbit at Rest? Sucks. Seek My Face? Sucks. But The Centaur? Better than anything anyone here will ever write.
And the Garrison Keillor comparison? Inapt! Inapt I tell you. Updike likes to write, primarily, about people who sleep around in surprising ways. So, sure, that has it's limits, but if not completely transgressive, neither was it comforting in its time.
Hmm. Maybe I misunderstood this "Lake Wobegone" problem comment. Updike's got his flaws, but if one wants to fight a real mysoginist shithole, one should just focus on pushing Hemingway out of the academy. He's almost gone already, and that's probably fair.
The Garrison Keillor comment only really applied to his first book, "Pigeon Feathers" which I liked at the time. But to me, boring people who screw around are still boring.
I ended up believing that for his first novel, "Rabbit Run", Updike visited a prostitute as part of his Research, hopping off every minute or two to scribble down notes. And also that the sex was injected to spice up the boring lives of boring people.
However, I never did read the 47 novels he wrote after "Rabbit Run".
Not caught up on thread, but the problem with "white" as an identifier is that it was basically invented to enforce racism. Even if one doesn't cling to specifically Irish or German traditions, your whiteness ain't my whiteness: the whiteness of, say, the great lakes really is different from the whiteness of the southwest. And anyway, "white" really just means "western European-American," sorta kinda. Meatloaf is like a bastardized version of vaguely western European food in the same way that the hard shell taco is a bastardized version of Mexican food, no?
Been thinking about this thread, Charleycarp was unusually loquacious tonight. Nobody else seemed to notice, or maybe the rules say you pretend not to notice. I, I just wanted to come back and read them again.
I read the comments and I see this brown face looking across a table at me, but that probably isn't what it's like at all.
What about Heller? Something Happened is one of my favorite books, out of the subset of books I've read that I have not read in the past 20 years. Wait -- that's wrong -- I reread it 12 years ago and it was as good or better the second time around. The narrator is the archetypal IMS. But Heller? He seems to be presenting the narrator's head as a fucked-up one, one the reader should not aspire to occupy. And now I'm flashing on the scene from Catch-22 when the psychotic soldier (his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope) murders a prostitute when she demands payment. But I can't remember if that scene was treated the same in the book as it was in the movie. So anyway: what about Heller?*
* Also, Vonnegut. I can readily believe him to be irritating and (reluctantly) misogynistic, but a shithead? I think not.
I must admit I've never gotten into Updike, even though his subject-matter is close to my experience. Did anyone else see AWB's piece about deciding it was ok to detest him? An act of self-liberation.
I know what people mean by the misogynist streak in American literature, by men, going back at least to Mark Twain, but remains important to me. I was in Petoskey, Michigan a few weeks ago, the setting for many of Hemingway's early stories, and was moved to start reading and thinking about them again. Talking with friends, I've found we share a lot of feeling for them, out of the academy or not.
166 - Surely correcting the spelling mistake and explaining the Hendrix joke to LB shouldn't count against my daily quota. I'm just sorry I went for Little Wing (influenced by the Corrs' version no doubt) while the example that fits the thread better would have been Bold As Love:
Anger he smiles, towering shiny metallic purple armour,
Queen Jealousy, Envy, waits behind him,
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground.
Blue are the life-giving waters taking for granted
They quietly understand.
Once happy Turquoise armies lay opposite
Ready, but wonder why the fight is on.
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love.
Just ask the Axis.
My Red is so confident,
He flashes trophies of war and ribbons of euphoria.
Orange is young, full of daring,
But very unsteady for the first go round.
My Yellow in this case is not so mellow,
In fact, I'm trying to say that it's frightened like me,
And all of these emotions of mine keep
Holding me from giving my life to a rainbow like you.
But I'm, yeah, I'm bold as love,
But I'm as bold as love.
But I'm as bold as love.
Just ask the Axis, he knows everything.
I'm divided on Updike. A lot of the time I have a visceral reaction against him, partly because he does seem so wrapped up in his own assumptions in a way only a white man could be (and you get the idea that he views other cultures as special interests). But Rabbit Run (not his first novel) is obviously quite a book in one way or another. Some of his stories are great, and most of them seem to have a moment of illumination, though often surrounded by dubiety.
I agree with 165; there's just no good reason for solidarity with all other white people. And there can be good reason for solidarity with all other black people, even though the blackness of different areas may be different in the way the whiteness of different areas is.
136: I don't think the fact that Hendrix's music fits in means that he's not a token, as the only black person played by classic rock radio.
I think that golden oldies / classic rock radio would rather have no tokens at all, but they can't leave Hendrix out because too many old stoners are in their audience, and Hendrix (with Zep a couple years later) wrote the book on stoner music.
The real tokens I remember on that 900-song list were one song by BB King (Thrill is gone), one song by Otis Redding (Dock of the Bay), maybe one song by Aretha, and one song by the Chambers Brothers (Time). These songs just came along at the right moment and got airplay. No Sly Stone, almost no Motown, no James Brown, maybe one thing by Ray Charles IIRC, no Marvin Gaye IIRC.
There was a peak of cultural integration around the Sly Stone era. Prison guards were alarmed when black-white communication began in the prisons, because divide-and-conquer was their game. Classic Rock was a resegregation of the 1967-70 demographic. (Golden Oldies, I think, is the older-yet demographic).
Much, much better than the novels, and if the man will have a serious literary reputation it will have to owe to the short stories, not to the macho image.
Is that the one where they shout 'time' over and over, at slowing and speeding tempos? I heard that on classic rock radio too, didn't know who it was by or that they were black. Also sometimes heard "I Got You."
Also, in support of 165, there was a time when white people from the wrong part of Europe weren't really white or good candidates to be good Americans: too Catholic, too drunk, too prone to fighting, too dirty, too swarthy, too whatever. The U.S. survived.
Paul Fussell called them "Class X" in Class. Meaning, basically, what's called the "creative class" these days.
his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope
Aarfy?
The Hendrix remark works as a joke, as someone else points out, because among African-American musicians at the time, Hendrix was probably most receptive of the styles of "white" rock and roll. It probably isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that it's very white to imagine that appreciating Hendrix (of all people) provides any special insight into the "black" experience (something I did believe as a little white boy).
But as "white" music goes, Country has it all over. I love a lot of Country Music--even some of what passes for Country these days--but never has a genre of music been so defined by its "whiteness" or so unreflective on the circumstances that made it so.
Fussell's book had some good insights, but is my least favorite of his books. Better is Benjamin DeMott's, which I forget the exact title of.
Arfy is right. Pipe-smoking would-be-tweedy navigator. One of fascinating things about Catch-22 is the matching of personalities to ratings: Pilot, Navigator, Bombardier. There really were psych. tests for that, and personalities did run to type.
The macho image is what has made him outre, that and his many personal flaws, and some pieces of very bad writing. But many of Hemingway's short stories are really much better than anything being written today. So it's a shame.
IDP: Thanks for the link, but as a (partially - about 70%) English descended person, I shall treat this with extreme scepticism until I've read a discussion somewhere more specialised. Too many unanswered questions for my taste. [Extended rant deleted on preview].
I would have thought the reevaluation of Hemingway, to give him a proper, qualified place, had been largely done and assimilated long since. It amazes me to find people still reacting to the grotesque reputation of the 50s, people not yet born when the view we're presenting here was developed and disseminated.
180: I'm out of touch, but Kravitz is way late for classic rock. Maybe's there's a later demographic format.
181: Yes. All black except the drummer. The tempo-change gimmick combined with the lyrics is stoner-cosmic.
191: After reevaluation comes rediscovery. Hemingway's woundedness was what annoyed me. I think that Ralph Ellison wrote something about it. Also, he failed to acknowledge the no-relationship principle.
The 176 link refers to the period before 2000 BC. There were several migrations to the British Isles before that time (these were the Stonehenge people. The Celts only came ~600 BC. The Romans estyablished a foothold ~100 BC, but didn't resettle. The Anglos-Saxons cam ~600 Ad, and the Norse 800-1100 AD.
The gist of the article is that after every stage, the original population remained numerically dominant. This means cultural change, probably by violent elite-replacement, possibly by gradualist infiltration and acculturation. But not mass migration and extermination. ("Elite replacement" implies that the invader genes were from males rather than females.)
The Basques have always been the prehistorical anomaly in Europe. The peoples of the Caucasus are also non-Indo-European. The genetic significance of this is unknown to me and may be very slight, after thousands of years of intermarriage.
If my memory serves, Cavalli-Sforza's work suggests something similar about the vast majority of Europe. That is, in most invasions it's been elite-replacement plus cultural transfer rather than wholesale population transfer. With the western edge of europe least affected by population and gene transfer and the south eastern edge of europe most affected. The argument in that article would largely fit with that.
Q107, the hard rock station in Toronto, never played any black artists during their regular shows, but on "Psychedelic Sundays" they would play anything by Hendrix, anything by Sly, "Time" by the Chambers Brothers, "Spinning Wheel" by Earth Wind and Fire, and "Freedom" by Richie Havens. And that was about it.
Who wrote the novel about two swinging couples having mid-life crises around the time of the Nixon resignation? Was that Updike?
I read Herzog many many years ago and thought it was appallingly misogynist. Then later I thought maybe I was being uncharitable, because it is true that when I was younger I sometimes had difficulty separating the views of the characters from the views of the author. But someone mentioned Bellow as an IMS upthread, so perhaps my first instincts were right.
194/5: Matt is right, as far as I remember. I picked on the assertion of Germanic affinities for the Belgae to illustrate methodological suspicions rather than to refute the whole shebang. But it's a very vexed area. I saw a thing I can't find on line which said that genetic evidence for the Germanisation of Britain suggested that the indigenous people were assimilated in some areas, enslaved in others and massacred in yet others.
Which is what you'd expect really. The Anglo-Saxon chiefs didn't arrive with an occupation strategy in their pockets (no change there, then). They arrived piecemeal, and they responded to events on the ground, to balance of forces, to opportunities, etc. A bit like the Europeans in the Americas, in fact.
I like the work of some of those guys, above all Roth, but then I do have IMS tendencies. I have special reasons for disliking Updike -- some kind of deliberate limpness and banality, plus overwriting, plus preciosity and pretension.
Name-dropping again: as a HS student regarded as promising (ha!), through another promising youth who was a family friend of his (and is now a second-rank neo-con), I met Bellow and his then-wife, probably Glassman.
The Wife was willowy, blond, elegant, and an effusive hostess. She also gave me the creeps. This was my first intimation that I wasn't going to make the big time, I suppose, though I didn't realize that at the time.
At some point I concluded that Bellow was financing each divorce with a novel about the previous divorce. I was already fragile, I suppose, but this perception probably was a factor in my eventual no-relationshp policy.
BTW: Is there a name for the school of novelists which includes Updike, Roth, Heller, and tangientially Mailer? Is my impression accurate, that these authors are in a category together?
More specifically, whenever one claims that a celebrated writer does not deserve said celebration, one's argument relies, implicitly on one's ability to read and interpret works. I'm not sure that any of the self-asserted debunkers here have made a very strong case.
206: I don't think so, unless you are simply talking about a particular "generation" of novelists. It seems like the Jewish novelists of that generation are not put into the same school as the non-Jewish novelists.
