I think I speak for white animals everywhere when I ask if we've all read "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapter in Moby-Dick.
Whiteness theory is actually a whole field these days. I don't know much about it, so I shan't say much.
I appreciate what you're trying to do, LB, but I think the fear is that whiteness will still retain its power, but with the added power of appearing self-critical, just like today's "sensitive man in touch with his feminine side" is often just a misogynist who likes complaining and getting his feelings hurt. Never underestimate the pleasure that dominant people take in complaining!
Yeah, I'm not hoping for much here. Actually, what I was really hoping was that there was a conventional wisdom that I just didn't happen to know about which would give me something to shoot at.
Not much more to say on the race thing than's been said already. Ethnicity to me seems to imply pride, desire to pass on traditions and customs, and that green bean casserole just isn't something worth elevating. Plus, I like that in the U.S. people borrow traditions that they like: food, music, dancing, religion, clothing, and I think that's weakened with an us/them dynamic.
On the name thing, the article is atrocious, but I think it's been verified elsewhere (some study or other) that employers respond badly to made-up names (including everything from Braelyn to Tamiqa) and female names on resumes. I'm not sure an 'ethnic' name was problematic, just made-up ones. Nothing really normative comes of that, though.
And I can see that maybe this might work: I can't imagine being able to erase ethnicity at all from people's minds, but I can see it being possible to sort of erase whiteness -- it's what the discomfort I talked about in the earlier post leads people to want to do.[...]I'm curious about this, though -- doesn't it still leave people like me, white folks with no other particular ethnicity, as the arbiters of normality?
Urm, I kinda got the overall impression white people should just go away for unspecified reasons, by unspecified means.
max
['No need to worry about the arbitration power of non-existent people.']
I'd have to look it up, but there's a study out there showing that employers react badly to black-associated names, whether or not invented: Jamaal and Ebony, both perfectly conventional, albeit strongly ethnically identified, names that have been around for a while, hurt your odds of getting hired.
1:Perhaps this simply is not a white person's call, however much it may be our problem. Where are Tia's "Ten Points", and can they be applied? There a lot of errors that we can fall into, so maybe just listening uncomfortably is the best we can do.
This proposed "whiteness as absence of ethnicity" continues to rub me the wrong way. It basically means putting 'whiteness' (which I think we're all clear doesn't refer primarily to skin color) in the center of the universe in a way that probably looks sensible if you're coming from that perspective.
Refusing to give 'whiteness' a name sounds like an effective way to keep it from being displaced from its pedestal -- a way to keep it dominant in society even it ceases to be dominant among the people.
I think you're overrating the ability to which white people control "white" once it is established as an inclusive norm. I don't think it's going to be very long before "Miguel" is a white name. After all, it has, over time, opened up to include the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and the rest.
LB, "whiteness" is equivocal and is in one sense like other ethnicities (this is the bologna on white bread sense) and in other sense means "the establishment," which is only contingently and historically white. White people set the standard for normal in virtue of their whiteness in the second sense, not in virtue of their whiteness as such. "Normative" whiteness is much broader than ethnic whiteness and includes things from African-American to Hispanic to Scandinavian.
The association of normative whiteness with ethnic whiteness is (and has been) loosening. At some point, we hope, the association will disappear, and "American" will no longer mean "white." But that hasn't happened yet, and the establishment is, in fact, still mostly white. In this context, emphasizing ethnic whiteness has the effect of re-associating ethnic whiteness with normative whiteness.
What about naming one's daughter any of these? If there was ever an enclave of white-on-whiteness, it's Utah.
I'm back to my basic contention that "white" is a racial designation, not an ethnic one. Do you think that there is a single black ethnicity? [Ask my friend Linda what she thinks of names likes "Tamesha".] Or a Latino or Asian one? [Listen to my former housekeeper, a Guatemalan, on the subject of odd Mexican customs or my son's friend Wei-lin's grandmother on the barbaric nature of the Japanese.]
I think some of the things you perceive as symbols of "white ethnicity" are formed from an urban - and very New York - perspective. I would bet heavily that the majority of towns in the US don't have a Chinese restaurant. There are still places where Taco Bell is an exotic foreign restaurant and contra dancing down at the Grange on Saturday nights is pretty kick-ass.
15 was me, and I also don't accept what 17 says without any evidence. Of course no individual white person is the gatekeeper for whiteness, but from there, does assimilation happen as 'white' people expand their opinions of what's 'white' or as 'other' people start changing their behavior to act more 'white?'
I think it's mostly the latter. The way these these complex kinda-racial-kinda-class-identities are communicated is through language and accent. As Italian/Irish immigrant descendents began to talk more like 'white Americans' in diction and accent, they became accepted as members of the tribe.
LB- who gets to define "normal". Certainly there are many "white" people who like chinese food, and some who don't. Is watching the NFL or Major League baseball "white", or only NASCAR. As for names, Caitlin O'Brian, OK; Maeve Kowolski- not so much. There are ethnic names within whiteness, and and when you start to include southern European cultures, or Armenians, all bets are off.
I have never eaten or made green bean casserole. I don't eat bologna whether on white bread or not. I have never decorated holiday cookies, nor has anyone in my family. But I'm white. I'm very dubious that there's such a thing as white ethnicity. I agree with ogged that white is (or has been used as) a synonym for belonging to the establishment, particularly since the decline in influence of the northeastern WASP, but don't think there's a white culture.
There are a number of American subcultures whose members have been white (e.g. the northeastern WASP). And to some extent the media (mostly magazines and television) have constructed a mashup of these cultures and portrayed that as white American culture (in the normative sense) in the hope that each of their readers/viewers would recognise some aspect of the construction and thereby identify with the whole.
Where does that leave LB, or me? We have to accept not having an ethnicity. No tribal rites. No ritual foods. We have our neighborhoods (I, too, lived in Inwood in the '70s; it's a nice place). We have our cities. We have our country. These are surely enough "imagined communities." How many do we need?
Growing up in southern RI in the 1970's, we had to drive to either Westerly (about a half hour away) or Providence (about 40 minutes) to reach the nearest Chinese restaurants (Westerly had one, Providence a few more, I think, but not many.) And as above, they were strictly so-called Cantonese restaurants--aside from those that engaged in the even more dubious "Chinese-Polynesian" hybrid (fun, yes, especially once one could legally drink, but not exactly authentic or good.)
On a tangent, one of the few potential benefits of the current situation to which I look forward are the good Middle Eastern restaurants that should start to spring up as Iraqis who worked with us flee their country and come here (if we let them in, that is.) The Lebanese immigrants have dominanted the field too long. Then all we have to do is go to war with Iran, and we'll be cooking for sure.
jim, there are things that are ethnically white in the sense that only white people do/have them, but not in the sense that they're universal to all white people (and we reckon most ethnicities this way anyway).
does assimilation happen as 'white' people expand their opinions of what's 'white' or as 'other' people start changing their behavior to act more 'white?'
