Whiteness
One of the things about being American, particularly a white but not WASP American, is that you only know about your “culture” through a weird game of intergenerational telephone. So, when we meet someone from our ancestral land, we are as foreign to them as they are to us
Our desire to be accepted as “normal white Americans” means we lost any relationship to our ancestral ways. And when we try to reconnect with it, it feels at best hollow and at worst like appropriation. We can put on the lederhosen or the kroje, we can pantomime the moves of the dance, we can devour plates of things we can’t really pronounce, but it doesn’t feel real.
It never quite touches the soul
Whiteness itself is a lie. The notion of whiteness is a lie. And it’s a lie that hurts everyone. Obviously it hurts people of color worse. And that harm is so dramatic and disgusting that nothing could ever remove its stain
But whiteness is such a horrible mother that she hurts even her own children
Whiteness
@robinhood This assumes "culture" is tied to a piece of land an arbitrary ancestor and arbitrary number of generations ago inhabited.
For some people, that's true. For many it isn't. I could name half a dozen Northern Europeans counties I could be "from". Their culture isn't mine though, or my family's.