207 makes sense. There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
206: I wouldn't put Heller in a category with the other three, but that isn't based on more that the other three bore me in vaguely related ways, and I think Catch-22 is a great book. Never thought much of any of the other three.
There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
It's true that sort of criticism tends to be bogus -- I tend to assume that if I dislike something that's generally acclaimed, it's because I'm not getting it or don't have a taste for it, rather than that it objectively sucks. On the other hand, "Like you could write anything better," is a completely irrelevant comeback. I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such.
I read them as expressing taste, impressions, and reactions to reputations. Every one of these guys, except Heller, has written a great deal and been widely, often wildly feted. I've gotten something from every one of them, least from Updike, the first voted off my island, but no one writes that much at the highest level. In the words of another invaluable IMS, "listen not to the teller, but to the tale"; Herzog's a good book, with a wonderful, passionate and solipsistic personality at the center of it.
There's actually a story not yet told about the sexual politics of 1955-1965. Fear of homosexuality was pervasive, therapists and ideologues were already present in force, and insinuations homosexuality was used as a weapon by macho men against less-macho men, and then finally hyper-macho men were accused of overcompensation and latent homosexuality. This was all at a high, formal, official level, not just gutter talk.
It filtered down to the high schools where the teachers kept an eye out for suspect guys and tried to help them. It was worse for the actually-gay, of course, but every guy was targetted.
As a result gross heterosexuality became more or less an obligation, except that good boys were also still expected to be chaste.
All those writers played that game. And then the game changed twice in 10 years, first with the hippie thing (wimp macho) and then with women's liberation.
Gore Vidal, Calder Willingham, Truman Capote, and especially Tennessee Williams were the flaming queens of the time. The others we've been mentioning were the baseline of normality.
So anyway, why am I weird? There's more, but do you need more?
216 -- That's a little worrisome -- my purely personal take on SH (filtered by 12 years' separation) is that it's one of the most deeply affecting, memorable books I know. Might have to take this consciousness in for a tune-up, change the oil, check the ignition.
209: Matt, I know what he asserts. But plenty of other people have done genetic work that comes to different conclusions, to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why I said I'd like to read an analysis of his work in a professional or semi-pro journal. In general you'd expect significant genetic continuity even if you were looking at fairly large scale replacement, simply because iron age people just weren't as efficient at genocide as we are.
As you probably know, there's a historian called Walter Goffart who's attempted to demonstrate an elite replacement model for most of the western Roman empire in the 5th century, using legal and economic data. It would be very interesting if you could find gentic evidence to support this, but I suspect it's too soon to open the pop.
"I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such."
This smells a bit like the unathletic sports fan who harps just a bit too much on the flaws of his favorite team's athletes. I think that's a bit disgraceful, though ogged may disagree.
John's right about the currents. I may be mistaken, but I think Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men deals with this sympathetically, as in my opinion she always does. As an aside, let me say that if you actually read feminist authors back in the seventies, instead of going on second-hand media accounts and cafeteria posturings, it was easy to be sympathetic and feel positive about the project.
Some of Mailer's own musing, in The Prisoner of Sex and Marilyn, was worthwhile to me.
Text (passim): These may not all be considered judgements, but they are part of the process by which it is decided what lasts and what doesn't. From 1950-1980 there must have been 1000 American novelists that serious people (some of them) took seriously. Probably by now 200 of them are still read much. (Vance Bourjaily? Calder Willingham). 50 years from now it will probably be ten or so. My vote (excluding survivors like Hemingway and Faulkner) would be: Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, maybe Roth, maybe Malamud, maybe Heller.... I'm sure I've forgotten a few.
One problem Bellow, Heller, Roth, Styron, Bourjaily, Mailer, Updike, and others have is that a template is detectable: a young man's struggle with his father, first sexual experience, and tortured romantic relationships. Even James Baldwin almost does this.
I don't know about Pynchon, "Dhalgren", Gaddis, etc. A whole different ball game and I haven't liked them.
221: Seriously, do you think you have to be able to do better yourself to be able to criticize? That just seems loopy to me.
Try it in the visual arts. I can't draw at all -- I'm literally at the stick figure level. I couldn't create any of the works of Whasisname Kinkade, The Painter Of Light (TM). Is it unseemly of me to think or say that they're crap? Because I don't see why it should be.
Perhaps not the Painter of Light, who is more or less a figure of ridicule. But for you to declare, "Geogia O'Keefe is Teh Suxx," yes, I think you'd have to demonstrate some knowledge and critical skill to convince anyone that statement reflects more on O'Keefe than on yourself.
You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
LB, I've got no problem with a person expressing disinterest in an author. I doubt I'm that crazy. But strong criticism requires some back-up, is what I mean, or I get irritated and start insulting people.
I'm starting to make a big deal about a small point, another sign that I should get on with my exile.
Text, it's a pretty democratic process. After a point people stop reading and talking about X. And basically, the decision is not done in a serious thoughtful way. At a later date, some are revived because of the efforts of influential and persuasive individuals.
I remember a number of authors still talked about a lot when I was young, who I never hear about any more at all. Most of them will probably never be revived.
I think that to the degree that a novel can be thought of as generic, it will be forgotten when the genre becomes passe. Exceptions would be extremely masterful, perfect examples of a genre, and probably those which have something a little different or extra.
From the American XIXc non-specialists read Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Poe.... These weren't very typical of the many fiction-writers of that time.
Stephen Crane? JF Cooper? Ambrose Bierce? Washington Irving?..... I don't know any more.
For Updike to have one female character, in the first Rabbit book, think of Rabbit's cock as "like an angel's sword" is a bit much. For him to do it again in the second one is totally ridiculous.
you don't need the ability to make a table in order to abuse a bad one, but you need to know what a bad table is. Otherwise you are only revealing your ignorance.
I don't think you have to be better than the Someone in order to criticize Someone's work, but I agree with text that in many cases, stated dislike of a celebrated artist is more about finding more rarified air than any particular reason. That performance at the Met? Good enough for the plebes, but the true connoisseur scoffs. This fine piece of literature? Oh, I've read dozens just like it and honestly, darling, it just bores me to tears.
I always prefer honest reactions, freely felt and offered. And as Emerson points out, a lot of this stuff won't be in any canon anyway. Much of the reputation of these writers was always marketing, and I'm glad people are willing to judge for themselves.
I think that a pretty good case against Updike has been made. I could probably take care of Mailer and with a little research. Bellow is a tougher nut to crack, but I find the guy incredibly annoying and have no intention of being fair to him. He'll have to survive without any help from me.
I think that literature is an discretionary, optional, involvement, and whimsical rejection is the reader's prerogative. Making it a serious professional responsibility in the universities has been a disaster. The Crooked Timber / Valve people drive me nuts with their ponderousness.
It's like the PC debates about whom you should be attracted to.
I actually quite love hemingway. gaddis, eh. isb all the way. he really is a talented writer, and he has a kind of compelling paranoid appeal, but I got to a point about 3/4 of the way through jr when I just couldn't take the female characters any more and threw the book against the wall and never finished it. it's funny, I much prefer the more or less total absence of female characters, as in a war story, or if not total absence then functional absence, as in a war story where they briefly visit a brothel or flirt with some girls. the world of men, their anxieties and bullshit--even a very misogynist writer can depict that with feeling and interest. but if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character, like the tragedy and the satyr play got all mixed up, or it's like a baroque painting into which a few obscene pencil sketches have been inserted. here you have the (male) actual characters, differentiated from one another, with believable interior lives...and there you have dolls of pure exterior, shiny swelling surfaces, empty eyes, and something stipulated to be interior when they are clearly nothing but badly made automata tottering around the place, falling in love with the deserving or undeserving, handed out like party favors at the end. the author offers up his total inability to imagine what it is like to be a woman on a big silver platter hopefully labelled "mysterious femininity" and feels sure we'll fall for it. fucking pisses me off.
241: Yes, very much so. A lot of my reading has fallen into the 'functional absence of women' category you describe, and as you say, it's much, much less irritating than books that purport to portray women and then don't.
22: I haven't read through this whole thread yet (I'm working on it) but I did want to say that I think that Fischer was planning to write histories of the other European cultures who colonized the U.S., but he never got around to it.
There is one paragraph in Albion's Seed where he says that New York's Dutch heritage meant that it was willing to tolerate much more extravagant displays of wealth and more inequality than would be permissible in certain parts of the country.
I keep hoping that he'll finish the series, but I think that he worte a book about banking in the Renaissance instead.
perhaps the concerns about masculinity emerson alludes to above have something to do with it, but I find this kind of thing more annoying in novelists from the 50s and 60s. I feel like it was recent enough in time that they should have been able to know better. also, I know people who were alive then, so it seems more personal to me. like, this could be a real actual old dude, totally incapable of recognizing my basic humanity.
236: You have to have some sort of theory, which can be implicit, to which you can refer your criticism. But you don't have to spend long years at the feet of Terry Eagleton to get that. A bit of intelligence and experience will usually do. I'm sure LB is well qualified. Dr Johnson certainly was.
237: Very true. I knew a guy whose publisher decided his manuscript should be a best seller, and one of the ways in which they defaced it to this end was to bring in a Specialist Ghost Writer of Sex Scenes. Which must come close to being the worst job in the world outside of the mining industry.
The early Swedish contribution (the foundation of Delaware) has been criminally neglected -- and of course many of those so-called "Swedes" were actually Finns.
Clownae, have you read Good As Gold? What's fascinating about that book today are all the thinly-veiled caricatures of people who made up the proto-Neo-Con set, the Podhoretzes, Kristols, Kissinger, etc. In fact, Heller kept a thick file of clippings by or about those people while writing GAG. I remember his notes on them being fairly scathing. How I wish Heller were alive to write about them now.
if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character
This is true, but it is a high bar, too. Who writes novels in which both male and female characters are presented with equal persuasiveness? I guess I could go for the Henry James (speaking of Mighty White Writers) of Portrait of a Lady or Washington Square. (And even then, maybe he's persuasive because he's not portraying women but ladies, i.e. class is trumps in that particular identity sweepstakes.)
So whiteness is an ethnicity like any other
I think the traditional explanation is that it's not like any other, but rather the undifferentiated norm against which others are measured: that is, saying nothing is the same as saying "white." Absent signifcant changes in the cultural pool, that's going to remain true.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:45 AM
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:55 AM
I'm curious as to whether that remains the case in Hawaii, a state which is majority-non-white and reportedly somewhat hostile to us honkies. Can anyone speak to this?
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:56 AM
this is part of why it was so consciousness-raising to see Richard Pryor in his first concert-videos doing imitations of white people being white.
Deeply embarrassing and cringe-making, and at the same time hilarious, to realize that white was not unmarked, at all, could be observed, could be categorized, pigeon-holed, ridiculed.