And? Great, an open standard. If there is going to be a standard--and, per yoyo, there will be one--it ought to be open. Wanting more than that is silly. Moreover, as more people of different ethnicities get pulled into the mainstream, the prior culture asserts itself and expands the mainstream culture. I seem to recall being mildly shocked when, sometime in the late 90s, someone white and old on a Sunday morning talkshow used the word "dissed" unironically. I think that happens with all of the culture.
When my dad was a kid his family was once on vacation in Colorado and they had dinner at an Italian restaurant. They ordered spaghetti but they waiter accidentally brought them pizza instead. It was the first time any of them had ever seen it, and they decided to try it rather than correct the mistake. They didn't like it.
@31: Hockey is northeastern WASP, not generally white.
@34: What I'd say is that there are things which are characteristic of some American subculture whose members are white (like hockey!). That doesn't promote them into being characteristic of whiteness. Your formulation begs the question.
It depends on where you are in Canada. Toronto has lots of immigrants from all over, and BC has a lot of Japanese businessmen/tourists. The middle is pretty pale, though.
I think that we're fooling ourselves. Whiteness will be the default for a long time, even after it becomes a plurality rather than a majority. It's terribly confused with middle-classness, which is evern more dominant. Anyone who isn't either middle class or white is in a bad way, white non-middle class are in sort of a bad way, middle-class non-white are pretty well off but have specific problems, and the neither-nors are fucked.
The class problem is worse, and also harder to solve.
45: Yes. A small subgroup of white people who learned to back sticks when at school. Almost certainly only white people. (which is why it's a refutation of 34)
I think of field hockey the way I think of (field) lacrosse: as a sport that is so limited to a certain segment of Northeastern white people that people outside that demographic barely even know it exists. Which is I guess jim's point.
I'd be willing to bet that more than just white people roast meat or eat meatloaf. What's with all the meatloaf hatin', anyway? Don't any of you people know how to make a good meatloaf, or how to change it up? I like to do one with ground beef and pork, good stale Italian bread from the bakery in bits--not crumbs--lots of fresh basil, garlic, and chopped sundried tomatoes. It's like a meatball in slices--I like to serve it with a little tomato sauce--and tasty, too.
Whiteness as an ethnicity doesn't satisfy in part because it doesn't really account for aspects of whiteness that are more part of a code than anything anyone identifies with or finds inside them--i.e., the ability of someone who looks like me, almost no matter how shabbily dressed or appearing, to hail a cab in New York. Another part, already discussed, is the distance that many people, again including me, feel from the sort of "whitebread" American culture LB talks about. If we eat meatloaf one Sunday, the next it might be ragoût de pattes de cochon, just like Grandmeme used to make.
It's a big topic, obviously, and I've mostly avoided commenting due to the difficulty of saying anything meaningful when dealing in such broad terms. I guess the bottom line is that LB is just a rootless cosmopolitan.
I think of lacrosse (and rugby) as great sports for relatively-rough guys (and gals) who can't stand the way American football has developed. I only first saw rugby played recently, and it looks like tremendous fun.
There are a number of American subcultures whose members have been white (e.g. the northeastern WASP). And to some extent the media (mostly magazines and television) have constructed a mashup of these cultures and portrayed that as white American culture (in the normative sense) in the hope that each of their readers/viewers would recognise some aspect of the construction and thereby identify with the whole.
I think this has a lot of truth to it, in the sense that "ethnically white" encompasses many actually-identifiable ethnic groups who have white skin. Contra ogged in 34, the issue isn't that "I'm white, but I don't do X." It's that virtually no single white family does all of the things ascribed to "ethnically white." Because aspects of WASP, redneck, north Midwest ("where the Finns are a minority") have been blended with hunky, Irish, and even Italian to make a sort of Frankenstein monster of an imagined ethnic group.
I couldn't slog through the last thread, so maybe this was covered, but I think that part of the confusion/difficulty is that an awful lot of white Americans are mongrels in a way that few other racial groups are. I know that not all Hispanics are alike, nor all African Americans or Asians. But it's been 100 years since the last major influx of white immigrants to the US, and the vast majority of whites blend ethnicities/nationalities that, 75-150 years ago, would have been fighting in the streets, 5-Points style. And in all that blending, you lose so much ritual - no more fish at Christmas (Italian), earnest wedding dancing (Hunky), or even emotional distance (Yankee) - that there's not much left. Lots of whites still do have strong ethnic ties, but there's also a big soup who don't, and I don't think it's just a signed/unsigned issue. While the roots may lie in America's racist origins (non-whites were not exactly welcome to intermarry with whites or each other at any time before, maybe, now), the current situation that LB's trying to explicate isn't really about that at all.
I was surprised when I dated a girl from a seriously Irish family - everyone was 2nd or 3rd generation, but there was no question of ethnicity. Whereas I, something like 50% Irish, never felt anything for Aulde Eire (or whatever). In some ways I identify culturally Jewish, growing up in NY and Miami, but I don't fool myself that I fit in.
So as far as I'm concerned, LB's question stands: I won't claim simply to be "American" - it's the ultimate white presumption - but it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not. So what the hell am I?
Drunken/Becks-style:(Aside; does Becks-style refer generally to drunken posting or specifically to *that* style of drunken posting?):
I see all liberal conversations of this type as fraught with the fear that we are merely replacing one unfair status hierarchy with another. Specifically, the problem is not so much that we will replace one form of dominant whiteness with another as that we will replace dominant whiteness with some other unjust classification. This may be another form of unjust whiteness, but it may also be some other unjust class identification; poverty is the most immediate and common example. I'm not sure--open to disputation on this point--that the two are substantively different.
54: it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not.
Why? We all have multiple identities. Why do we all have to have the same set? When I lived in New York, I had an identity as a New Yorker. People who lived in rural isolation didn't have a counterpart identity. So some people have ethnic identities and others don't. Deal.
re:60
I'm not sure it is location that is the factor here. I think density is the determinate and "westness" for the most part acts as a proxy for density.
So as far as I'm concerned, LB's question stands: I won't claim simply to be "American" - it's the ultimate white presumption - but it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not. So what the hell am I?
Why's that? I'd bet that most of the blacks in this country (apart from a fairly small group of recent African and Carribean immigrants, who are often shunned by the American black community) are more American than most of the whites, given the massive influxes of white immigrants during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Claiming to be "American" is the only thing that makes sense for most people who are otherwise "French, Irish, English, Swedish, I think there was some Italian and Romanian in there too..." Or who simply have all American relatives, except for one or two immigrants back a few generations.
42:I ain't telling. There are small details I leave out, after 15 years on the Internets. Sometimes there are even little fibs. There is a lot of data out there about me now, little nuggets here & there. I don't have a general worry about random stalkers, but a worry about pissing someone off personally.
