I think one of the most damaging things about white supremacy is not only did it destroy individual local cultures under the fictional umbrella of "white culture," it damaged our understanding of what culture even is.

For a whole lot of white people, culture is pure aesthetics.

You can see it in the alt-right's obsession with what men "should" look like. They aren't reviving actual practices or a sense of genuine communal identity and solidarity, they're trying to match an image.

I think when right wingers say "if you don't like cultural appropriation, stop using computer and phones and modern technology" they give themselves away - they see culture as a set of tools with no value beyond their immediate utility for getting something you want.

Right wing men adopt (modern interpretations of) Nordic aesthetics because they think it makes them attractive to women and raises their perceived strength with each other, but they don't understand the reason the historical Nordic peoples they're emulating looked this way.

My mother is big into genealogy so I know physically where my ancestors lived, but other than knowing a possibly apocryphal family legend about a duplicitous Anglo-Saxon lord who defected to William the Conqueror just before 1066, I have no real ties to them.

I don't have any complaints about the place I live, but the only connection I have to it is the feeling of having spent 32 years living here. I know a fair bit about its history but that understanding doesn't grant me any particular bond with the other people who live here.

Capitalism makes you live where you can afford to live, and the apocalyptic rise of renting vs ownership means that people aren't permanently in one place. This means that a lot of people live in places they have no tie to with people they have little in common with.

lmao one of the quote tweets to the OP of this thread is a white supremacist with a bad meme literally proving my point

It's been crystalising for me ever since I learnt about cultural burns in California that western society views culture in a purely utilitarian sense, and it's evident in what aspects of foreign cultures get appropriated: the ones that have an immediate obvious use or "coolness."

Not saying it never happens, but when's the last time you saw a white person with a lip plate like the Mursi people of Ethiopia?

Now compare that to how often you see white people getting Polynesian tribal tattoos or buying dreamcatchers

Lip plates don't look as "cool"

I think one of the best things about Overly Sarcastic Productions is that they do a lot of historical analysis of myths and delve deep into the context of why historical religions, legends and myths turned out the way they did

The Greek deity Dionysus is an excellent example

His mythology went through a tremendous amount of change over thousands of years because at various times he was a figure representing the freedom from arbitrary societal restrictions, and the status quo didn't like him

At various times the cult of Dionysus was suppressed by various Greek city states, but over time some of them assimilated his traditions into a form less dangerous and more acceptable to the ruling class.

Another good example: ALMOST EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT NORSE MYTHOLOGY IS UNTRUSTWORTHY

Most of the stories Norse people told about their gods were oral tradition and were only codified by Christians in Iceland centuries later, who viewed everything through a Christian lens.

The orderly, cyclical religious beliefs of the Egyptians probably arose because the Nile floods very regularly and very predictably, while the gods of Mesopotamia mostly being vicious assholes probably came from the fact that the Tigris and the Euphrates flood very unpredictably.

. @Tonya_Song said to me (and I'm quoting with her permission) that culture is formed by those who come before us. The environment in which a people find themselves shapes their outlook and their practices.

The white people who invaded California didn't understand why the natives repeatedly set fires, and so banned them from doing it. They didn't have the cultural context of living there for generations and understanding WHY you might want to intentionally set fires.

White supremacists act like the cultural burning techniques of the Californian natives were "unscientific" because they didn't understand about microclimates and soil pH balance and aquifers, but like:

1. how would you know they didn't
2. neither did the settlers

European peasants probably didn't understand shit about soil pH or the nitrogen cycle either, but they figured out three-field crop rotation just fine and you never get on their case about that, I'm sure it was just the "brilliant natural ingenuity of white people" or something

This.

Also remember that the tumbleweed is not a native plant, it's an invasive species that was brought from Europe. https://twitter.com/DarkSoulsSauron/status/1302682126463176706

Capitalism, with enclosure of public land, industrialisation, urbanisation and commodification of every aspect of art, music, nature, food, stories, clothing, shelter, mythology and religion has not only left us without culture, it's left us incapable of understanding what it is.

Incidentally, this isn't an appeal for tradition or a condemnation of modernity.

We have the technology and the means to cultivate and maintain community like never before. We could easily feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and safeguard both the land and the people on it.

The fact that world-spanning, highly creative fandoms and communities exist and are basically filling the void that capitalism and white supremacy gouged out of our lives is testament to the fact that we don't need to "go back," we need to find a new way forward.

White supremacy makes the assertion that "our" culture is threatened by the presence of people of different skin tones because they literally can't conceive of culture as anything more than a surface level understanding of what you look like and the way you pronounce words.

The thing about "white culture" is that it has exactly one defining quality and that's skin tone.

There's literally nothing stopping a black person from being English in any way that could be realistically measured - accent, job, clothing, diet, religion, music preferences, etc.

When someone makes the argument that a black person can't "really" be English, it is always and inherently a racial argument, no matter how much they try to protest otherwise.

There is a cultural conception of how an Englishman looks, and if you deviate, you can't be English.

Ultimately white supremacists are both way too mystical and way too trivial about culture.

To them, culture is basically this inherent trait that's fundamentally tied to your genetics, but also has no actual meaning other the way you look.

White supremacists act as if there's some fundamental link uniting a man from Ireland and a woman from Romania just because they look somewhat similar

(Also note that both Irish and Romanian people have, at various times in history, arbitrarily not been considered "white")

And the thing here is that both Ireland and Romania do have cultures that were significantly affected by histories of colonial occupation by imperialistic powers.

BUT THAT'S NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT THEIR *SKIN TONE*

You can't even argue that Europe shared a singular religion, because the practice of Catholicism had significant local differences depending on region, the schism with the Orthodox Church significantly predates the Medieval era and Martin Luther happened early in the Renaissance.

(Incidentally, hello to all of the #CrusaderKingsIII players who only just learnt that there was a thing called Insular Christianity. It's fascinating, isn't it?)

While I was in the shower I just realised that the common white supremacist argument "if the natives were so clever, why couldn't they deal with the settlers" could be rephrased as "if white people were so clever, why couldn't they deal with the Black Death?"

"Why couldn't the natives deal with a massive new problem for which they had no previous context or experience" is probably not the argument white supremacists want to make, as it is accidentally and embarrassingly honest in its depiction of white settlers as a natural disaster.