Yeah, bracing stuff. Hard to believe it was so long ago, and so little has changed, racially, in America.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:57 AM
So glad to be ethnically Jewish.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:58 AM
I think we should celebrate whiteness in this thread. Ogged's not allowed. Shall we vote on the question of including Jews?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:58 AM
2: "surprisingly" s/b "surprising"
The judgement that the results were surprising was the author's, not mine.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:00 PM
I don't mind / like it when my white friends refer to their whiteness as an ethnicity. Like when we're deciding what to eat, and my white friend feels like eating some bread-based food, like Italian or hamburgers or something, it's fine for her to say, "no, I don't want Vietnamese tonight, I want to eat whitepeople food." It puts white people on the same level as everyone else, whereas if she were to say, "I don't want to eat ethnic food," it would normalize whiteness as the expense of other people(s).
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:00 PM
I've never seen the embarrassingness of an affirmation of one's own whiteness addressed in the context of freedom-from-ethnicity as a facet of white privilege
You have to be ironic about it.
I recall that about fifteen years ago the student paper did a wonderful April Fool's story about establishing a white ethnic theme house on campus; it so carefully walked the line of believability that it had me going for at least three paragraphs.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:00 PM
"Shall we vote on the question of including Jews?"
That's funny--I was just going to ask whether we should include the Irish.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:01 PM
So glad to be ethnically Jewish.
Join the Society for Ethnical Culture!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:01 PM
Your particularity, LB, is class and local (NYC).
The trouble with whiteness is that there are many people like LB, except less aware of its anomalousness than she is, who have no particularly awareness of other particularities. I, on the other hand, while just as "white," am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality, and how each sets me apart from "whiteness" in certain ways. Yesterday's Polish immigrant is white, and his grandchildren might be as disconnected from other particularities as LB, but not in the meantime.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:01 PM
Don't other aspects rush in to fill the void left by "whiteness"? Sit down and I'll tell you a thing or twelve about my great home of Texas, and all the funny things that (white) Texans get up to.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:02 PM
molesting the livestock? I love those stories.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:06 PM
No that goes on mainly in Minnesota.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:08 PM
Funny: I'm being asked to participate in a survey about my Texas ethnicity, primarily because Susan identified me on her blog as a fellow member of the great Texas diaspora.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:11 PM
Iranians were the original Aryans (the words are close cognates) so Ogged is white. However, he has to own to his ethnic responsibility for the Holocaust.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:11 PM
If I understand what you're saying, it's a catch-22. If we say "I'm just boring plain old American", we're defining "American" as "white with bad cooking" and anything else as "other." If we say, "I'm proud of being white", we're proud of having... well, bad cooking and we sound like the white pride crowd.
My background is somewhat like LBs. I know we're Sicilian on one side, but it doesn't show up anywhere except the first names of some great aunts. Pittsburghese accent, bad cooking, mushroom soup casseroles. I can make a great spaghetti sauce, but I learned it from my mom who learned it from my non-Italian dad. The other side -- no idea at all really. If I were to say 'I don't have an ethnicity', I think I'd mean nothing more than 'there's nothing that marks me as belonging to a small in-group.'
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:12 PM
>whiteness is an ethnicity like any other
I think that there are real distinctions within whiteness. I am reading Etnic America by Thomas Sowell and I am becoming more convinced of the lasting effects of ethnity in America. Sowell points out that Irish-Americans disproportunately become lawyers. It also includes stereotypes that I never heard before such as how fun loving German-Americans introduced picnics, dancing and sports to the US. Thank you, fun loving German-Americans.
This book is supposed to be good too, but it is 972 pages long.
It is true that ethnicity is hidden in a way that race is not.
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:14 PM
Suppressed bestiality is one of the main causes of various sorts of crippling mental disorder. Often the damaged individual is completely unaware of his or her bestial urges, and the therapist has to push his therapy skills to the max in order to "draw them out". Only then can the healing begin.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:18 PM
We were talking about Albion's Seed here just last week. The lasting quality of the Scotch-Irish mindset in that book made a profound impact on James Webb, explaining to him aspects of his life, culture and attitudes he'd never understood about himself before. He wrote a book about it. He's now running to unseat George Allen, another guy with more in his background than "whiteness" to think about these days.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:19 PM
And sausage and sauerkraut.
"Honky" and "haole" both work for generic-white.
I'm highly suspicious of "Albion's Seed", because it exaggerates the British component. Minnesota and Wisconsin were first settled by Brits, but they were completely overwhelmed by Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, Irish, and a bunch of little niche ethnicities too. Minnesota, though very white, still has the lowest British ancestry of any state.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:22 PM
I have a hilarious image in my mind of George Allen stonewalling persistent reporters: "Again with the Jewish question."
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:23 PM
brown people have ethnicites which explain important things about their identities, but white people are just people, and anything they do is a statement of their personal identity
This seems related to the 'fundamental attribution error' of believing the actions of others are indicative of the type of person they are, rather than the result of the specific situation/environment.
Posted by ccfc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:24 PM
Could we tell White person jokes? Would that help?
Q: What do WASPs do instead of having sex?
A: Rule the world.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:24 PM
18: That's it exactly. Exeept that this:
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
Is unrealistic. What, we're going to ban the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Kwanzaa?
8: I know talking about whiteness isn't offensive when it's done in that manner, but it's embarrassing. It sounds too much like white-supremacist vocabulary.
19: Oh, sure there are distinctions within 'white American' -- as IDP says, I'm more a New Yorker than I am anything else. But meatloaf-eating-white-people is as coherent a group as lots of other things that get treated as ethnic groups -- 'Latino' anyone?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:24 PM
I started and stopped and started again. I grew up in a very ethnic community...German, Mennonite, Italian, Poles, Scots...as a rare but undetectably Irish descendant. We were blue-collar/farm but not Nascar. To claim there is a "white culture" distinct from all the subcultures seems to me like saying there is a "Hispanic" culture that blends Mexican-Americans with Brazilians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans.
I am trying, but my "whiteness" doesn't feel like the patriarchy. My meatloaf is not an act of oppression. I don't use Hunt's tomato sauce but Kraft cheese.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:24 PM
But all jokes are white people jokes unless otherwise indicated.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:25 PM
My meatloaf is not an act of oppression.
Except to the cows.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:27 PM
Bob, it does not get whiter than Kraft cheese in meatloaf.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:28 PM
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
I think this is an extremely white solution.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:30 PM
John Emerson, have you ever read Randolph Bourne's "Transnational America" and the critique of assimilation and the melting pot ideology in it?
I thought Albion's Seed was suggesting that the British Cultures he described explained a great deal about the American cultures which descend from them, whatever the ancestry of the people living in them now. Areas of predominantly foreign settlement, like Minnesota, would be obvious exceptions. An example is the way the late Dale Earnhart, whose name suggests some German ancestry, expresses the Scotch-Irish inheritance better than I do, even though I have quite a bit of that in my background.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:37 PM
Speaking of meatloaf, one of my sister's best friends in grammar school was a white girl. Our moms got to be good friends, and they had something of an unspoken deal: my sister, who loved meatloaf, would go over to this girl's house on nights when the girl's mom was making it for dinner, and in exchange, whenever my mom made lumpia shanghai, she would make an extra plate for the girl's family. The first time I ever had meatloaf, I was in college, and I thought wow, that girl totally got the better end of the bargain.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:40 PM
How was the lumpia shanghai transported to the friend's family's house? Did your sister carry it over after dinner?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:43 PM
I think my mom drove it over. They lived close by.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:44 PM
20: Healing is often required after the bestiality is drawn out. Best to choose your partners carefully.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:47 PM
Plainly you aren't from the South.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:47 PM
If we say, "I'm proud of being white", we're proud of having... well, bad cooking and we sound like the white pride crowd.
shoulve've been included in the above, which replied to Cala.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:48 PM
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
It was in Time. Surprised me too.
Posted by emmanuel.goldstein | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:48 PM
3: I can't, personally, as I was three when I left. But my (oh-so-Scandinavian) looking mother still fumes about how she had to bring my (stocky Japanese, often mistaken for Samoan) father everywhere to get decent service.
I think the white/non-white dynamic was much more of a "snub the oppressors" type thing than a "brown is the new white." But, like I said, it's all second-hand stories.
18, 26, 31: Have to agree with Neil here. But I'm not sure I agree with the premise - I can't think of any non-white people I know* who (non-ironically) talk about how "all Japanese people raise their kids" or anything. And is there a such thing as a typical white holiday custom? Or is it a typical American holiday custom? Christmas in Germany is (or at least was, who knows anymore) demonstrably different from Christmas in America, despite the whiteness of both dominant cultures.
*This is admittedly limited. Asians are, after all, the "model minority."
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:49 PM
36. I know it's insult upon injury, but that must've had a small penis.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:50 PM
^guy
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:50 PM
40: Sure, I'm talking about ethnicity rather than 'race'. The meatloaf-eating ethnicity I'm talking about isn't 'white' in any sense that would include Germans living in Germany -- it's White American.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:54 PM
And is there a such thing as a typical white holiday custom?
White people decorate cookies.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:56 PM
One place I notice this in in Romance writers, who appear to under huge pressure to Anglicize their pen-names. It is funny to go thru hundreds of ttles(don't ask) and never see a Jacewicz or Pellegrino or Grogan.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 12:57 PM
If the W,M-E background ever becomes sufficiently outnumbered that its members will be constantly aware of their otherness, then it will be an ethnicity. Right now it's a kind of negative ethnicity, because the norm is still based on it.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:07 PM
White people decorate cookies.
Kwanzaa cookies come pre-decorated.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:07 PM
Umm guys... here abouts "Effnick" is the girl in the funny looking traditional costume from the next valley. All white, mind you.
Given that the Austrians were only ever any good at subjugating other "white" nations, until the minor mishap at the beginning of the last century, there is a refreshing robustness to, shall we say, identification with european heritage.
Some, of course, find that unattractive.
Hereabouts, some whites are more priveleged than others. Ask a Sinti.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:08 PM
Heh heh - JP's post reminded me of when I went to a friend's house and they expected me to eat rice with a fork. I came home and told my Mom all about it.
I guess I just have trouble seeing how "typical American" doesn't presuppose white, and if you're going to make statements like "typical Americans decorate cookies" you just gotta suck it up, no? Whereas if you're, say, dancing, and you suck, you can totally say things like "I'm so white" without being an ass.
Maybe it's just that you're allowed to say bad things about being white. (Thinking at work, here, which is not a common occurrence, so apologies.)
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:09 PM
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:10 PM
"" ...
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:11 PM
good point.
Posted by Michae | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:12 PM
I'm not saying ban all ethnic holidays or that ethnicities aren't important. But people do make stereotypes and decisions that are attributed to ethnicities rather than individual's motivation. Why do Asian children do so well in school -- I think there might be a book by that title? How can the Democrats secure the black vote? (White people get to decide, being the implication, but black people vote as a unit.)
I wonder if that increases the us/them dynamic more than a more neutral classification scheme would.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:13 PM
LB: Thanks for posting this. This post prompted me to finish up a post at my own blog that I'd been trying to finish for months.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:14 PM
could some kind soul delete those two misbegotten attempts... i ll go back to lurking now.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:15 PM
MAE, about your bumper sticker issue, I can imagine an attachment to inherited values, felt to be under pressure from trends in modern society which the holder is ambivalent about or hostile to. But I can't imagine a respectable way to identify that with "white."
