It’s Just Too Darn White In Here.

What, nine different cultures came together to create this deliciousness? 

             I’m an American.  I was born in Upstate New York and this is the country I’ve lived in my whole life.  America is a unique place because it may be the only country where each person has a different definition of what the country should be.  It’s an idea first, then a country.  My idea of America is a place where people from all over the world came to make a life for themselves.  In those four hundred years, we have created thousands of subcultures, accents, cuisines, languages, communities, and…hairstyles that are somehow linked to an original country and still remaining uniquely American.  

             Gumbo.  Chow Mein.  Buffalo wing pizza.  Square dancing. The high-top fade.

             I’m also white.  German, French, Irish, Italian, some Polish in there too.  Pretty honky.  But those cultures don’t make me feel at home.  American culture does. By its very nature, it is comprised of mixed race and ethnicity; religion and social class.  I feel so connected to it that when I experience something that’s too white, I have a knee-jerk reaction to reject it. Even though I’m white. 

             Remember the 1980’s?  The friggin’ 1980’s?  Well, I do.  I didn’t like the decade that much.  I especially didn’t like the music that was pumped through the soundtrack of every John Hughes movie.  You know what I mean. Synthesizer-heavy, whiny, empty songs of sorrow from young white people.  That shit always got under my skin.  I hated it. It was something about white people complaining that made me want to puke.  It wasn’t a white band ripping off a black sound as best as they could, it was raw white suburban songs of breakups and feeling sad because the skies were gray.  American pop began from black music from the church and the fields.  It became rock and country, hip hop and soul.  The more you pull it away from those roots and whiten it up, the less I’m interested. 

             I tried to explain it this way:  I like the mix of American influences.  If it was in one big Venn circle, the further you got away it, the less likely I was interested.  Especially the super-white stuff.

             I can’t tell you why Joy Division was whiter than Tom Petty.  But they were.

             Most of the shit in my music collection and on my phone is by white people.  There’s just something they’ve tapped into that interests me that I don’t hear from in those songs from 80’s.  I also am not a fan of the Winter Olympics.  There’s some international stuff that’s fun, but when you get into the skiing and snowboarding shit, it’s obviously the white people’s Olympics.  When white people begin to be beaten by others, they tend to create new sports to dominate.  The new sports are more exclusive to join and require expensive equipment. They can win because they can afford it. There’s something about watching the 16-year-old with the groovy first name land at the bottom of the hill in front of her hedge-fund parents that rubs me the wrong way.  Too white, is all I can think of.

             You won’t hear me bitching about inclusivity in our entertainment, either.  I like it in my sci-fi, fantasy, action, drama, and comedy. It adds to the validity of the project.  It’s odd to see an all-white cast these days, isn’t it?  I’m glad.  Inclusion means new outlooks, opinions and new stories.  I’m white, I probably have a pretty white point of view, but I already know what it is.  There’s room for so many voices out there that may surprise you and make for a better piece of art. This isn’t the result of a sea change in the American cultural landscape. These are stories that have been here for decades. Centuries.  The difference it we’re getting access to them now because of technology and the way we access things. That white America you believe constituted the entirety of our national story was always just one point of view.  It was just bigger and louder.

             Sorry, all you white-supremacist scumbags out there, being white is not the end-all be-all of the human existence.  We’re part of the story but we’re not the whole story.  I’m a white guy; almost my entire family is white, but it’s also not our singular defining feature, either. We benefit from cultural influences and that very notion is so very American. We are who we are because we get to experience differences. It happens all over the world, but we established a country where that was essentially the prime directive.  Embrace it.

             I also never liked Bing Crosby.  Punk-ass bitch.