Most white people, especially rural white people (I grew up in a town of 2000 in Ohio) don’t have any concrete culture, they don’t have a unique form of pottery, special wedding dresses, a musical style going back 500 years, special rituals and dances to celebrate things. They are completely reliant on corporate culture to provide them with a sense of identity and purpose, they don’t have Hanbok dresses or special flutes native to their peoples, they have Taco Bell, the Steelers, Applebees, deals on make-up at the dollar store, deal on shirts at TJ Maxx. They have thrown away culture for corporate capitalism, they are empty inside, a vacuity of soul, an emptiness that leads to narcissism and extreme justification in the face of all facts. They don’t want to admit, they are ‘hollow’ inside.
Noah Cicero (via pleaseshutthefudgeup)
I don’t necessarily think this is untrue but I don’t know why the target has to be poor people in rural towns. At the very least it is definitely not “especially rural white people”
(via micawindow)
something really bothers me about this reduction of the notion of ‘culture’ to, like, specific artifacts that supposedly express the essence of some monolithic ethnos. ‘this pottery and these dances give me identity and purpose’ sounds more like the words of people clinging to a dying culture as it’s subsumed into the capitalist world-system than the way that culture works outside of that
like, it’s primarily in the retrospective view that these things take on the sort of meaning that i think is being attributed to them here. when you’re an archaeologist digging through successive layers of dirt, you say ‘each one of the cultures that lived here had its own distinct style of pottery’. but for all you know a person actually alive making one of those pots would have just said ‘this is a pot i made and it looks like all the other pots everyone else makes’. nothing distinct about it
there is a point to be made that white americans are primarily passive consumers of their own ‘culture’ rather than active participants in its reproduction, and that that’s probably a problem, but that would require acknowledging that (1) this is true of people in every capitalist country, even in those dark and mystical corners of the world where people still supposedly ‘have culture’, and (2) what’s represented as ‘real culture’ here, bitingly juxtaposed with a list of consumer goods, is in fact nothing more than a different list of consumer goods. hanbok dresses and special flutes can be mediated by capitalist commodity relations in the exact same way the steelers or dollar-store make-up are
(via quoms)
Yeah this shit is a perfect example of an incredibly orientalist framework being masked as resistance to it. Non-white cultures spring from some primordial a historic “spirit” while white culture is grounded in a material history and power relations. If the person that wrote this were to attempt some sort of consistency they would be saying that no culture exists because all culture articles is embedded in history and societal relations (which make something “not-culture” because….?)
(via memecucker)
has this person ever been to a homecoming game or a county fair? lord.
(via soyeahso)
Corporations are part of our culture, we just don’t like to admit that. It only seems hollow if you cling to reactionary notions of authenticity.
(via brainstatic)
just moving along like everyone else 