I'm saying, in other words, that some of the alienation and grievance may be justified, but identifying it with "white" isn't
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:21 PM
46: Not so sure about that. The Latino racial identity, for instance, is quite popular even in the places where it is dominant. There isn't the same sense of 'everybody is like us, aren't they?' as exists in the U.S.
I think LB had it right in the first place; this is a consequence of the recent racism taboo which has caused embracing 'white culture' to seem like an embrace of privilege rather than of heritage.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:22 PM
Oh, and don't interpret me saying it 'seems like an embrace of privilege' as an implication that it -isn't- an embrace of privilege.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:23 PM
53: I don't know if calling it something different would change the fact that people make stereotypes and decisions that are attributed to ethnicity.
(Sorry to comment and run, will see if the convo's still going after the commute.)
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:23 PM
57: Yes, it can be locally dominant, but never loses sight of not being so in the country as a whole. It's when white is clearly not dominant in the country as a whole that the polarities would shift.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:25 PM
I second "I Don't Pay"'s comments in 12.
I'm white, and so don't experience the discrimination that a lot of visible ethnic minorities do. But I still "am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality" and of ways in which my background sets me apart from mainstream English culture -- living as I do, in England.
Not all visibly white people are entirely of the ethnic and cultural mainstream.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:27 PM
56: IDP, I think you've summed it up well, probably better than I did in my post.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 1:41 PM
To put a different spin on it: my son's HS 15 years ago was pretty attentive to multiculturalism, at the formal level, at least. So there were various special groups for each minority, but none for the white kids. It all makes sense in the big political picture, but as it impacted actual individuals it meant that one and only one group was left out. Theoretically, of course, the 70% of the kids who were white were dominant in the overall community, and in reality to a considerable extent, but steps were taken to keep the overall community multicultural too.
The real split was by class. Middle-class Japanese- Chinese- and Vietnamese- American counted as white. I'm not sure that there was a single middle-class black in the school, but they would probably count as white too. One middle-class Vietnamese girl born in the US was admired because she went out of her way to help out the new Vietnamese refugees; not all of them did.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:13 PM
I have some difficulties coming to grips with the "lack of irrational detriment = privilege" equation. Probably because I'm basically on the 'wrong' side of the line in so many ways. There are a number of irrational detriments to which I am not subject: I'm not female, not short, not so tall I face discrimination, not 'of color,' not 'ethnic' (ie 'white' but non-Anglo), not illiterate, not handicapped (differently abled?), not poor (or lower middle class), not stupid (most days), not overly religious, not a member of a religious minority, not an abuse survivor, not Southern, not so fat as to draw discrimination, not an employee, etc. I am sorry for none of the above -- those attributes that are optional I have intentionally created -- only that people different from me in any of these attributes have suffered on account of that difference.
And yet there are endless ways that people who want to can say that I'm not one of them, or not good enough. I'm not Hollywood good looking. Not very good at plenty of tasks, from auto mechanics to carpentry. I'm not rich, really. I'm not from old money. I'm a terrible dancer. I didn't (couldn't) go to an Ivy League law school. I don't tell jokes well, and my stories drag. This is just the beginning, of course. McManus has a string of adjectives for me which the reader is free to imagine.
Obviously, I can't (and don't) sit around saying 'oh poor me' -- because I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either. The fact that I can walk through a Metro station un-ogled neither provides me with any net gain (over, say, walking through an empty station) nor does it add to the ogling that a woman walking the exact rout will experience.
Fire away.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:41 PM
Re: 64
I think much of this has to do with (mostly) unanswered questions about how we classify different levels of identity. So, for whatever reason, the fact that you don't tell excellent jokes is on a completely different level of identity than, say, being black. Thus, we feel the latter counts as being underpriveledged in a way the former doesn't. On the one hand, this distinction is obvious, on the other, I'm not sure it's actually coherent; not only that, but you can (as you did) construct examples the highlight the incoherence much more strongly.
Solution to this? I have no clue. Someone else figure it out!
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:52 PM
re 16: Texans in New York=Texpat
This is an amusing and exotic identity for New Yorkers. Who, of course, sharing a constricting island culture have no idea how parochial they are.
Posted by curiousgyrl | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:55 PM
64: I think it's possible that you may be missing the point a bit.
I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either.
Sure. The point of calling something 'white privilege' is that someone who enjoys it isn't, individually, doing anything wrong. They (in this case you, could as well be me) didn't create the system that defines their ethnicity as the norm, and makes everyone else an outsider, and they aren't doing anything particular to maintain it. So it's not not something you should feel guilty about, as "it's not like I've been the one exacting that price" seems to imply. It's just something that's worth noticing, and examining, and doing what you can (as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm) to disassemble where possible.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:09 PM
Glenn, you have no idea how much better my life would be if I told better jokes. I'd be more popular, maybe even a household name. Money, power, groupies, the works.
The point is that I can point to someone who gets something I don't get. They are privileged, hence I am underprivileged. Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards. When I stick up my hand, I get a cab. Not everyone can say that. I think, though, that one would say of this situation that a person who cannot get a cab is 'underprivileged,' and a person who can get one is 'normal.' Given that the goal with this sort of thing is that everyone becomes 'normal' with respect to haling cabs.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:11 PM
s, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm
How that could be anything but a bad idea, I can't imagine.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:12 PM
Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards.
I think we already *do* attach minimum standards, those standards being that if you sound like a jerk when explain why you consider yourself underprivileged, you probably shouldn't do so.
(This is a non-specific second person usage of "you," and I don't mean to insult any person in this thread).
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:17 PM
I don't perceive 'white American' as a category having enough common characteristics to count as an ethnicity. Regional differences (Texan), cultural (Greek American) , and class overwhelm 'whiteness' in every respect except as compared to blackness. Our Asian-ness, i guess.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:17 PM
How that could be anything but a bad idea, I can't imagine.
A lot of white people might feel more comfortable reinforcing norms if they think they're societal norms rather than ethnic norms. Or in other words, if 'white American' becomes recognized as an ethnicity then white Americans will stop believing that non-white Americans are different because they're stupid.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:19 PM
71: But that's only if you see the world through a white-normative lens. A lot of people accept "Asian American" as an ethnic category, despite the fact that that group contains internal variance on almost every axis that matters to people (language, skin color, religion, food, cultural norms, holidays, etc.). But they are "not-white," and so constitute a discernible group.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:22 PM
3, 40: I think the idea that local people in Hawaii are generally prejudiced against haoles is mostly bullshit. Being haole is a minor advantage in some ways and a minor disadvantage in others but mostly just not a big deal one way or the other. OTOH there are subcultures that don't intersect much with the dominant culture (or what seems like the dominant culture to me), so I don't doubt that others' experiences differ from mine.
I suspect that a lot of white mainlanders think they're experiencing hostility when what they're actually seeing is reserve. There is no shortage of well-off, over-entitled mainlanders who come here expecting to have their asses kissed in various ways, partly because they're spending a lot of money and partly just (IMO) because they're very accustomed to having brown people kiss their asses in ways they're not even aware of. I think there's some tendency to assume that a white person who doesn't have obvious markers of being from here may be one of those over-entitled assholes until proven otherwise. Proving otherwise isn't hard, but if you never try you're likely to continue to be treated with reserve.
Related, and again IMO: many white Americans absolutely cannont stand the existence of forms of status and hierarchy from which they're completely excluded. It bugs the living shit out of some people that a white person coming from the mainland will never be an insider in exactly the same way that a brown person who grew up here can be. To me, BFD, but to some it's horrifying.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:23 PM
re: 71
Yes, I think there's something to that.
Although, I suppose there is the pull of a certain type of 'Norman Rockwell' 1950s bourgeios American whiteness that's found in the media and which, to my outsider's eyes, does seem to specific enough to be a particularly American form of white identity -- even if in reality it was never really shared by everyone, even those who were white and boureios. It's certainly distinct from, say, Englishness or Scottishness (white or otherwise). And does seem distinctly white rather than more generally American.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:23 PM
Right. If CharleyC gets a cab and Random Black Guy doesn't, it might help if the cabbie were perceiving the difference between them as Ethnic Guy I and Ethnic Guy II rather than Normal Guy and Ethnic Guy, if you see what I mean.
and 71: You don't think? There's a hell of a lot of local variation within any ethnicity, but that doesn't mean we all don't recognize Eddie Murphy imitating a white guy, or know what ordering a baloney sandwich on white bread with mayo means.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:24 PM
71: For that matter, the colonial descendents of every country which was colonized by Spain considers itself to have a common heritage. So why can't the colonial descendants of just one country colonized by England have one?
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:31 PM
as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm
Part of my worry with this is something like this: I don't have a small ingroupy ethnicity; grandparents did, but I don't. The dialogue here suggests that I should say my ethnicity is 'white American' so I can think of it helpfully as not 'default', but as part of a culture.
But doesn't that run the very real risk of saying 'to be American is to be a white person with no strong cultural ties to another group'? Everyone else is hyphenated, but I'm *authentic* American. This is what's worrying me, and why I suggested that this is the wrong way to go, to think of whiteness as just another kind of ethnicity.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:32 PM
Agree with Cala and Carp, I think. Right now, "white" is far and away the dominant culture in this country. But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm. Make it another "ethnicity" and you'll see people using that distinction to exclude people--in the ways in which there are arguments about whether someone "is really black," or "really Asian." Sub-categories of white--Italian, Irish, etc.--would seem to serve the purpose you want, at least somewhat.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:37 PM
78: See, I see that as the effect of those like you and I claiming to be the default, rather than members of an ethnic group. "White American" isn't necessarily the best name for it, given your concerns -- just "White" makes it sound like a racial, rather than an ethnic group. "Whitebread"? (And of course, the same person can be part of two ethnicities. I have family that's more 'Irish-American' than I am, but not less 'Whitebread'.)
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:38 PM
But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm.
I'm not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:44 PM
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:47 PM
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:48 PM
I don't know about NYC. In DC, the cab driver is stopping for me because he's guessing that I'm not going to take him to a part of town he doesn't want to be in. The joke is always on him, because I'm going someplace even worse -- the near 'burbs. Twice a week at least, once I'm in the cab and we're going, and the driver really figures out where I want to go: I get let off right there. A block away from where I started.
I wish I lived in a world where the cab driver would make no assumption about a black patron. I'm not clear what you think I can do about that -- not ride in cabs? I am not in the same situation as you, LB, with respect to ethnicity: all my life I've known of mine. And it's not generic white, or at least that's not how I've ever understood it. So my acknowledging an ethnicity isn't going to solve anything, any more than my deploring the cab driver who doesn't want to drive to certain parts of DC will.
I guess, to be fair, I have to say that my ethnicity is a background norm because my ancestors came to North America and killed nearly everyone of different ancestry.
73 -- Exactly. I would never use the term Asian-American to describe someone who, to my knowledge, self-identifies more specifically. It's one of the outermost of the concentric circles of our identities, and too overinclusive for anything other than comparison to non-Asian.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:48 PM
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
The issue is that there are two ways to de-norm whiteness. One is to make it an ethnicity among ethnicities, and the other, which is, I think, America's fitful, unfinished, imperfect project, is to both drain it of meaningful "ethnic" content and make it so malleable that it can incorporate the parts of the other ethnicities that we, as a nation, have all decided are pretty ok. I might have mentioned before the European who pointed out that "white" Americans walk, to the European eye, like black people.
