Acculturated

Given that the end of the Derek Chauvin trial has been in the news, it came up online. And one member of an online forum that I participate in triggered a heated, long-running argument when they submitted (among other things) the following:

[George Floyd's] parents split up when he was 2. He got into college on a football scholarship, but dropped out. He was involved in several rap groups. Between 1997 and 2005 he served 8 jail terms. In 2009 he pled to 5 years for being part of an armed home invasion. After prison he joined a Christian rehab group and church. He was apparently addicted to an opioid called fentanyl. He was arrested for passing counterfeit money. He had 5 children--wikipedia doesn't mention him ever being married.

If many Q conspiracy theorists and Marjorie Taylor Greene seem to fit within a certain American culture, it's because they do. George Floyd appears to fit into another one. It's just that it is very risky to mention that he does. But he does.

So this raises some interesting questions. What is "culture?" How are cultures defined? What defines a person as "fitting within" a specific culture?

Part of the problem with speaking of culture and Black America is twofold: First, for many White Americans, Black people are all the same; they're effectively a monoculture. This has the result of coding "culture" directly with "all Black people." And it's a strange thing to be on the receiving end of. I am considered to have more in common with people I've never met from the other literal other side of the continent than I do with people I've known for decades, on the strength of a perceived similarity in our skin tones. People may talk about "East-coast hip-hop" versus "West-coast hip hop," but the idea that Black people living in Seattle's Rainier Beach might have a completely different culture than, say those living in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood seems unintuitive to many Americans. At the same time, the idea that people from Broadmoor in Seattle and Buckhead in Atlanta would have similar cultural experiences would strike many people as ridiculous.

Secondly, concepts like "Rap culture," "Hip-hop culture," "Gang culture," "Street culture" and other terms that for the reason I noted above tend to be considered synonyms for "Black culture" are defined mainly in terms of how they differ negatively from what one might call "Mainstream White culture." (Something that I'm not sure actually exists, except as a concept used to compare other cultures.) To be sure, this tends to be the nature of comparisons with the mainstream, almost any deviation from the accepted norm is considered a negative in one way or another, with only a few exceptions. But when was the last time you heard someone refer to "R&B culture" to refer to a subset of the Black community? Or used any sort of "culture" designation to refer to something positive in a non-White group of people?

This tends to lend discussions of "culture," as pertains to Black Americans a cast of "all Black people." This creates the sense that "it is very risky to mention that George Floyd appears to fit into a another 'American culture'," because if there is no perceived difference between "another 'American culture'" and "the Black population of the United States" in the Venn diagram, the former is very easily taken as simply a code for the latter. And once culture is seen as merely a coded means of racist speech, the big guns come out.

Now, to a degree, this is also due to the fact that, generally speaking, culture is a subset of race; common discourse in the United States does not typically recognize any cultures, outside of perhaps some professional cultures, that cross racial definitions. Even though the definition of "gang" is not itself racially coded, a list of "Famous People That Openly Display The Gang Culture" from this Annapolis, Maryland, web page is exclusively of Black and mixed-race Black people. Likewise, while I'm pretty sure that there are Black people who live in New England, for instance, "New England culture" is generally considered the exclusive province of White New Englanders. This subordination of culture to assigned racial identity exacerbates the problem.

The person who wrote this noted that "it is very risky to mention that he," meaning George Floyd, fits into a specific culture, because lacking the words, or the willingness to define the culture they were referring to with any sort of precision, they simply came across as racist. Hence the argument that promptly started, which, in the end, was born of someone feeling a need to comment on something that they couldn't (or didn't bother to) be specific about. There should be nothing "very risky" about simply acknowledging the fact that the United States has a number of different cultures within its borders. But until the average person on the street to speak about the cultures that include non-White Americans with the same level of nuance and detail that they can bring to White American cultures that they aren't personally participants in, they're going to continue to sound as if they're clumsily blowing into a dog whistle.