I wouldn't know what to call myself besides 'American', not meaning white, exactly, but more than any cultural attachment or tradition I follow doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to anything small and authentic from somewhere else on the globe.
Sort of related, at least to the wideness of the term 'American.' When I'm visiting the loverboy's relatives, they often ask something like 'So in the States/Do Americans think we live in igloos/it's always snow-covered/aren't unions strong down there?/does it ever get cold/what do people eat/isn't your beef weird because it's cornfed? and my usual answer is usually something like: 'First things first, America is a really big place and we don't agree on much of anything.'
I use American to mean from America, and that could mean anything about what you eat or act like or look like. My only takeaway from the movie Spellbound was amazement that all those kids could live such different lives and still consider themselves from the same country.
I mostly consider myself Californian though. I decided a few years ago that the only people I truly understand are educated people from LA or SF. Anyone else is liable to surprise me with some cultural something.
20 is why, I think, "white" is a problem. LB used "Anglo" in the post at one point, which I also use instead of "white" where appropriate. But I firmly deny that the white folks saying that they lack an ethnnicity are right. WASP is an ethnicity, middle American is an ethnicity.
I also firmly deny that green bean casserole is something I, white though I mostly am, would *ever* put in my mouth (again). Y-U-C-K.
This makes sense to me. I really can't consider myself any sort of ethnicity (British Isles mutt, mostly), but I identify as North Carolinian much more than American.
First, if anyone's still reading this thread, I expanded a bit on the arbiters of normality point. Basically, white Americans never made the choice to make non-Western foods more acceptable than non-English names, collectively or individually; it just happens that food is one of the easiest things to appropriate or cross-contaminate across cultures, and naming is one of the hardest.
Another point is that the definition of what mainstream culture is (what Americans call white now) is not fixed. In the US, it used to be just Anglo-Saxons, then Anglo-Saxons and Germans, then also Irish, then all non-Jewish Europeans, and now all Europeans. In due time, it will probably expand to include Hispanics, especially American-born ones.
I once read about an anecdote from the days Texas was part of Mexico. When American troops arrived in a certain town, one women greeted them, "Thank God you're here - I've been here for months and I've only met one white man, a negro from New Orleans."
Ah, "if anyone still reads this thread" was misplaced. I blame your use of Central Standard Time, which lags 2 hours behind my Eastern Daylight-Saving Time.
It's just that America is such a huge place, and there's so much of it that I have never seen, that it's hard to feel much visceral attachment to it. It's mainly a political entity to me, and the particularly "American" features we all share boil down mostly to television, restaurant chains, and retailing.
NC, on the other hand, I know the names of nearly all the trees, most of the birds, can put the 30 largest cities or so on a map and draw all the interstates. I can tell you where most of the beaches are from north to south, and all the barrier islands, and where the biggest mountains are, and so on.
I envy that, actually. I've lived all over, and as a consequence, don't know any single area all that well. There are cities I know well. But I couldn't draw you a very detailed map of any state. And likely, it would look somewhat misshapen.
There's also weird stuff out there about the relative popularity of names among different socioeconomic classes, and how this varies over time. Granted, some of it was in Freakonomics, which is a fascinating read but may be a bit lacking in sound scientific backing.
Different from food, I think, which mainly seems to depend on where the local underclass of immigrants came from, as they are the ones who run the restaurants.
If there was ever an enclave of white-on-whiteness, it's a red-haired family of four on the wintery Canadian prairies - like mine. And we're neither Methodist nor Mormon. Continually having to account for how white we seem steers us right back into the path of the ship-scuttling narcissism that mainstream society (our culture) keeps bathing us in.
I'm not shooting for some white-washed whale, I don't think.
I'd like to say something intelligent and meaningful on this thread but I continue to have no damn idea what the hell you're on about.
Claiming to be "American" is the only thing that makes sense for most people who are otherwise "French, Irish, English, Swedish, I think there was some Italian and Romanian in there too..." Or who simply have all American relatives, except for one or two immigrants back a few generations.
Speaking as a Norwegian-ScotsIrish('Danl Boone kilt a baer')-Irish (Catholic)-Cherokee-Czech(Or is that actually Sorb, like I suspect?)-Chikasaw-French (Dijon, even)-New Amsterdam Dutch-Mayflower WASP-Jewish-Mohawk- Comanche-Mexican (courtesy)-assumed-English/black/German Texan [I think I got it in the right order], I think I agree. I don't think that's what the vague They floating around this thread is trying to get at in Their Vague Way. Since American [inclusive of but not exclusively Republican/Midwestern] is innately Bad.
What's with all the meatloaf hatin', anyway?
Some people make very bland pate meatloaf. Apparently, if your mama can't cook, that's a sign that Americans don't have a culture. I think.
I think some of the things you perceive as symbols of "white ethnicity" are formed from an urban - and very New York - perspective.
Well, I can agree with that. Evidently furrners are exotic and colorful and wonderful and fart golddust and are related to unicorns, and their innate Goodness shines through via the refractory elements of their skin.
I would bet heavily that the majority of towns in the US don't have a Chinese restaurant.
If you put a lower limit on the population (say, a thousand, since Bowie, Texas doesn't even have street lights), I would bet you were wrong. But then I live in/around a city that has more restaurants per capita than NYC, so I'd be biased.
There are still places where Taco Bell is an exotic foreign restaurant and contra dancing down at the Grange on Saturday nights is pretty kick-ass.
Sure! In China!
max
['Do the Chinese in Beijing complain about the lack of Black-Eyed Pea restaurants in Xinxiang?']
I've got nothing against meatloaf. I like meatloaf. I was brought up on it. I even like bland meatloaf. While I like spicy food of various sorts, there's nothing wrong with bland food so long as it's well prepared.
I once read about an anecdote from the days Texas was part of Mexico. When American troops arrived in a certain town, one women greeted them, "Thank God you're here - I've been here for months and I've only met one white man, a negro from New Orleans."
I've had conversations like that in Samoa. The Samoan for 'white people' is 'palagi' -- it means just about what haole means in Hawaii. It's not just 'foreigner': it excludes Chinese and islanders from non-Polynesian islands. And if you ask a Samoan what it means in English, they'll say 'white'. On the other hand, in usage, it does include African Americans, or at least the black UN doctor I knew there was a palagi just like the rest of us.
Concerning the names white people in the US give their kids, there's a big exception. I remember being surprised to discover that white people in Utah regularly give their kids names that register as "black" to other white Americans (though they may not be names actually favored by black Americans). A much wider range of variation and innovation in the naming of white kids seems to be accepted there--even among the relatively affluent; I don't think it's entirely a class status thing.