I very much doubt that the "ethnicity among ethnicities" approach can work, because of our historical circumstance: whiteness is still dominant, and trying to mark it off from other ethnicities will end up fixing a particular conception of whiteness that will lose the ability to slowly assimilate what's now "outside" it. That's pretty much the same as killing America, you barbarian.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:51 PM
25: What does a WASP man say after sex?
'You moved - did I hurt you?'
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:55 PM
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
As a moral quality, of course this is right. One can't ignore, though, that what you share with Cala and with me, and I suppose with some others here (but way less than all) is something you also share with a substantial majority of the population.
To pick a different example: People who go to church (or other worship venue) at least once a month, regardless of genetics, are the American norm by sheer dint of numbers.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:55 PM
m not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
In the movie White Men Can't Jump, there's a scene in which the black character tells the white guy that he can't really hear Jimmy Hendrix, because he's white. It's sort of funny, and you hear things like this all of the time. It's even funny if the black guy means it. Jimmy Hendrix--who the fuck cares? Now imagine a white guy saying to some black guy that he doesn't get Shakespeare because "it's a white thing." It wouldn't be funny. Not getting Shakespeare means something more important than not getting Hendrix, and it does so because the dominant culture is white, and what it values most is what is most valuable.
I'm not sure if that's clear. Part of it is that this all seems sort of self-evident to me, so I'm having trouble explaining what I'm thinking.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:56 PM
68: Exactly. We think certain status differentiations are deserved and others are not. I'm just not sure we're entirely coherent in doing so.
Humor affirmative action?
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:58 PM
SCT: That's "Jimi", you honkie.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:01 PM
88: I'm not sure I follow. Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about, because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England. On the other hand, I think it's entirely fair to say that I don't get Jeff Foxworthy because I'm not white, and really it wouldn't bother me.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:01 PM
"culture"
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:02 PM
90: "Jimi" is his slave name.
91: I think you're really, really wrong if you believe that people only lay ethnic claim to culture that extends as far back as 1970 (Hendrix's death date). Even if that were so, the number of things produced by the culture since then that are considered important and are produced by white Americans dwarfs the number of similar things produced by non-white Americans.
Also, how can you not get Foxworthy, who is not so much "white" as "Southern" or maybe "Southern white."
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:11 PM
Ogged's 85 is very good.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:15 PM
Surprisingly, nobody has mentioned the accent, which is basically the delimiter of white Americanhood. Sure, one "can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white" but only if one does not speak with a black, Hispanic or Asian accent. And it's certainly not the case that anyone can wake up one day and decide to talk like the people on TV do.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:18 PM
I second ogged's analysis.
[On preview, third.]
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:20 PM
SCMT, I'm not saying that ethnicity only extends as far backwards as 1970. I'm saying that telling a black person, "You don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a sensible analogue to your Jimi Hendrix example, because Elizabethan England is as much a foreign place for white people today as black people -- just ask any high school English class.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:22 PM
Humor affirmative action?
The people who work for me laugh at my jokes. That'll have to do.
Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about [culture], because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England.
That distant sound you hear is Mr. Kurasawa rolling over in his grave. This puts me into the SCMT camp, I guess, NTTAWWT, because things like Shakespeare are available to anyone anywhere. There are situations, of course, where pigmentation is going to make all the difference, or facial architecture. Or figure. Culture, though, we can choose to pick up, walk away from, be oblivious to, etc.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:23 PM
Kurosawa. Geez, I even looked it up to make sure.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:24 PM
I don't think I "get" Murasaki Shikibu better than a white person. But, if I had grown up in Japan, reading school primers that quoted her haiku, I might feel better about making that assertion.
So I think SCMT has a valid point, inasmuch as we hear "to thine own self be true" or "a rose by another other name" etc. surprisingly frequently in our everyday American discourse.
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:28 PM
May I suggest that Shakespeare, whose work has endured due to its broad appeal, is not the best example?
I also wonder what would be a better example of culture that only white Americans can truly understand, if there is such a thing?
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:34 PM
I don't think there is any, but I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk. Everyone understands everything through the lens of their own personal experience, but not sharing an ethnicity with the artist doesn't mean that you can't really understand their works.
(I can't believe I'm actually saying this. This is one of those posts where I thought my thinking on ethnicity was more mainstream than it is.)(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:49 PM
100, 101 -- FTB can immerse herself in the works of Murasaki Shikibu even today. One need not have been brought up in a culture to embrace and ultimately own it. I'm not saying such a thing can be done overnight, but one is not culturally fixed at 3 or 6 or 10 years old. I cannot imagine that there is an aspect of 'white American culture' that someone not a 'white American' cannot truly understand.
I think of the movie Meet Joe Black. Now the life Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani are living in that movie -- they're cast as white Americans, after all -- is prety distant from that of nearly all of us. I suppose you could distill from that movie some kind of experience that would be utterly alien to Japanese-, Iranian-, or Irish-Americans. Then again, whatever that was would likely be just as alien to LB with her baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread.
To pick up on ogged's 85, anyone who lives in the US can self-identify with the white norm all the way if they want: 'the british burned our capital in the war of 1812.' It might be pretty awkward to hear an African-American say 'we didn't free our slaves until 1865,' but an American descendant of Jewish Eastern European immigrants who came in the 1920s can say this. And when they do, as pointed out in 85, the norm expands.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:57 PM
(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
I'd say this is a way better descriptor for most of the people on here than any sort of Cracker-American attempt. Certainly describes me better than White-American could (though I have been described, much to my chagrin, as The Man by an ex of mine. So I suppose I'm whiter than I think.).
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:59 PM
You're probably not wrong with Weirdo-Americans. But I was thinking "getting" Shakespeare was a matter of getting the beauty of the language (hence my counterexample). Which I should have made more explicit.
The Hendrix thing, I think, does make someone a jerk. Whereas I would concede as valid someone saying "you don't get Hendrix cuz you don't play guitar" or "you don't know blues."
Posted by FTB | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 5:00 PM
Among my problems with perceiving "whiteness is an ethnicity like any other" are the following:
a. There are too many ethnic groups that present as "white", especially in our little moulting pot of the UsA. Within what a "non-white" person might see as "white", there are factions that do and do not see each other as "white".
b. There are waaaay too many class differences that affect such things as "what white people are like, and how white people bring up their kids, or typical white holiday customs" far more than a commonality of colour.
c. Bologna with mayonnaise on white bread? What are you, a Methodist?
Dunno about the rest of you, but I don't see any reason to affirm the colour of my skin. My Norse heritage, perhaps, but that extends more to a hatred of lutefisk, an enjoyment of Julekage and an appreciation of Hardanger embroidery. [And the occasional desire to go to ski resorts and mock downhill skiers.] But, to be honest, I like baklava better, am far more inclined to cook bulgogi than risted laks med kremsaus and the covers on the pillows on my couch were embroidered and purchased in Jordan, where I spent several years of my childhood. And I haven't X-country skied since my first knee surgery.
Do I get that presenting as "white" = privilege in this country? Of course - and believe me, tagging into a store several paces behind my non-white son would have taught me that had I not already known it. I've had sales assistants rush to help me whilst ignoring him, which I find wryly amusing, given that he dresses better than I do* and has far more disposable income these days - they should notice the former and be able to infer the latter. I doubt that it's merely veneration of my cronicity. However, he would receive more and better attention than a "white" person who presented as homeless; economic class trumps "white privilege".
Now I have to run off and make meatloaf, which I shall serve with Wonderbread, margerine and TaterTots, after which Pa and I will sit in our rocking chairs on the porch and read Scripture. Yes, indeedy.
* Him: True religion jeans, $262; A&F tee $29.50; Fossil messenger bag, $180.
Me: Levi jeans from Target $22; tie-dye tee bought at Venice Beach ten years ago $6; 22 year old Coach shoulderbag in need of re-dyeing.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 5:03 PM
I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk.
It works as a joke because it's so ridiculous. Hendrix, as opposed to many many other artists, is very accessible outside black culture. Monterey, Isle of Wight, Woodstock.
Let's take a moment to think about Little Wing, shall we:
Well she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind thats running round
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.
OK, I'm out. I'll walk to the bus stop rather than take a cab home, to lessen the quantum of oppression in the world by some little amount.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 5:08 PM
our little moulting pot of the UsA
Gaaak! This stew is full of feathers!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 5:48 PM
108: That was deliberate; people who have come to the US shed some of the "feathers" of their countries of origin, but not all, and some grow back.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:00 PM
One of the things that I like particularly about the analysis in Albion's Seed is that the author's definition of ethnicity or "folkways" is expansive enough to include a lot of things that most people would probably account for as class markers. In particular, when he writes about the Scots-Irish/'borderer' culture, he's obviously not talking about whatever earl or baron was nominally in charge of the areas those people came from, but rather the broad mass of common people who produced and reproduced the culture. The other thing I've argued is that many of the 'folkways' that are identified as particularly Scots-Irish have come to be present in a broad swath of working-class U.S. culture, regardless of the ethnicity or even the race of the participants.
Regarding the story about white people seeing something worth preserving in 'white culture', there's one version at the Star Tribune (it was, after all, a U of Minn study).
I realize that I'm beating my same old drum here, but I guess it's seemed to me for a long time that the antidote to the null value of whiteness as an ethnicity in this country is class consciousness. Of course, there's some people who take exception to that, at least sort of. But even though I agree with much of Sakai's analysis, as a white person it seems counterproductive to mire myself in more depression. There's nothing pride-worthy in whiteness, to my view, but I can take courage in the example of my working-class ancestors who did so much with so little. There's also the fact, elided somewhat in Settlers that, like me, a lot of white people in this country are the products of a family tree that includes many people of color, despite which we have plenty of white skin privilege today. I guess that it seems fairly hopeful to me that some of my white ancestors were progressive enough to voluntarily start families with freed slaves or their descendents, and I think it's pretty significant that one of the things that made this possible was a shared class identity.
I still can't figure out how my Danish ancestors ate alebrod for breakfast though -- with whipped cream and raisins, too! Yecch!
Posted by minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:02 PM
(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
I think we agree with the diagnosis but are divided on the solutions. But I admit, weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:06 PM
I'd also like to nominate blogger-American.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:10 PM
To pick a phrase from the discussion: the null value of whiteness as an ethnicity
A lot of this null value has to do with German ancestery being, for most of the 20th century, the ethnicity that dare not speak its name.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:42 PM
My grandfather took on an obviously Anglo nickname when he was dating my grandmother because he didn't want to sound like he was Italian.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:44 PM
109: I thought so, but couldn't help myself. Come to that, it's more of a crucible than a stewpot, anyway.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:48 PM
You're all welcome to become Apostromericans.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:51 PM
101- Updike? Auchincloss? Cheever? Irving? How accessable are these to non WASPs?
Posted by Tassled Loafered Leech | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:51 PM
Damn, "ancestry"
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:54 PM
A Belgian acquaintance says that he learned that the U.S. was like a tossed salad, with all the different ethnicities remaining distinct but mixing well together or something like that.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 6:58 PM
c. Bologna with mayonnaise on white bread? What are you, a Methodist?
