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Skaidon's avatar

Ooh this is a tricky subject - extremely interesting though.

1) I highly recommend "The war in the west" and "the strange death of Europe" by Douglas Murray - he talks about many of those same "identity" based issues in those books (albeit from a conservative British perspective)

2) controversial opinion: I suspect "black American" culture was a way to reclaim a distinct "non-white" ethnic identity in the wake of the abolition of slavery, however that was by definition a rejection of a culture rather than being founded upon a set of positive principles. Conservative black Americans such as Thomas Sowell, Glenn Lowery and Larry Elder reject this premise entirely, hence why people such as FD Signifier claim they are "not black".

3) there's a very interesting essay somewhere on substack about "American" being a "post-national" idea rather than fitting neatly into the worldview of "nationalism". (On a side note the Israel-Palestine conflict can be described as being a pre-national / pre-enlightenment conflict i.e. a tribal blood feud)

4) the youtuber Greg Owen has asked on behalf of his adopted (black) daughter "what is "blackness"?" He hasn't yet made a video on the subject but as he seems a very emotionally intelligent man I'm looking forward to his take on the subject. He's also made a video with a Nigerian YouTuber about how poorly Hollywood tends to portray non-American cultures - which leads to:

5) (continuation of 3+4) is America a nation, or is each state a nation with America being a "meta-nation"? If that's so, why do Americans misunderstand other cultures so badly? Also, it makes the existence of the 51st and 52nd states seem a lot more plausible if you look at it that way (regardless of whether you think that should be a thing or not)

That's all I can think of for now, shame we can't edit comments here on Substack, if I think of anything more I'll have to comment some more!

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Henry Heinks's avatar

Overall I like it. A few loose thoughts:

- American identity is largely a collection of subcultures. As a midwesterner, gumbo and barbecue are not in any way part of “my”culture. Those are southern things. I eat walleye and cheese curds. Yet I love me some good American southern cooking, especially when traveling, and am proud that those other cuisines exist inside of my larger American identity.

- America is such a global power that the commonalities across its subcultures are exported across the entire globe. This makes them hard to identify. Blue jeans, Hollywood movies, and pop music aren’t always recognized as “American” because they’re everywhere.

-Americanizations of other cultures is part of the American identity. Panda Express is not Chinese food, it’s American. And while there’s always some guy that’s like “um actually pizza is Italian” if you take any Italian to Chicago they’ll be like “wtf is this how dare you call it pizza it’s clearly a different food”.

-The difficulties in defining culture call back to the nominalism vs realism debate. How do you define an object? Neuroscience and the statistics used in the field can actually help answer this. Objects are clusters of similar experiences. As humans, we use our sensory organs to sample observations (subjective) of the physical properties (objective) of the world around us. We then group similar readings into clusters. A dog is something we interact with in the unique ways dogs do, a cat is a cat in the same way, and they are both part of larger categories like “animal” and “pet”. The identity of the specific object is fundamentally infinitely unique, but its categorization based on proximity to the center of the cluster is self-evident. The existence of the cluster is not “made-up” because it is a deterministic grouping that results from objective properties of the object in question. The cluster itself is real regardless of what you name it. This also allows for outliers to be identified accordingly. Take an albino black bear. The color of a bear’s fur seems to be part of its objective identity as a black bear, yet a black bear can still have white fur due to albinism and still objectively be a black bear due to sharing all other properties that black bears have. Just because you’re a little unique does not mean you don’t still end up in the same larger cluster, and larger clusters can be further subdivided into smaller clusters so that we can identify “albino black bears” as their own unique subgroup.

When applying this to culture, you don’t need to follow an exhaustive checklist of “these things make you American”. Instead you identify a grouping in n-dimensional space where “Americanness” hangs out. To be American is the extent to which you are proximal to the other Americans in the infinite number of cultural measurements you can apply.

Hopefully that last point made any sense at all.

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