ANTH-150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Focusing
15 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of
“Cultureless” Identities – Pamela Perry
What does “white” mean?
- White raciality as cultureless
-Laurie: whiteness is not culturally defined
-Murray: to be cultural means having emotional attachment to tradition and
history
- White students at Valley Groves did not reflect on or define white identity as a culture
and social location to the extent that the white youth at Clavey did
- Perry’s argument is not about whether there is or not a white culture but about the
power whites exercise when claiming
they have no culture.
- Culturelessness can serve, even if unintentionally, as a measure of white racial
superiority. It suggests that one is either “normal” and “simply human”
- Whiteness
and white culture
are frequently conflated, especially when whiteness
is understood as a whole symbolic system and way of life through which whites
make sense of themselves and their social relations
-Frankenberg argues that the women’s discourses suggest that their felt sense of
cultural emptiness stems from a dualistic sense of unbounded white vs.
bounded non-white others
- African American, Asian, or Latino students joined with white friends, and, when
they did, they assumed the styles and demeanors of the crowd they were in, be
it “popular,” “skater,” or merely “normal.” Then, there were the students of
color who clustered in groups of like-kind, racial ethnically.
- IN SUM: at Valley Groves High, white people and white European American
culture saturated school life. White youth had little to no association with people
or cultures that would place whiteness in relief in such a way that students might
reflect on it and consciously define it.
- It’s harder for Americans to define white culture because the culture of America
is just more consumption. In America, we buy stuff, and that’s the basis of our
culture. If you talk to people who want to go to America? They want things. TV is
a very American thing. We don’t have lengthy traditions
- Valley Groves, a predominantly white high school, white identity seemed
cultureless because white cultural practices were taken for granted, naturalized,
and, thus, not reflected on and defined. At Clavey, a multiracial school, white
culture was not taken for granted -- white youth thought about and defined it to
an extent, particularly through their interests and tastes in popular culture.