Is there something wrong with that? </ruffled feathers> Actually, yes, on Dad's side of the family.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:07 PM
A Belgian acquaintance says that he learned that the U.S. was like a tossed salad
I was also taught this, alongside the "melting pot" metaphor.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:13 PM
Leech, that's funny; I was thinking of citing Updike as a culture-bound author. But that just means that he's very much of his culture, as much as or more than any non-white author; it doesn't mean non-WASPs can't enjoy him. (And I find Cheever very accessible.)
If there's any truth to the "You can't understand X because you're not Y" (and I think it's limited), Y has to be something much smaller than 'white people'. Is every single white person equally privy to the world of Whit Stillman in a way that black or Asian people aren't?
(121, me too.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:21 PM
We Americans are all about the salad-tossing.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:22 PM
64:"McManus has a string of adjectives for me which the reader is free to imagine."
'Capitalist running dog' is the one size fits all purpose tool.
Golly, is everyone imagining me lurking outside the blog with a paint gun? I want to become a verb.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:37 PM
it doesn't mean non-WASPs can't enjoy [Updike].
Anyone can enjoy Updike, once they learn how to make the M of receptivity—with their minds.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:43 PM
Anyway, given a suitable rate of intermarriage and a few generations, we'll all be a nice brownish shade (better for surviving global warming anyway) and nobody will care which line of ancestry was responsible for the family meatloaf recipe.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:49 PM
I've never read Auchincloss, but the idea that one must be a WASP to understand Updike, Cheever, or Irving is laughable. For that matter, the idea that you have to be X, where X equals any type of person, spirit, critter, or thingamajig, in order to understand decent (or even not so decent) writer Y is frankly stupid. Unless you can't get a translation.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:51 PM
In other words, Weiner with exclamation points.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:52 PM
I don't really think there's such a thing as culture that people "can't understand" because they're X/not Y. I think it is possible for literature to speak especially to certain experiences that are tied to your racial/class identity, be it underprivilege or overprivilege (which is worth squat when it comes to literary understanding or appreciation, IMO).
To answer my own question I think that The Simpsons, by design, speaks to the white-American identity thing in this way. It's interesting that the show is popular all over the world -- I can't imagine how many of the jokes would translate well -- but I think this is tied up in the white-American-as-somehow-universal phenomenon we're discussing.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:54 PM
"weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered"
We hippies in the 60s divided the world into "straights" and "freaks". Freaks included most minorities, if not all, but especially cultural minorities.
John Varley in the 70s divided his future culture into "Republicans" and "Democrats", meaning much the same as above. Just saying.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:57 PM
I want to become a verb.
Bob already is a verb. Your work is done.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 7:59 PM
and ogged's 85 was very good, as someone who came late to the thread
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:03 PM
103, etc: The Jimi Hendrix example is a terrible example. All through his career and even today, he's was/is more listened to by white people than by black. One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:07 PM
My Tex-Mexican American nephew in law identifies with John Wayne. He's a retired military lifer. He also identifies with his family and ancestors, but he's an Army man from Texas.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:09 PM
One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
Pretty much typical of classic rock/AOR; incredibly white, with Jimi as the token. I thought that the use of Hendrix was kind of a copout in the movie; if it had been about Sly (with reference to There's a Riot Goin' On) that would have stung. Of course the movie was written and directed by a white guy.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:13 PM
Jimi really wasn't the token. He was a real crossover. He played white-people hippy music, really, though he built on his R&B background.
Some of the interviews with him and onstage tapes show that he really didn't believe what was happening and felt very weird about it. Of course, he hadn't exactly parachuted into the middle of Updikeland.
I liked Updikes first short stories when they came out, but when I look at them again they seem horribly overwritten. He was always struggling with the Lake Wobegon problem: how do you write about a place where everything is arranged to make sure that nothing ever happens, and where nobody ever talks about it if something does happen to happen.
His first novel continued the struggle with that problem, writing about boring, annoying people who live boring lives, except that his short-stories were about his teen years when his characters didn't knwo yet how boring they were. The people became more boring still when they matured. I lost interest right there.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:27 PM
I would happily eat Danish Beer Soup. I may even save the recipe. It sounds like a great way to take care of the stale beers that don't have cigarettes floating in it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:34 PM
it's not true that just anyone can enjoy updike, because updike is an irritating misogynist shithead. fine, I'll just come out with it, because I'm tired of living a lie: I'm a UHA, an updike hating american. cheever, on the other hand, is good.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 8:58 PM
it's not true that just anyone can enjoy updike, because updike is an irritating misogynist shithead.
That's the subtext of 125, as I understand it.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:03 PM
I don't think I've ever read any Updike. Instincts: impeccable!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:08 PM
The problem is deeper than that, because I like Philip Roth fine and am, in fact, capable of being an i. m. s. myself. As far as I can tell, every single on of the big late fifties - early sixties novelists was an i.m.s.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:15 PM
I've read a couple of Updike short stories. Distinctly meh.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:16 PM
SB, are you going to have a subtext explaining blog now, too?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:18 PM
As far as I can tell, every single on of the big late fifties - early sixties novelists was an i.m.s.
This is about what I was thinking. I read Bellow thinking, dude, you're a genius, but what the fuck's your problem?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:20 PM
I assume that would be located directly beneath text's blog.
Aaaaaand I'll be banning myself.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:20 PM
Stub, if memory serves, you haven't made me laugh yet, but I appreciate your knowledge of the local lore and customs.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:21 PM
text has a blog?
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:25 PM
are you going to have a subtext explaining blog now, too?
Yes*.
*No.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:26 PM
147: Yeah, there's a link to it on standpipe's blogroll.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:28 PM
It's like in the Pullman books. Everyone has a blog—even in our own world—but not everyone knows it's there.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:29 PM
I don't rememebr signs of i.m.s.-ery in Ralph Ellison, who has always been my favorite. Probably not in James Baldwin either, but he was a little bitch. Can't remember William Styron; never liked his stuff much.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:30 PM
I don't remember much of anything about the portrayal of women in Invisible Man. There may have been some misogyny there.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:33 PM
One of the very first things I read on the internet was a collection of Ellison's letters. Really beautiful stuff. I haven't been able to find it again.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:34 PM
He was quite a guy.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:37 PM
152:I think I remember more, and there is.
Read some Updike, and then a collected Cheever stories, and was very much impressed. Never liked Roth; loved early Bellow:consider this a "some of my favorite writers point". Irving really bores and irritates me. Two Waspy(?) writers not yet mentioned, and shame on y'all:Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler.
One important (?) "white bread" author not mentioned yet:Stephen King.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:48 PM
Come on, we were talking about i.m.s writers, not writers per se.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 9:55 PM
I don't have a blog. I have a frozen fish.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 10:02 PM
What's the difference between being meaningfully Irish from Queens and meaninglessly Irish from Queens?
Three.
Posted by Thers | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 10:47 PM
It's like in the Pullman books. Everyone has a blog
Mine is a stoat.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 10:52 PM
Nobody cares anymore, but I'll come out and say it: I like Updike. Sure, he's written some turgid, silly crap, but it's only because he's willing to take chances, and because, early on, publishers decided to print up any old shit he had handy. So, sure, a book a year, and several short stories, and some of it is going to suck.
Rabbit at Rest? Sucks. Seek My Face? Sucks. But The Centaur? Better than anything anyone here will ever write.
And the Garrison Keillor comparison? Inapt! Inapt I tell you. Updike likes to write, primarily, about people who sleep around in surprising ways. So, sure, that has it's limits, but if not completely transgressive, neither was it comforting in its time.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:10 PM
Hmm. Maybe I misunderstood this "Lake Wobegone" problem comment. Updike's got his flaws, but if one wants to fight a real mysoginist shithole, one should just focus on pushing Hemingway out of the academy. He's almost gone already, and that's probably fair.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:20 PM
or, you know, he was probably even a misogynist shithole.
disgrace and exile, now, for text.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:24 PM
The Garrison Keillor comment only really applied to his first book, "Pigeon Feathers" which I liked at the time. But to me, boring people who screw around are still boring.
I ended up believing that for his first novel, "Rabbit Run", Updike visited a prostitute as part of his Research, hopping off every minute or two to scribble down notes. And also that the sex was injected to spice up the boring lives of boring people.
However, I never did read the 47 novels he wrote after "Rabbit Run".
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:38 PM
64: when I had similar conversations, I've said--I don't think we should feel at all guilty, I think we should feel lucky.
My subculture is urban/suburban white liberal, I think.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 11:52 PM
Not caught up on thread, but the problem with "white" as an identifier is that it was basically invented to enforce racism. Even if one doesn't cling to specifically Irish or German traditions, your whiteness ain't my whiteness: the whiteness of, say, the great lakes really is different from the whiteness of the southwest. And anyway, "white" really just means "western European-American," sorta kinda. Meatloaf is like a bastardized version of vaguely western European food in the same way that the hard shell taco is a bastardized version of Mexican food, no?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 12:43 AM
64, 68, 84, 87, 98, 99, 103, 107
Been thinking about this thread, Charleycarp was unusually loquacious tonight. Nobody else seemed to notice, or maybe the rules say you pretend not to notice. I, I just wanted to come back and read them again.
I read the comments and I see this brown face looking across a table at me, but that probably isn't what it's like at all.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 2:37 AM
What about Heller? Something Happened is one of my favorite books, out of the subset of books I've read that I have not read in the past 20 years. Wait -- that's wrong -- I reread it 12 years ago and it was as good or better the second time around. The narrator is the archetypal IMS. But Heller? He seems to be presenting the narrator's head as a fucked-up one, one the reader should not aspire to occupy. And now I'm flashing on the scene from Catch-22 when the psychotic soldier (his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope) murders a prostitute when she demands payment. But I can't remember if that scene was treated the same in the book as it was in the movie. So anyway: what about Heller?*
* Also, Vonnegut. I can readily believe him to be irritating and (reluctantly) misogynistic, but a shithead? I think not.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 5:55 AM
"(reluctantly)" doesn't quite capture what I was hoping for it to.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:04 AM
Updike wrote a short story called "The Chaste Planet"—science fiction, believe it or not, concerning little pickle-shaped aliens from Jupiter.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:20 AM
I must admit I've never gotten into Updike, even though his subject-matter is close to my experience. Did anyone else see AWB's piece about deciding it was ok to detest him? An act of self-liberation.
I know what people mean by the misogynist streak in American literature, by men, going back at least to Mark Twain, but remains important to me. I was in Petoskey, Michigan a few weeks ago, the setting for many of Hemingway's early stories, and was moved to start reading and thinking about them again. Talking with friends, I've found we share a lot of feeling for them, out of the academy or not.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:30 AM
166 - Surely correcting the spelling mistake and explaining the Hendrix joke to LB shouldn't count against my daily quota. I'm just sorry I went for Little Wing (influenced by the Corrs' version no doubt) while the example that fits the thread better would have been Bold As Love:
Anger he smiles, towering shiny metallic purple armour,
Queen Jealousy, Envy, waits behind him,
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground.
Blue are the life-giving waters taking for granted
They quietly understand.