I think the solution for someone trying to "root" herself, particularly someone as self-aware and introspective as LB, is to explore regional influences, and also Americana. She doesn't have that Shamrock Shoppe quality. It should be remembered that between real ethnicity and honest whitebreadedness, there is a lot of fake, shallow pseudo-ethnicity. By real ethnicity I mean people whose difference from the mainstream is either obvious — race, language, all-inclusive religion — or deeply-rooted and homogeneous, so that you can never remember when differences from the mainstream, traceable to choices your group and family made in the past, were not part of your understanding of your place in the world.
Much modern American ethnicity has an ersatz, ready-made quality, the sort of feeling for which bumper stickers were made. I have an allergic reaction to that: I detest highland games and kilt-wearing, for instance, and have to be careful not to hurt people's feelings when they try to draw me into it.
On the other hand, our habits, attitudes and language have a history, and it's one worth exploring. I think the Sterns' ongoing project of exploring American comfort food is a good example of the roots of what we take for granted; Alton Brown's recent motorcycle journey is another example.
There is nothing wrong, in other words, with exploring American culture as a project in rootedness, and such a quest should be able to give some of the depth and particularity that are the best parts of ethnicity, in that they can give meaning and significance to everyday things.
A lot of country names overlap with black names. I think that ciuntry names are more old-fashioned because people tend to use family names. In my family we have an Oscar and a Leola, and in the neighborhood there are Otis and Loxy and lots more, including constructed names like Ladean.
Regarding LB's original dilemma, describing herself as from Queens would somewhat solve her identity dilemma, and it would actually be inclusive of non-white people from Queens, while not being a completely washed out universalistic identity.
The Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan wrote a piece about how once high-status names from the Puritans had become "bumpkinified" by their occuring mostly in the country. His example was Elmer, once a respectable name derived from Aylmer, a 16th century divine and martyr. A person from our class would really be making a statement by going to one of those, but you never know. Actually, LB's choices are pretty radically old-time American, within limits, and I like that.
118: Or LB could just describe herself simply as "Queen".
112: Evidently furrners are exotic and colorful and wonderful and fart golddust and are related to unicorns, and their innate Goodness shines through via the refractory elements of their skin.
Huh? I guess that explains why the girl at the Dairy Queen in Wyoming leapt back when my friend Linda and I stopped there on our way cross country; seeing a chocolate-dipped person just overcame her with delight. [Tho' she's got to work on that expression; looked more like stark terror to me.]
Hell, the last town I lived in - as opposed to city - didn't even have a McDonald's, much less a Taco Bell. The inhabitants pretty much thought "foreigner" described anyone from New York City. Or Stamford. Had I not been the descendant of an Olde Family Buried Hereabouts, I would have been regarded as an interloper.
The city I live in now is overrun with sushi restaurants and Paris Hilton. I could do without both.
Would Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence be useful here? The idea he promotes is that we all tend to have multiple identities and - collectively - there is a lot of overlapping:
I can be, at the same time, an Asian, a British citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-brahmin...This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong.
I think I speak for white animals everywhere when I ask if we've all read "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapter in Moby-Dick.
Whiteness theory is actually a whole field these days. I don't know much about it, so I shan't say much.
I appreciate what you're trying to do, LB, but I think the fear is that whiteness will still retain its power, but with the added power of appearing self-critical, just like today's "sensitive man in touch with his feminine side" is often just a misogynist who likes complaining and getting his feelings hurt. Never underestimate the pleasure that dominant people take in complaining!
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:06 PM
Yeah, I'm not hoping for much here. Actually, what I was really hoping was that there was a conventional wisdom that I just didn't happen to know about which would give me something to shoot at.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:07 PM
Not much more to say on the race thing than's been said already. Ethnicity to me seems to imply pride, desire to pass on traditions and customs, and that green bean casserole just isn't something worth elevating. Plus, I like that in the U.S. people borrow traditions that they like: food, music, dancing, religion, clothing, and I think that's weakened with an us/them dynamic.
On the name thing, the article is atrocious, but I think it's been verified elsewhere (some study or other) that employers respond badly to made-up names (including everything from Braelyn to Tamiqa) and female names on resumes. I'm not sure an 'ethnic' name was problematic, just made-up ones. Nothing really normative comes of that, though.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:11 PM
There is a commenter who hasn't been around much lately who has strong feelings about whiteness theory.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:13 PM
And I can see that maybe this might work: I can't imagine being able to erase ethnicity at all from people's minds, but I can see it being possible to sort of erase whiteness -- it's what the discomfort I talked about in the earlier post leads people to want to do.[...]I'm curious about this, though -- doesn't it still leave people like me, white folks with no other particular ethnicity, as the arbiters of normality?
Urm, I kinda got the overall impression white people should just go away for unspecified reasons, by unspecified means.
max
['No need to worry about the arbitration power of non-existent people.']
Posted by max | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:13 PM
I'd have to look it up, but there's a study out there showing that employers react badly to black-associated names, whether or not invented: Jamaal and Ebony, both perfectly conventional, albeit strongly ethnically identified, names that have been around for a while, hurt your odds of getting hired.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:13 PM
Never underestimate the pleasure that dominant people take in complaining!
Hey, I saw Born Rich the other day. This may be me, dominant as UMC white male, complaining.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:14 PM
4?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:14 PM
The thread I'm thinking of seems to have vanished into the hoohole.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:16 PM
1:Perhaps this simply is not a white person's call, however much it may be our problem. Where are Tia's "Ten Points", and can they be applied? There a lot of errors that we can fall into, so maybe just listening uncomfortably is the best we can do.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:16 PM
there's a study out there showing that employers react badly to black-associated names
The study.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:17 PM
8: I would assume.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:19 PM
This is what I was thinking of.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:22 PM
This may be what Cala was thinking of. It's about school rather than employment.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:26 PM
This proposed "whiteness as absence of ethnicity" continues to rub me the wrong way. It basically means putting 'whiteness' (which I think we're all clear doesn't refer primarily to skin color) in the center of the universe in a way that probably looks sensible if you're coming from that perspective.
Refusing to give 'whiteness' a name sounds like an effective way to keep it from being displaced from its pedestal -- a way to keep it dominant in society even it ceases to be dominant among the people.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:30 PM
Though 14 is presented as a rebuttal to the study in 11.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:32 PM
I think you're overrating the ability to which white people control "white" once it is established as an inclusive norm. I don't think it's going to be very long before "Miguel" is a white name. After all, it has, over time, opened up to include the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and the rest.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:33 PM
17: Maybe. I think that degree is really hard to estimate from the 'inside'.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:41 PM
It wasn't that long ago that you wouldn't have been "inside," Irish.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:43 PM
LB, "whiteness" is equivocal and is in one sense like other ethnicities (this is the bologna on white bread sense) and in other sense means "the establishment," which is only contingently and historically white. White people set the standard for normal in virtue of their whiteness in the second sense, not in virtue of their whiteness as such. "Normative" whiteness is much broader than ethnic whiteness and includes things from African-American to Hispanic to Scandinavian.
