Exploring 'White Culture'

In one of my classes we were recently assigned to present a short speech on our culture to the class. To this several of the white students complained, “What am I supposed to talk about? White people don’t have a culture!” Even I had trouble grappling with the task at hand.

And then it came to me.

There are so many different kinds of white people out there that it's hard to fit us all into one universal category. The reality is that white culture consists of a variety of sub-cultures, and it's the lifestyle you lead that defines which sub-culture you belong to. Alas, we are not culture-less after all!

Take my family as an example. We are all as white as you can get, but we definitely belong to a culture and lifestyle that differs greatly from others of our kind. What makes us different? Where we come from and the values we share. In our case this common ground is a love of hunting animals for food and sport.

I come from a family of farmers and ranchers from North Dakota, where killing your own meat is literally a way of life. When you have chickens and deer running around why go to the supermarket when you can chop a head off or go hunting? My uncle who lives in Alaska embodies this ideal perfectly; he shot a moose out of his own backyard a while ago and has been living off the meat for months now.

The fact that conversation at our family get-togethers always seems to revolve around hunting stories should have given me a clue that I had a culture a long time ago. We talk 'gun-talk' like some people talk about football!

I guess what I'm getting to is that you should never allow yourself to think that you are 'culture-less'. Just because yours pales in comparison to more colorful and obvious cultures (complete with costumes, blatantly obvious traditions and relics) doesn't mean that yours doesn't exist!

If you want to get a clear idea of what your TRUE culture is all about, think under the skin. Is there a core value, tradition or lifestyle that you and your whole family share? That alone should give you a strong clue and help you to discover that you do have a culture after all.