Once happy Turquoise armies lay opposite
Ready, but wonder why the fight is on.
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love.
Just ask the Axis.
My Red is so confident,
He flashes trophies of war and ribbons of euphoria.
Orange is young, full of daring,
But very unsteady for the first go round.
My Yellow in this case is not so mellow,
In fact, I'm trying to say that it's frightened like me,
And all of these emotions of mine keep
Holding me from giving my life to a rainbow like you.
But I'm, yeah, I'm bold as love,
But I'm as bold as love.
But I'm as bold as love.
Just ask the Axis, he knows everything.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:40 AM
test
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:45 AM
I'm divided on Updike. A lot of the time I have a visceral reaction against him, partly because he does seem so wrapped up in his own assumptions in a way only a white man could be (and you get the idea that he views other cultures as special interests). But Rabbit Run (not his first novel) is obviously quite a book in one way or another. Some of his stories are great, and most of them seem to have a moment of illumination, though often surrounded by dubiety.
I agree with 165; there's just no good reason for solidarity with all other white people. And there can be good reason for solidarity with all other black people, even though the blackness of different areas may be different in the way the whiteness of different areas is.
136: I don't think the fact that Hendrix's music fits in means that he's not a token, as the only black person played by classic rock radio.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:53 AM
172 -- Testing your fix?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:53 AM
Hey, (partially) English-descended people! Get a load of this.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:37 AM
Hey, (partially) English-descended people! Get a load of this.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:37 AM
I think that golden oldies / classic rock radio would rather have no tokens at all, but they can't leave Hendrix out because too many old stoners are in their audience, and Hendrix (with Zep a couple years later) wrote the book on stoner music.
The real tokens I remember on that 900-song list were one song by BB King (Thrill is gone), one song by Otis Redding (Dock of the Bay), maybe one song by Aretha, and one song by the Chambers Brothers (Time). These songs just came along at the right moment and got airplay. No Sly Stone, almost no Motown, no James Brown, maybe one thing by Ray Charles IIRC, no Marvin Gaye IIRC.
There was a peak of cultural integration around the Sly Stone era. Prison guards were alarmed when black-white communication began in the prisons, because divide-and-conquer was their game. Classic Rock was a resegregation of the 1967-70 demographic. (Golden Oldies, I think, is the older-yet demographic).
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:54 AM
176: The fit between language group and biological ancestry is very weak in a lot of places.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:55 AM
Hemingway's early stories
Much, much better than the novels, and if the man will have a serious literary reputation it will have to owe to the short stories, not to the macho image.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:59 AM
the only black person played by classic rock radio
Lenny Kravitz?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:01 AM
the Chambers Brothers (Time)
Is that the one where they shout 'time' over and over, at slowing and speeding tempos? I heard that on classic rock radio too, didn't know who it was by or that they were black. Also sometimes heard "I Got You."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:03 AM
I hated Hemingway in high school.
Also, in support of 165, there was a time when white people from the wrong part of Europe weren't really white or good candidates to be good Americans: too Catholic, too drunk, too prone to fighting, too dirty, too swarthy, too whatever. The U.S. survived.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:08 AM
In high school, we read The Old Man and the Sea. Unintentional self-parody.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:11 AM
That article linked in 176 is very interesting.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:13 AM
weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered
Paul Fussell called them "Class X" in Class. Meaning, basically, what's called the "creative class" these days.
his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope
Aarfy?
The Hendrix remark works as a joke, as someone else points out, because among African-American musicians at the time, Hendrix was probably most receptive of the styles of "white" rock and roll. It probably isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that it's very white to imagine that appreciating Hendrix (of all people) provides any special insight into the "black" experience (something I did believe as a little white boy).
But as "white" music goes, Country has it all over. I love a lot of Country Music--even some of what passes for Country these days--but never has a genre of music been so defined by its "whiteness" or so unreflective on the circumstances that made it so.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:13 AM
I assert my moral right to be identified as the author of #185
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:19 AM
Fussell's book had some good insights, but is my least favorite of his books. Better is Benjamin DeMott's, which I forget the exact title of.
Arfy is right. Pipe-smoking would-be-tweedy navigator. One of fascinating things about Catch-22 is the matching of personalities to ratings: Pilot, Navigator, Bombardier. There really were psych. tests for that, and personalities did run to type.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:21 AM
The macho image is what has made him outre, that and his many personal flaws, and some pieces of very bad writing. But many of Hemingway's short stories are really much better than anything being written today. So it's a shame.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:22 AM
IDP: Thanks for the link, but as a (partially - about 70%) English descended person, I shall treat this with extreme scepticism until I've read a discussion somewhere more specialised. Too many unanswered questions for my taste. [Extended rant deleted on preview].
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:25 AM
Better than anything anyone here will ever write
better than anything being written today
This is totally the book version of "Like she'd ever sleep with you."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:25 AM
I would have thought the reevaluation of Hemingway, to give him a proper, qualified place, had been largely done and assimilated long since. It amazes me to find people still reacting to the grotesque reputation of the 50s, people not yet born when the view we're presenting here was developed and disseminated.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:28 AM
180: I'm out of touch, but Kravitz is way late for classic rock. Maybe's there's a later demographic format.
181: Yes. All black except the drummer. The tempo-change gimmick combined with the lyrics is stoner-cosmic.
191: After reevaluation comes rediscovery. Hemingway's woundedness was what annoyed me. I think that Ralph Ellison wrote something about it. Also, he failed to acknowledge the no-relationship principle.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:35 AM
This is totally the book version of "Like she'd ever sleep with you."
Totally. My reaction to "anything anyone here will ever write" was "Wait, when did this become the going standard of comparison?"
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:47 AM
The 176 link refers to the period before 2000 BC. There were several migrations to the British Isles before that time (these were the Stonehenge people. The Celts only came ~600 BC. The Romans estyablished a foothold ~100 BC, but didn't resettle. The Anglos-Saxons cam ~600 Ad, and the Norse 800-1100 AD.
The gist of the article is that after every stage, the original population remained numerically dominant. This means cultural change, probably by violent elite-replacement, possibly by gradualist infiltration and acculturation. But not mass migration and extermination. ("Elite replacement" implies that the invader genes were from males rather than females.)
The Basques have always been the prehistorical anomaly in Europe. The peoples of the Caucasus are also non-Indo-European. The genetic significance of this is unknown to me and may be very slight, after thousands of years of intermarriage.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:47 AM
re: 194
If my memory serves, Cavalli-Sforza's work suggests something similar about the vast majority of Europe. That is, in most invasions it's been elite-replacement plus cultural transfer rather than wholesale population transfer. With the western edge of europe least affected by population and gene transfer and the south eastern edge of europe most affected. The argument in that article would largely fit with that.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:58 AM
Q107, the hard rock station in Toronto, never played any black artists during their regular shows, but on "Psychedelic Sundays" they would play anything by Hendrix, anything by Sly, "Time" by the Chambers Brothers, "Spinning Wheel" by Earth Wind and Fire, and "Freedom" by Richie Havens. And that was about it.
Who wrote the novel about two swinging couples having mid-life crises around the time of the Nixon resignation? Was that Updike?
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:58 AM
Somebody who should not go unmentioned when people are compiling lists of IMS authors: Norman Mailer.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:01 AM
197: Another writer who retains value for me despite bales of crap.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:03 AM
I read Herzog many many years ago and thought it was appallingly misogynist. Then later I thought maybe I was being uncharitable, because it is true that when I was younger I sometimes had difficulty separating the views of the characters from the views of the author. But someone mentioned Bellow as an IMS upthread, so perhaps my first instincts were right.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:06 AM
Sure. I'm not saying I despise his work, though much of it fails to be worth while.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:07 AM
The Executioner's Song for example is a great book.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:08 AM
194/5: Matt is right, as far as I remember. I picked on the assertion of Germanic affinities for the Belgae to illustrate methodological suspicions rather than to refute the whole shebang. But it's a very vexed area. I saw a thing I can't find on line which said that genetic evidence for the Germanisation of Britain suggested that the indigenous people were assimilated in some areas, enslaved in others and massacred in yet others.
Which is what you'd expect really. The Anglo-Saxon chiefs didn't arrive with an occupation strategy in their pockets (no change there, then). They arrived piecemeal, and they responded to events on the ground, to balance of forces, to opportunities, etc. A bit like the Europeans in the Americas, in fact.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:14 AM
197: I was amazed/appalled when Mailer called himself "Aquarius" in "Of A Fire On The Moon." What an ego/what a talent/what an ego!
Posted by bill | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:15 AM
"This is totally the book version of 'Like she'd ever sleep with you.'"
In both cases, ogged, the comment is deserved.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:15 AM
I like the work of some of those guys, above all Roth, but then I do have IMS tendencies. I have special reasons for disliking Updike -- some kind of deliberate limpness and banality, plus overwriting, plus preciosity and pretension.
Name-dropping again: as a HS student regarded as promising (ha!), through another promising youth who was a family friend of his (and is now a second-rank neo-con), I met Bellow and his then-wife, probably Glassman.
The Wife was willowy, blond, elegant, and an effusive hostess. She also gave me the creeps. This was my first intimation that I wasn't going to make the big time, I suppose, though I didn't realize that at the time.
At some point I concluded that Bellow was financing each divorce with a novel about the previous divorce. I was already fragile, I suppose, but this perception probably was a factor in my eventual no-relationshp policy.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:17 AM
BTW: Is there a name for the school of novelists which includes Updike, Roth, Heller, and tangientially Mailer? Is my impression accurate, that these authors are in a category together?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:17 AM
More specifically, whenever one claims that a celebrated writer does not deserve said celebration, one's argument relies, implicitly on one's ability to read and interpret works. I'm not sure that any of the self-asserted debunkers here have made a very strong case.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:19 AM
Who wrote the novel about two swinging couples having mid-life crises around the time of the Nixon resignation?
Are you talking about "The Ice Storm"? That was by Rick Moody, who is of the post-IMS generation.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:20 AM
re: 202
That Prospect article specifically responds to that claim re: Anglo-Saxon 'genocide'.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:22 AM
206: I don't think so, unless you are simply talking about a particular "generation" of novelists. It seems like the Jewish novelists of that generation are not put into the same school as the non-Jewish novelists.
207 makes sense. There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:22 AM
206: I wouldn't put Heller in a category with the other three, but that isn't based on more that the other three bore me in vaguely related ways, and I think Catch-22 is a great book. Never thought much of any of the other three.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:23 AM
post-IMS generation
IMSism is a phenomenon that transcends generational distinctions.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:23 AM
I think Catch-22 is a great book
You are obviously correct in this matter. But have you read Something Happened?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:25 AM
There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
It's true that sort of criticism tends to be bogus -- I tend to assume that if I dislike something that's generally acclaimed, it's because I'm not getting it or don't have a taste for it, rather than that it objectively sucks. On the other hand, "Like you could write anything better," is a completely irrelevant comeback. I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:28 AM
I read them as expressing taste, impressions, and reactions to reputations. Every one of these guys, except Heller, has written a great deal and been widely, often wildly feted. I've gotten something from every one of them, least from Updike, the first voted off my island, but no one writes that much at the highest level. In the words of another invaluable IMS, "listen not to the teller, but to the tale"; Herzog's a good book, with a wonderful, passionate and solipsistic personality at the center of it.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:29 AM
213: I may have -- I picked up a number of the rest of his books a while back, and none of them made any sort of impression on me.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:29 AM
There's actually a story not yet told about the sexual politics of 1955-1965. Fear of homosexuality was pervasive, therapists and ideologues were already present in force, and insinuations homosexuality was used as a weapon by macho men against less-macho men, and then finally hyper-macho men were accused of overcompensation and latent homosexuality. This was all at a high, formal, official level, not just gutter talk.