The association of normative whiteness with ethnic whiteness is (and has been) loosening. At some point, we hope, the association will disappear, and "American" will no longer mean "white." But that hasn't happened yet, and the establishment is, in fact, still mostly white. In this context, emphasizing ethnic whiteness has the effect of re-associating ethnic whiteness with normative whiteness.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:43 PM
What about naming one's daughter any of these? If there was ever an enclave of white-on-whiteness, it's Utah.
I'm back to my basic contention that "white" is a racial designation, not an ethnic one. Do you think that there is a single black ethnicity? [Ask my friend Linda what she thinks of names likes "Tamesha".] Or a Latino or Asian one? [Listen to my former housekeeper, a Guatemalan, on the subject of odd Mexican customs or my son's friend Wei-lin's grandmother on the barbaric nature of the Japanese.]
I think some of the things you perceive as symbols of "white ethnicity" are formed from an urban - and very New York - perspective. I would bet heavily that the majority of towns in the US don't have a Chinese restaurant. There are still places where Taco Bell is an exotic foreign restaurant and contra dancing down at the Grange on Saturday nights is pretty kick-ass.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:44 PM
Hrm. Maybe. I was thinking of it as a way to pop the two concepts away from each other.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:46 PM
I don't think my mom had Chinese food until she was in her forties.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:48 PM
"the majority of towns in the US don't have a Chinese restaurant"
Upper Midwest, 50s, city of 35, 000, we had two. Both the bland Cantonese stuff, of course. They weren't chains back then.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:53 PM
21:I think my flyover hackles are up.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:55 PM
15 was me, and I also don't accept what 17 says without any evidence. Of course no individual white person is the gatekeeper for whiteness, but from there, does assimilation happen as 'white' people expand their opinions of what's 'white' or as 'other' people start changing their behavior to act more 'white?'
I think it's mostly the latter. The way these these complex kinda-racial-kinda-class-identities are communicated is through language and accent. As Italian/Irish immigrant descendents began to talk more like 'white Americans' in diction and accent, they became accepted as members of the tribe.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:57 PM
20: I think that's an excellent reason to stop calling it 'whiteness.' What should we call it instead?
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 6:59 PM
LB- who gets to define "normal". Certainly there are many "white" people who like chinese food, and some who don't. Is watching the NFL or Major League baseball "white", or only NASCAR. As for names, Caitlin O'Brian, OK; Maeve Kowolski- not so much. There are ethnic names within whiteness, and and when you start to include southern European cultures, or Armenians, all bets are off.
Posted by Tassled Loafered Leech | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:00 PM
If there was ever an enclave of white-on-whiteness, it's Utah.
Word.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:05 PM
I have never eaten or made green bean casserole. I don't eat bologna whether on white bread or not. I have never decorated holiday cookies, nor has anyone in my family. But I'm white. I'm very dubious that there's such a thing as white ethnicity. I agree with ogged that white is (or has been used as) a synonym for belonging to the establishment, particularly since the decline in influence of the northeastern WASP, but don't think there's a white culture.
There are a number of American subcultures whose members have been white (e.g. the northeastern WASP). And to some extent the media (mostly magazines and television) have constructed a mashup of these cultures and portrayed that as white American culture (in the normative sense) in the hope that each of their readers/viewers would recognise some aspect of the construction and thereby identify with the whole.
Where does that leave LB, or me? We have to accept not having an ethnicity. No tribal rites. No ritual foods. We have our neighborhoods (I, too, lived in Inwood in the '70s; it's a nice place). We have our cities. We have our country. These are surely enough "imagined communities." How many do we need?
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:05 PM
Where does that leave LB, or me? We have to accept not having an ethnicity. No tribal rites. No ritual foods.
But we do have ritual sports like swimming and hockey.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:08 PM
Growing up in southern RI in the 1970's, we had to drive to either Westerly (about a half hour away) or Providence (about 40 minutes) to reach the nearest Chinese restaurants (Westerly had one, Providence a few more, I think, but not many.) And as above, they were strictly so-called Cantonese restaurants--aside from those that engaged in the even more dubious "Chinese-Polynesian" hybrid (fun, yes, especially once one could legally drink, but not exactly authentic or good.)
On a tangent, one of the few potential benefits of the current situation to which I look forward are the good Middle Eastern restaurants that should start to spring up as Iraqis who worked with us flee their country and come here (if we let them in, that is.) The Lebanese immigrants have dominanted the field too long. Then all we have to do is go to war with Iran, and we'll be cooking for sure.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:10 PM
i don't think if you have 75% of people doing/being one thing, you can avoid it being seen as normal.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:11 PM
jim, there are things that are ethnically white in the sense that only white people do/have them, but not in the sense that they're universal to all white people (and we reckon most ethnicities this way anyway).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:14 PM
does assimilation happen as 'white' people expand their opinions of what's 'white' or as 'other' people start changing their behavior to act more 'white?'
And? Great, an open standard. If there is going to be a standard--and, per yoyo, there will be one--it ought to be open. Wanting more than that is silly. Moreover, as more people of different ethnicities get pulled into the mainstream, the prior culture asserts itself and expands the mainstream culture. I seem to recall being mildly shocked when, sometime in the late 90s, someone white and old on a Sunday morning talkshow used the word "dissed" unironically. I think that happens with all of the culture.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:19 PM
When my dad was a kid his family was once on vacation in Colorado and they had dinner at an Italian restaurant. They ordered spaghetti but they waiter accidentally brought them pizza instead. It was the first time any of them had ever seen it, and they decided to try it rather than correct the mistake. They didn't like it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:20 PM
@31: Hockey is northeastern WASP, not generally white.
@34: What I'd say is that there are things which are characteristic of some American subculture whose members are white (like hockey!). That doesn't promote them into being characteristic of whiteness. Your formulation begs the question.
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:24 PM
Good lord, I don't think either of my parents have ever had Indian food.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:26 PM
A Matter of Taste is a good book on names.
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:27 PM
Hockey is Canadian. And is any country whiter than Canada?
(A: Yes.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:28 PM
27: I think that's an excellent reason to stop calling it 'whiteness.' What should we call it instead?
"Honkitude."
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:30 PM
McManus: St Cloud?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:30 PM
@40: Actually, I assumed the reference was to field hockey, rather than ice hockey.
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:31 PM
It depends on where you are in Canada. Toronto has lots of immigrants from all over, and BC has a lot of Japanese businessmen/tourists. The middle is pretty pale, though.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:31 PM
43: Does anyone actually use "hockey" simpliciter to mean field hockey?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:32 PM
I think that we're fooling ourselves. Whiteness will be the default for a long time, even after it becomes a plurality rather than a majority. It's terribly confused with middle-classness, which is evern more dominant. Anyone who isn't either middle class or white is in a bad way, white non-middle class are in sort of a bad way, middle-class non-white are pretty well off but have specific problems, and the neither-nors are fucked.
