Writing for the Atlantic, Vassar college professor Hua Hsu has a long and fascinating story about the idea that whiteness in America is under siege. "The End of White America" is a lively romp through pop culture and a look at the shift in American consciousness portended by, for instance, the rise of Hip-Hop and Obama's election. But, edifying ied or otherwise, we couldn't let a few of the story's more bothersome assumptions go unchallenged.The piece quotes Christian Lander; the Los Angeles–based Canadian who writes the super-popular blog, Stuff White People Like. “Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world,” Lander says. “And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’” Lander does not elaborate on how, exactly, white people destroy the world any more than, say, Asians or Africans. It's pretty much offered as a given.
The idea that a whole "demographic" could be inherently criminal is not only stupid, it's just as racist as thinking that all black people are lazy. White people have done good and bad things, just like everyone else on earth. Believing, as Lander seems to, that whites share some sort of collective guilt for crimes in the past is equally dumb. (No, we take that back. It's dumber.) How can anyone be sorry for something their great-great-grandfather did?) Remember that whole Martin Luther King, "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" thing? It applies here, too.
What's sadder is that Sanders isn't expressing anything unusual. The piece also quotes Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University, observing that his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis. “…To be white is to be culturally broke," he says, "The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.'"
That's the true shame of it. Our educational system doesn't give students, rich or poor, white and black, the knowledge that do have a culture -- one that isn't a product of one race or another, but the shared heritage of a nation. So-called "white culture," at least the American-patrician WASPy kind that's described in the story, is the product of a global mix that took millennia to create. It's the ethics of Jerusalem, the aesthetics and politics of Greece and Rome, filtered through a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, and a mass emigration from every nation on earth.
"White culture" is more than slave owners and Indian killers and Episcopalian snobs running the CIA. It's also Locke and Jefferson, Twain, Thoreau, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Johnny Cash. What's casually called "white" are things that all Americans, of any color, should be proud of, not apologize for.
Academia should let white kids know they are because of racism today, but emphasis on collective racial guilt from the past is as dumb as it is destructive. That's evident in Matt Wray's white, affluent college kids; possibly the most blessed generation in all of human history with the self-esteem of Germans after the fall of Berlin.