It filtered down to the high schools where the teachers kept an eye out for suspect guys and tried to help them. It was worse for the actually-gay, of course, but every guy was targetted.
As a result gross heterosexuality became more or less an obligation, except that good boys were also still expected to be chaste.
All those writers played that game. And then the game changed twice in 10 years, first with the hippie thing (wimp macho) and then with women's liberation.
Gore Vidal, Calder Willingham, Truman Capote, and especially Tennessee Williams were the flaming queens of the time. The others we've been mentioning were the baseline of normality.
So anyway, why am I weird? There's more, but do you need more?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:30 AM
216 -- That's a little worrisome -- my purely personal take on SH (filtered by 12 years' separation) is that it's one of the most deeply affecting, memorable books I know. Might have to take this consciousness in for a tune-up, change the oil, check the ignition.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:34 AM
208: Googled it, and it was called Memories of the Ford Administration and it was indeed written by Updike.
I must have been desperate for reading material to pick up a book with that title.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:36 AM
209: Matt, I know what he asserts. But plenty of other people have done genetic work that comes to different conclusions, to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why I said I'd like to read an analysis of his work in a professional or semi-pro journal. In general you'd expect significant genetic continuity even if you were looking at fairly large scale replacement, simply because iron age people just weren't as efficient at genocide as we are.
As you probably know, there's a historian called Walter Goffart who's attempted to demonstrate an elite replacement model for most of the western Roman empire in the 5th century, using legal and economic data. It would be very interesting if you could find gentic evidence to support this, but I suspect it's too soon to open the pop.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:36 AM
"I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such."
This smells a bit like the unathletic sports fan who harps just a bit too much on the flaws of his favorite team's athletes. I think that's a bit disgraceful, though ogged may disagree.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:38 AM
John's right about the currents. I may be mistaken, but I think Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men deals with this sympathetically, as in my opinion she always does. As an aside, let me say that if you actually read feminist authors back in the seventies, instead of going on second-hand media accounts and cafeteria posturings, it was easy to be sympathetic and feel positive about the project.
Some of Mailer's own musing, in The Prisoner of Sex and Marilyn, was worthwhile to me.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:39 AM
I don't get 221.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:41 AM
Text (passim): These may not all be considered judgements, but they are part of the process by which it is decided what lasts and what doesn't. From 1950-1980 there must have been 1000 American novelists that serious people (some of them) took seriously. Probably by now 200 of them are still read much. (Vance Bourjaily? Calder Willingham). 50 years from now it will probably be ten or so. My vote (excluding survivors like Hemingway and Faulkner) would be: Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, maybe Roth, maybe Malamud, maybe Heller.... I'm sure I've forgotten a few.
One problem Bellow, Heller, Roth, Styron, Bourjaily, Mailer, Updike, and others have is that a template is detectable: a young man's struggle with his father, first sexual experience, and tortured romantic relationships. Even James Baldwin almost does this.
I don't know about Pynchon, "Dhalgren", Gaddis, etc. A whole different ball game and I haven't liked them.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:42 AM
My point, Emerson, is that a reader with a little humility might question his or her own centrality to the winnowing process you so aptly describe.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:45 AM
221: Seriously, do you think you have to be able to do better yourself to be able to criticize? That just seems loopy to me.
Try it in the visual arts. I can't draw at all -- I'm literally at the stick figure level. I couldn't create any of the works of Whasisname Kinkade, The Painter Of Light (TM). Is it unseemly of me to think or say that they're crap? Because I don't see why it should be.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:45 AM
OFE: Thanks, Goffart looks very interesting.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:46 AM
Perhaps not the Painter of Light, who is more or less a figure of ridicule. But for you to declare, "Geogia O'Keefe is Teh Suxx," yes, I think you'd have to demonstrate some knowledge and critical skill to convince anyone that statement reflects more on O'Keefe than on yourself.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:47 AM
I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance.
They send you a detailed style guide; you could totally do it. But they only pay some piddly sum, like $200 a book.
Also, if we can't trash-talk the canon on a blog, where can we trash-talk the canon? I hate Milton!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:50 AM
You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
Posted by Sam Johnson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:51 AM
LB, I've got no problem with a person expressing disinterest in an author. I doubt I'm that crazy. But strong criticism requires some back-up, is what I mean, or I get irritated and start insulting people.
I'm starting to make a big deal about a small point, another sign that I should get on with my exile.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:52 AM
Text, it's a pretty democratic process. After a point people stop reading and talking about X. And basically, the decision is not done in a serious thoughtful way. At a later date, some are revived because of the efforts of influential and persuasive individuals.
I remember a number of authors still talked about a lot when I was young, who I never hear about any more at all. Most of them will probably never be revived.
I think that to the degree that a novel can be thought of as generic, it will be forgotten when the genre becomes passe. Exceptions would be extremely masterful, perfect examples of a genre, and probably those which have something a little different or extra.
From the American XIXc non-specialists read Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Poe.... These weren't very typical of the many fiction-writers of that time.
Stephen Crane? JF Cooper? Ambrose Bierce? Washington Irving?..... I don't know any more.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:55 AM
Ooh, I forgot my substantive criticism of Updike:
For Updike to have one female character, in the first Rabbit book, think of Rabbit's cock as "like an angel's sword" is a bit much. For him to do it again in the second one is totally ridiculous.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:55 AM
you don't need the ability to make a table in order to abuse a bad one, but you need to know what a bad table is. Otherwise you are only revealing your ignorance.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:56 AM
Maybe I meant "snark."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:56 AM
I don't think you have to be better than the Someone in order to criticize Someone's work, but I agree with text that in many cases, stated dislike of a celebrated artist is more about finding more rarified air than any particular reason. That performance at the Met? Good enough for the plebes, but the true connoisseur scoffs. This fine piece of literature? Oh, I've read dozens just like it and honestly, darling, it just bores me to tears.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:57 AM
Thesis: All sex scenes suck.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:58 AM
I always prefer honest reactions, freely felt and offered. And as Emerson points out, a lot of this stuff won't be in any canon anyway. Much of the reputation of these writers was always marketing, and I'm glad people are willing to judge for themselves.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:58 AM
I think that a pretty good case against Updike has been made. I could probably take care of Mailer and with a little research. Bellow is a tougher nut to crack, but I find the guy incredibly annoying and have no intention of being fair to him. He'll have to survive without any help from me.
I think that literature is an discretionary, optional, involvement, and whimsical rejection is the reader's prerogative. Making it a serious professional responsibility in the universities has been a disaster. The Crooked Timber / Valve people drive me nuts with their ponderousness.
It's like the PC debates about whom you should be attracted to.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:03 AM
Thesis: all sex sucks. We should just go shoe shopping instead.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:03 AM
I actually quite love hemingway. gaddis, eh. isb all the way. he really is a talented writer, and he has a kind of compelling paranoid appeal, but I got to a point about 3/4 of the way through jr when I just couldn't take the female characters any more and threw the book against the wall and never finished it. it's funny, I much prefer the more or less total absence of female characters, as in a war story, or if not total absence then functional absence, as in a war story where they briefly visit a brothel or flirt with some girls. the world of men, their anxieties and bullshit--even a very misogynist writer can depict that with feeling and interest. but if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character, like the tragedy and the satyr play got all mixed up, or it's like a baroque painting into which a few obscene pencil sketches have been inserted. here you have the (male) actual characters, differentiated from one another, with believable interior lives...and there you have dolls of pure exterior, shiny swelling surfaces, empty eyes, and something stipulated to be interior when they are clearly nothing but badly made automata tottering around the place, falling in love with the deserving or undeserving, handed out like party favors at the end. the author offers up his total inability to imagine what it is like to be a woman on a big silver platter hopefully labelled "mysterious femininity" and feels sure we'll fall for it. fucking pisses me off.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:04 AM
You're baiting me, FL, aren't you? Nice try.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:04 AM
241: Yes, very much so. A lot of my reading has fallen into the 'functional absence of women' category you describe, and as you say, it's much, much less irritating than books that purport to portray women and then don't.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:09 AM
22: I haven't read through this whole thread yet (I'm working on it) but I did want to say that I think that Fischer was planning to write histories of the other European cultures who colonized the U.S., but he never got around to it.
There is one paragraph in Albion's Seed where he says that New York's Dutch heritage meant that it was willing to tolerate much more extravagant displays of wealth and more inequality than would be permissible in certain parts of the country.
I keep hoping that he'll finish the series, but I think that he worte a book about banking in the Renaissance instead.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:09 AM
Has anyone said that so-and-so is a bad writer?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:09 AM
perhaps the concerns about masculinity emerson alludes to above have something to do with it, but I find this kind of thing more annoying in novelists from the 50s and 60s. I feel like it was recent enough in time that they should have been able to know better. also, I know people who were alive then, so it seems more personal to me. like, this could be a real actual old dude, totally incapable of recognizing my basic humanity.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:11 AM
236: You have to have some sort of theory, which can be implicit, to which you can refer your criticism. But you don't have to spend long years at the feet of Terry Eagleton to get that. A bit of intelligence and experience will usually do. I'm sure LB is well qualified. Dr Johnson certainly was.
237: Very true. I knew a guy whose publisher decided his manuscript should be a best seller, and one of the ways in which they defaced it to this end was to bring in a Specialist Ghost Writer of Sex Scenes. Which must come close to being the worst job in the world outside of the mining industry.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:12 AM
The early Swedish contribution (the foundation of Delaware) has been criminally neglected -- and of course many of those so-called "Swedes" were actually Finns.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:12 AM
Clownae, have you read Good As Gold? What's fascinating about that book today are all the thinly-veiled caricatures of people who made up the proto-Neo-Con set, the Podhoretzes, Kristols, Kissinger, etc. In fact, Heller kept a thick file of clippings by or about those people while writing GAG. I remember his notes on them being fairly scathing. How I wish Heller were alive to write about them now.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:14 AM
I'm going to sleep; 'night everybody. keep it real. perv on hermione for me.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:16 AM
Isn't "I don't like things that suck" an adequate critical theory?
Damn. I've been wrong all these years.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:17 AM
if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character
This is true, but it is a high bar, too. Who writes novels in which both male and female characters are presented with equal persuasiveness? I guess I could go for the Henry James (speaking of Mighty White Writers) of Portrait of a Lady or Washington Square. (And even then, maybe he's persuasive because he's not portraying women but ladies, i.e. class is trumps in that particular identity sweepstakes.)
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:19 AM
If the Armageddon Christians can be Likud philo-Semites, why can't people like me be Woody Allen / Philip Roth / Joseph Heller philo-Semites?
Posted by