The class problem is worse, and also harder to solve.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:36 PM
45: Yes. A small subgroup of white people who learned to back sticks when at school. Almost certainly only white people. (which is why it's a refutation of 34)
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:37 PM
45: "hockey" in England automatically means field hockey.
I spent a good chunk of my afternoon walking around a mid-sized Canadian city; not the whitest place ever been, not by a long shot.
While looking for a copy of Newsweek, I noticed that Canada has A LOT of hockey magazines.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:38 PM
45: "hockey" in England automatically means field hockey.
I spent a good chunk of my afternoon walking around a mid-sized Canadian city; not the whitest place I've ever been, not by a long shot.
While looking for a copy of Newsweek, I noticed that Canada has A LOT of hockey magazines.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:38 PM
I think of field hockey the way I think of (field) lacrosse: as a sport that is so limited to a certain segment of Northeastern white people that people outside that demographic barely even know it exists. Which is I guess jim's point.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:42 PM
I'd be willing to bet that more than just white people roast meat or eat meatloaf. What's with all the meatloaf hatin', anyway? Don't any of you people know how to make a good meatloaf, or how to change it up? I like to do one with ground beef and pork, good stale Italian bread from the bakery in bits--not crumbs--lots of fresh basil, garlic, and chopped sundried tomatoes. It's like a meatball in slices--I like to serve it with a little tomato sauce--and tasty, too.
Whiteness as an ethnicity doesn't satisfy in part because it doesn't really account for aspects of whiteness that are more part of a code than anything anyone identifies with or finds inside them--i.e., the ability of someone who looks like me, almost no matter how shabbily dressed or appearing, to hail a cab in New York. Another part, already discussed, is the distance that many people, again including me, feel from the sort of "whitebread" American culture LB talks about. If we eat meatloaf one Sunday, the next it might be ragoût de pattes de cochon, just like Grandmeme used to make.
It's a big topic, obviously, and I've mostly avoided commenting due to the difficulty of saying anything meaningful when dealing in such broad terms. I guess the bottom line is that LB is just a rootless cosmopolitan.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:47 PM
Which is funny since lacrosse is a Native American game. And is more polular outside the Mortheast than you might think, teofilo.
Posted by Tassled Loafered Leech | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:48 PM
I think of lacrosse (and rugby) as great sports for relatively-rough guys (and gals) who can't stand the way American football has developed. I only first saw rugby played recently, and it looks like tremendous fun.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:49 PM
There are a number of American subcultures whose members have been white (e.g. the northeastern WASP). And to some extent the media (mostly magazines and television) have constructed a mashup of these cultures and portrayed that as white American culture (in the normative sense) in the hope that each of their readers/viewers would recognise some aspect of the construction and thereby identify with the whole.
I think this has a lot of truth to it, in the sense that "ethnically white" encompasses many actually-identifiable ethnic groups who have white skin. Contra ogged in 34, the issue isn't that "I'm white, but I don't do X." It's that virtually no single white family does all of the things ascribed to "ethnically white." Because aspects of WASP, redneck, north Midwest ("where the Finns are a minority") have been blended with hunky, Irish, and even Italian to make a sort of Frankenstein monster of an imagined ethnic group.
I couldn't slog through the last thread, so maybe this was covered, but I think that part of the confusion/difficulty is that an awful lot of white Americans are mongrels in a way that few other racial groups are. I know that not all Hispanics are alike, nor all African Americans or Asians. But it's been 100 years since the last major influx of white immigrants to the US, and the vast majority of whites blend ethnicities/nationalities that, 75-150 years ago, would have been fighting in the streets, 5-Points style. And in all that blending, you lose so much ritual - no more fish at Christmas (Italian), earnest wedding dancing (Hunky), or even emotional distance (Yankee) - that there's not much left. Lots of whites still do have strong ethnic ties, but there's also a big soup who don't, and I don't think it's just a signed/unsigned issue. While the roots may lie in America's racist origins (non-whites were not exactly welcome to intermarry with whites or each other at any time before, maybe, now), the current situation that LB's trying to explicate isn't really about that at all.
I was surprised when I dated a girl from a seriously Irish family - everyone was 2nd or 3rd generation, but there was no question of ethnicity. Whereas I, something like 50% Irish, never felt anything for Aulde Eire (or whatever). In some ways I identify culturally Jewish, growing up in NY and Miami, but I don't fool myself that I fit in.
So as far as I'm concerned, LB's question stands: I won't claim simply to be "American" - it's the ultimate white presumption - but it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not. So what the hell am I?
Posted by JRoth | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:54 PM
53: It's fun until someone loses a testicle.
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 7:57 PM
Drunken/Becks-style:(Aside; does Becks-style refer generally to drunken posting or specifically to *that* style of drunken posting?):
I see all liberal conversations of this type as fraught with the fear that we are merely replacing one unfair status hierarchy with another. Specifically, the problem is not so much that we will replace one form of dominant whiteness with another as that we will replace dominant whiteness with some other unjust classification. This may be another form of unjust whiteness, but it may also be some other unjust class identification; poverty is the most immediate and common example. I'm not sure--open to disputation on this point--that the two are substantively different.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:00 PM
54: it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not.
Why? We all have multiple identities. Why do we all have to have the same set? When I lived in New York, I had an identity as a New Yorker. People who lived in rural isolation didn't have a counterpart identity. So some people have ethnic identities and others don't. Deal.
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:07 PM
I'm willing to concede that lacrosse is popular in the Midwest as well.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:08 PM
People who lived in rural isolation didn't have a counterpart identity.
This is not generally true.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:09 PM
I think that at a certain poitn neighborhood substitutes for ethnicity for white people, and a lot of non-whites. The farther west, the more true.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:14 PM
re:60
I'm not sure it is location that is the factor here. I think density is the determinate and "westness" for the most part acts as a proxy for density.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:24 PM
So as far as I'm concerned, LB's question stands: I won't claim simply to be "American" - it's the ultimate white presumption - but it's stupid to pretend that every American of color, and half the whites, are ethnic, but I'm not. So what the hell am I?
Why's that? I'd bet that most of the blacks in this country (apart from a fairly small group of recent African and Carribean immigrants, who are often shunned by the American black community) are more American than most of the whites, given the massive influxes of white immigrants during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Claiming to be "American" is the only thing that makes sense for most people who are otherwise "French, Irish, English, Swedish, I think there was some Italian and Romanian in there too..." Or who simply have all American relatives, except for one or two immigrants back a few generations.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:29 PM
42:I ain't telling. There are small details I leave out, after 15 years on the Internets. Sometimes there are even little fibs. There is a lot of data out there about me now, little nuggets here & there. I don't have a general worry about random stalkers, but a worry about pissing someone off personally.
