Anonymous asked:

My favorite thing about that terrible quote about "rural white people have no culture" is it literally says white Americans don't have special wedding dresses when like... we have a style and color of wedding dress that is so culturally mandatory that they all look roughly the same and virtually every women has to wear it when she gets married and it's treated as so sacred that mothers sometimes pass it down to their daughters and you can never ever wear that dress except on your wedding day.

memecucker answered:

yeahh like the fact that the author of that quote is a white man who says he was born in a rural ohio town makes it really transparent that he was speaking from a “fish dont know water” angle

[quinewave]

“We don’t have culture, I know because all the weird shit everyone else does is culture and this normal stuff is just stuff”

[philippesaner]

When a male of the Mandan Indians fasts for three days, shaves his head, and hangs from splints pushed through his skin to prove his manhood to the universe he is not thinking of traditional Mandan culture. He is becoming a man.

Nor is the Mexican Catholic, crawling on her hands and knees to venerate an image of the Blessed Mother, “participating in traditional Mexican culture” by way of “religious activity”. She is crawling on her hands and knees. It’s the touristing graduate of World History II who — grimacing over his tequila like a pansy — scoops the value from her act and labels it a “cultural phenomenon”.

From the anecdotes to the point:

To speak about something is to assume a place outside of it, referring to reality as an objects perceived. But culture is that lens of tradition and value by which we perceive reality, and a man cannot perceive a lens any more than he can his corneas. Thus nobody living their culture refers to it as “culture”, and you’ll seldom hear an Italian say “let’s be real Italians and eat tortellini” except in reflection, jest, or to white people. From curry to bar-mitzvahs, cultural things are things done, not labeled, lived, not spoken of, real, not reflected on.

Marc Barnes