And it isn't me I am protecting.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:34 PM
I wouldn't know what to call myself besides 'American', not meaning white, exactly, but more than any cultural attachment or tradition I follow doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to anything small and authentic from somewhere else on the globe.
Sort of related, at least to the wideness of the term 'American.' When I'm visiting the loverboy's relatives, they often ask something like 'So in the States/Do Americans think we live in igloos/it's always snow-covered/aren't unions strong down there?/does it ever get cold/what do people eat/isn't your beef weird because it's cornfed? and my usual answer is usually something like: 'First things first, America is a really big place and we don't agree on much of anything.'
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:41 PM
I use American to mean from America, and that could mean anything about what you eat or act like or look like. My only takeaway from the movie Spellbound was amazement that all those kids could live such different lives and still consider themselves from the same country.
I mostly consider myself Californian though. I decided a few years ago that the only people I truly understand are educated people from LA or SF. Anyone else is liable to surprise me with some cultural something.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:50 PM
the loverboy's
This is getting out of hand, Calamonster.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 8:55 PM
Snookum-pookums?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:02 PM
I don't feel like you're taking me seriously.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:03 PM
I'm sorry, blondiebear.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:07 PM
oh, you two.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:09 PM
68: You sound a little cranky. Maybe it's beddy-boes time, boo.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:10 PM
This isn't the kind of tag-teaming I've been after.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:14 PM
Beggars can't be choosers, o precious jewel of the TiVo.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:16 PM
I suppose you're right, peachbottom.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:19 PM
I'm not sure I have a response to that, sugar quill of the internets.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:25 PM
COME BACK LIVVY ALL IS FORGIVEN
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:28 PM
Um, Livvy was mad at us, not contrariwise. Though self-forgiveness is the latest thing, I here.
Livvy, we've gotten past that.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:44 PM
Thanks for stepping on Weiner's perfect coda, beardy-bear.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:48 PM
The thread can't be over. It can't, can it? Froky?
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 9:54 PM
It is, Standpipe Bridgeplate.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:03 PM
20 is why, I think, "white" is a problem. LB used "Anglo" in the post at one point, which I also use instead of "white" where appropriate. But I firmly deny that the white folks saying that they lack an ethnnicity are right. WASP is an ethnicity, middle American is an ethnicity.
I also firmly deny that green bean casserole is something I, white though I mostly am, would *ever* put in my mouth (again). Y-U-C-K.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:10 PM
Hahahaha!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:19 PM
Heh heh. Kinda afeared of white power aren't we? Oops, I am writing this on white background. They are everywhere.
Posted by Trey | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:20 PM
I also generally use "Anglo" in place of "white." It's pretty common in the Southwest.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:27 PM
Yeah, b/c ppl in this part of the world who use "white" are usually freakish bigots. IME.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:29 PM
That to some degree, but also because the alternative is often "Hispanic" (or "Indian") rather than "black."
(Glad you enjoyed the Flying Star.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:31 PM
I use anglo because it sounds cooler. Though in many cases, it's inapt. Isn't that right, pillowpants?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:31 PM
sure, but why'd you have to bring me into this?
Posted by pillowpants | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:32 PM
I mostly consider myself Californian though
This makes sense to me. I really can't consider myself any sort of ethnicity (British Isles mutt, mostly), but I identify as North Carolinian much more than American.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:32 PM
I thought we learned you that lesson in the War of Southern Petulance.
Or, err, they learned me that lesson too. Me and mine'un.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:34 PM
Vastly more atrocious green bean casserole recipes than good ones, but the latter do exist. It's all about spices.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:35 PM
Ok, now the thread is over. It should have ended at 80, but *some people* just don't know how to keep things nice.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:40 PM
I refuse to believe it. Green beans should be steamed and eaten while still crisp. By definition "casserole" doesn't mean doing that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:43 PM
I refuse to end threads.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:44 PM
"I mostly consider myself Californian though."
"From California, eh? Does that make you a Yankee?"
"If you're from California, you're not a Yankee. You aren't really anything."
I mean, there exist dogs where the answer to the question "what breed is it?" is "dog." No reason people can't be the same way.
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:47 PM
First, if anyone's still reading this thread, I expanded a bit on the arbiters of normality point. Basically, white Americans never made the choice to make non-Western foods more acceptable than non-English names, collectively or individually; it just happens that food is one of the easiest things to appropriate or cross-contaminate across cultures, and naming is one of the hardest.
Another point is that the definition of what mainstream culture is (what Americans call white now) is not fixed. In the US, it used to be just Anglo-Saxons, then Anglo-Saxons and Germans, then also Irish, then all non-Jewish Europeans, and now all Europeans. In due time, it will probably expand to include Hispanics, especially American-born ones.
I once read about an anecdote from the days Texas was part of Mexico. When American troops arrived in a certain town, one women greeted them, "Thank God you're here - I've been here for months and I've only met one white man, a negro from New Orleans."
Posted by Alon Levy | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:50 PM
Ah, "if anyone still reads this thread" was misplaced. I blame your use of Central Standard Time, which lags 2 hours behind my Eastern Daylight-Saving Time.
Posted by Alon Levy | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:51 PM
It's just that America is such a huge place, and there's so much of it that I have never seen, that it's hard to feel much visceral attachment to it. It's mainly a political entity to me, and the particularly "American" features we all share boil down mostly to television, restaurant chains, and retailing.
NC, on the other hand, I know the names of nearly all the trees, most of the birds, can put the 30 largest cities or so on a map and draw all the interstates. I can tell you where most of the beaches are from north to south, and all the barrier islands, and where the biggest mountains are, and so on.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:54 PM
Apo, you need to get out more.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:59 PM
I envy that, actually. I've lived all over, and as a consequence, don't know any single area all that well. There are cities I know well. But I couldn't draw you a very detailed map of any state. And likely, it would look somewhat misshapen.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 10:59 PM
There's also weird stuff out there about the relative popularity of names among different socioeconomic classes, and how this varies over time. Granted, some of it was in Freakonomics, which is a fascinating read but may be a bit lacking in sound scientific backing.
Different from food, I think, which mainly seems to depend on where the local underclass of immigrants came from, as they are the ones who run the restaurants.
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 11:03 PM
97: This blog is actually on Mountain Daylight Time. No one seems to know why.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 11:09 PM
Apo, you need to get out more.
I have mono.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 11:11 PM
Right, well, then I won't invite you to come visit me and get to know the great american west.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-26-06 11:13 PM
If there was ever an enclave of white-on-whiteness, it's a red-haired family of four on the wintery Canadian prairies - like mine. And we're neither Methodist nor Mormon. Continually having to account for how white we seem steers us right back into the path of the ship-scuttling narcissism that mainstream society (our culture) keeps bathing us in.
I'm not shooting for some white-washed whale, I don't think.
Posted by ahab | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:04 AM
MST is my time zone. Must be my fault.
Posted by ahab | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:08 AM
Nah, we'll just blame it on Gary.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:11 AM
Is Gary white?
Posted by ahab | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:29 AM
108, see number 12.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:32 AM
Right - I find the virtual reference librarians here really knowledgeable and helpful, even when I'm an ass.
Posted by ahab | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:50 AM
re: 53
Emerson, for rugby, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddHPJgD7cY&mode=related&search=
Pity about the quality of the video. It really can be a beautiful game.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:54 AM
I'd like to say something intelligent and meaningful on this thread but I continue to have no damn idea what the hell you're on about.
Claiming to be "American" is the only thing that makes sense for most people who are otherwise "French, Irish, English, Swedish, I think there was some Italian and Romanian in there too..." Or who simply have all American relatives, except for one or two immigrants back a few generations.
Speaking as a Norwegian-ScotsIrish('Danl Boone kilt a baer')-Irish (Catholic)-Cherokee-Czech(Or is that actually Sorb, like I suspect?)-Chikasaw-French (Dijon, even)-New Amsterdam Dutch-Mayflower WASP-Jewish-Mohawk- Comanche-Mexican (courtesy)-assumed-English/black/German Texan [I think I got it in the right order], I think I agree. I don't think that's what the vague They floating around this thread is trying to get at in Their Vague Way. Since American [inclusive of but not exclusively Republican/Midwestern] is innately Bad.
What's with all the meatloaf hatin', anyway?
Some people make very bland
patemeatloaf. Apparently, if your mama can't cook, that's a sign that Americans don't have a culture. I think.I think some of the things you perceive as symbols of "white ethnicity" are formed from an urban - and very New York - perspective.
Well, I can agree with that. Evidently furrners are exotic and colorful and wonderful and fart golddust and are related to unicorns, and their innate Goodness shines through via the refractory elements of their skin.
I would bet heavily that the majority of towns in the US don't have a Chinese restaurant.
If you put a lower limit on the population (say, a thousand, since Bowie, Texas doesn't even have street lights), I would bet you were wrong. But then I live in/around a city that has more restaurants per capita than NYC, so I'd be biased.
There are still places where Taco Bell is an exotic foreign restaurant and contra dancing down at the Grange on Saturday nights is pretty kick-ass.
Sure! In China!
max
['Do the Chinese in Beijing complain about the lack of Black-Eyed Pea restaurants in Xinxiang?']
Posted by max | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 5:20 AM
I've got nothing against meatloaf. I like meatloaf. I was brought up on it. I even like bland meatloaf. While I like spicy food of various sorts, there's nothing wrong with bland food so long as it's well prepared.
I once read about an anecdote from the days Texas was part of Mexico. When American troops arrived in a certain town, one women greeted them, "Thank God you're here - I've been here for months and I've only met one white man, a negro from New Orleans."
I've had conversations like that in Samoa. The Samoan for 'white people' is 'palagi' -- it means just about what haole means in Hawaii. It's not just 'foreigner': it excludes Chinese and islanders from non-Polynesian islands. And if you ask a Samoan what it means in English, they'll say 'white'. On the other hand, in usage, it does include African Americans, or at least the black UN doctor I knew there was a palagi just like the rest of us.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 7:39 AM
Concerning the names white people in the US give their kids, there's a big exception. I remember being surprised to discover that white people in Utah regularly give their kids names that register as "black" to other white Americans (though they may not be names actually favored by black Americans). A much wider range of variation and innovation in the naming of white kids seems to be accepted there--even among the relatively affluent; I don't think it's entirely a class status thing.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 7:43 AM
Damn, I see DominEditrix got to that first.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 7:48 AM
I think the solution for someone trying to "root" herself, particularly someone as self-aware and introspective as LB, is to explore regional influences, and also Americana. She doesn't have that Shamrock Shoppe quality. It should be remembered that between real ethnicity and honest whitebreadedness, there is a lot of fake, shallow pseudo-ethnicity. By real ethnicity I mean people whose difference from the mainstream is either obvious — race, language, all-inclusive religion — or deeply-rooted and homogeneous, so that you can never remember when differences from the mainstream, traceable to choices your group and family made in the past, were not part of your understanding of your place in the world.
Much modern American ethnicity has an ersatz, ready-made quality, the sort of feeling for which bumper stickers were made. I have an allergic reaction to that: I detest highland games and kilt-wearing, for instance, and have to be careful not to hurt people's feelings when they try to draw me into it.
On the other hand, our habits, attitudes and language have a history, and it's one worth exploring. I think the Sterns' ongoing project of exploring American comfort food is a good example of the roots of what we take for granted; Alton Brown's recent motorcycle journey is another example.
There is nothing wrong, in other words, with exploring American culture as a project in rootedness, and such a quest should be able to give some of the depth and particularity that are the best parts of ethnicity, in that they can give meaning and significance to everyday things.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 8:10 AM
A lot of country names overlap with black names. I think that ciuntry names are more old-fashioned because people tend to use family names. In my family we have an Oscar and a Leola, and in the neighborhood there are Otis and Loxy and lots more, including constructed names like Ladean.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:04 AM
Regarding LB's original dilemma, describing herself as from Queens would somewhat solve her identity dilemma, and it would actually be inclusive of non-white people from Queens, while not being a completely washed out universalistic identity.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:07 AM
The Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan wrote a piece about how once high-status names from the Puritans had become "bumpkinified" by their occuring mostly in the country. His example was Elmer, once a respectable name derived from Aylmer, a 16th century divine and martyr. A person from our class would really be making a statement by going to one of those, but you never know. Actually, LB's choices are pretty radically old-time American, within limits, and I like that.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:13 AM
118: Or LB could just describe herself simply as "Queen".
112: Evidently furrners are exotic and colorful and wonderful and fart golddust and are related to unicorns, and their innate Goodness shines through via the refractory elements of their skin.
Huh? I guess that explains why the girl at the Dairy Queen in Wyoming leapt back when my friend Linda and I stopped there on our way cross country; seeing a chocolate-dipped person just overcame her with delight. [Tho' she's got to work on that expression; looked more like stark terror to me.]
Hell, the last town I lived in - as opposed to city - didn't even have a McDonald's, much less a Taco Bell. The inhabitants pretty much thought "foreigner" described anyone from New York City. Or Stamford. Had I not been the descendant of an Olde Family Buried Hereabouts, I would have been regarded as an interloper.
The city I live in now is overrun with sushi restaurants and Paris Hilton. I could do without both.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 3:27 PM
Just thought someone should mention the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars
Posted by JP | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 6:29 PM
Would Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence be useful here? The idea he promotes is that we all tend to have multiple identities and - collectively - there is a lot of overlapping:
I can be, at the same time, an Asian, a British citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-brahmin...This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong.
(via)
Posted by Charlie Whitaker | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 4:55 AM