White Culture Quotes

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet. ~ Noel Ignatiev

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers ... How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? ~ Robert Jensen

To be "bad" is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits an attention that makes others pull back with some trepidation. This young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance in a hostile culture; it also is an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters. ~ Cornel West

People of color grow up steeped in 'white' culture. The reverse is not true. And, no, listening to hip-hop on the way to work does not count as immersion. ~ John Ridley

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young. ~ Zoe Kravitz

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.
Don't know who I am? I'm an individual! ~ Barack Obama

You wonder why I'm so uptight about entitle white culture? It's not just that I live here half the time and see real poverty. It's not just the snack baskets in first class. It's because entitled white culture encourages those inside it to never look outside their own fucking worlds. We blow everything off because we're so concerned with looking good we can't just feel. ~ A.S. King

This president (Barack Obama) I think has exposed himself over and over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture ... I'm not saying he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist. ~ Glenn Beck

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not. ~ Tom Brady

What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other. ~ John Howard Griffin

My glorification of independence and individualism made me and easy target for the myth of meritocracy, and overshadowed what in my heart I knew to be true: the deep interconnectedness I longed for with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers is core to human survival. Interdependence is our lifeblood. ~ Debby Irving

In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

It taught me that it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider. If a white guy chooses to immerse himself in hip-hop culture and only hang out with black people, black people will say, "Cool, white guy. Do what you need to do." If a black guy chooses to button up his blackness to live among white people and play lots of golf, white people will say, "Fine. I like Brian. He's safe." But try being a black person who immerses himself in white culture while still living in the black community. Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. ~ Trevor Noah

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don't even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I'm not sure that their dichotomies apply to me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure. ~ Bell Hooks

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority. ~ James A. Baldwin

Even though we are a nation that's becoming a minority country, we still have this view where everything is seen through the prism of the dominant culture, which really means white. ~ Roland Martin

I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life. ~ Gavin McInnes

The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable. ~ Ruth Benedict

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. ~ Claudia Rankine

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. ~ Richard Dawkins

Time is drowning,
Hearts are burning,
Heads are rolling,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Creatures talking,
Weak are rising,
White Queen's nearing,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Cards are bleeding,
Crowns are sweating,
Tea is spilling,
Nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock;

Red Queen, here's your warning,
Wonderland's raging,
Alice is coming,
Highness, time is drowning,
And nothing can save you now,
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock… ~ Emory R. Frie

I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn't deserve white, and I was sick of black. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I started out as Snow White, but then I drifted. ~ Mae West

My philosophy has always remained the same, it's about creating calm balanced environments based on Eastern cultures, ie order and creation of harmony. How people feel in a space is as important as the way it looks, one can't be without the other to succeed. ~ Kelly Hoppen

Aspects of culture can also be described as vestigial, where once-adaptive cultural adaptations become maladaptive when environments change. ~ Anonymous

I've seen nerdists make tributes to their obsessions out of Legos that are like works of art. It just goes to show you how pervasive this stuff has become in our culture. It really is an ideology that you can subscribe to now. ~ Chris Hardwick

One of the major contributions of the Protestant faith to the world is the culture of dignity of labour. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull

this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face ~ Natalie Diaz

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people
men and women
to face. ~ Robert Jensen

One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Sharing knowledge is not part of Western culture ~ Fons Trompenaars

We must do what we must to do ~ Ellen G. White

Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture." And ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Don't forget - you're dealing with aberrated people. They're not responsible for their answers. They're victims of culture. That means they have been influenced by their culture. ~ Jacque Fresco

There was an apology from the ax-wielding Hermione, but according to her mother she was detained in the woods dealing with a very large and troublesome Pinus, which caused Vimes's face to go blank until Sybil nudged him and pointed out that the pinus strobus was the official name for the white pine. But ~ Terry Pratchett

Quality is more than a promise, it's genuine performance. ~ Ron Kaufman

For beauty there must be austerity and a total abandonment, and there cannot be abandonment if there is any sense of ambition expressing itself as an achievement. When there is austerity, there is simplicity, and only the mind that is simple can abandon itself, and out of this abandonment comes love. Such a state is beauty. But of that we are totally unaware. Our civilization, our culture, is based on arrogance, on the sense of achievement, and in society we are at each other's throats, violently competing to achieve, to acquire, to dominate, to become somebody. These are obvious psychological facts. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances. ~ Andrew Weil

Instead, so long as Kennedy lived and Khrushchev stayed in power, there was steady movement toward the relaxation of tension - the American University speech, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the establishment of the "hotline" between the White House and the Kremlin. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

I grew up with white friends, Asian friends - Vietnamese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders. I had Hispanic friends, not just Mexican friends, but Guatemalan friends, Honduran friends, and we knew the difference, you know? ~ Ryan Coogler

What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance. ~ Christopher Hitchens

And that damned man in the White House doesn't help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I'm talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It's not my fault or your fault. It's the black man's fault. It's the Muslims' fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man's got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color,
different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It's an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment. ~ Mark M. Bello

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. ~ Alice Munro

The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States which has tried to avoid complete secularization by leaving little zones of individual freedom is in danger of forgetting that these zones were preserved only because religion was in their soul. And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is there liberty. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes. ~ Edmund White

1 + 1 = 2 is simply an induction from experience. It is in no way logically or arithmetically 'necessary'. It is induced knowledge, on a par with 'All swans are white'. ~ Paul Strathern

Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?
Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market. ~ Aravind Adiga

One of my ancestors fought in the War of the Roses", she announced haughtily, without looking round, "and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow in the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That's what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight ~ Terry Pratchett

Who are you?' Mo looked at the White Women. Then he looked at Dustfinger's still face.
Guess.' The bird ruffled up its golden feathers, and Mo saw that the mark on its breast was blood.
You are Death.' Mo felt the word heavy on his tongue. Could any word be heavier? ~ Cornelia Funke

The soul that is yielded to Christ becomes His own fortress, which He holds in a revolted world, and He intends that no authority shall be known in it except His own. A soul thus kept in possession by the heavenly agencies is impregnable to the assaults of Satan. ~ Ellen G. White

The South Koreans treated me well. I could not bear to imagine their reaction if they'd known I'd grown up in the bosom of their archenemy. At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war. I ~ Hyeonseo Lee

It was said that the Old Folk controlled the power of fire, among other things, but that was in the Long and Long Ago. Before that, the fathers of the Old Folk caught a spark with flint and steel and their own desire to live. It was also said that the world was a great wheel, and everything came round to what it once had been, and so Steven Boughmount knelt in the snow with rocks in his hands, trying to catch a flame. He was having little luck. Just over the low hills, beyond this scrub of forest, the village was warm and sleeping behind its wall.
That's where I should be, Steven thought as he scraped the edge of one rock against the other. Not in bed, not yet, but stretched out in my chair with my feet up, a pipe smoking just right in my hand and Heather curled up beside me. The boys are all asleep, but maybe we'll stay up for a while. Maybe we'll move to the bedroom, maybe not. That's where I should be, not up to my ass in snow trying to light a fire.
"C'mon, bastard," he said, and drug the sharp edge of the rock in his right hand against the flat of the one in his left. A white spark flew, and then died before it could reach the stripped branches and dried moss he had laid out on the frozen ground.
Snow crunched somewhere off to the left of him. Steven heard soft, bare footsteps. They were coming, all right. And they were in a hurry, running toward a village protected by two drunks on either side of a leaning gate. That was why Steven sat in the snow. When ~ Michael Kanuckel

What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release. ~ Stephen King

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is? ~ Daniel Quinn

Mass culture is Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. ~ Chris Hedges

The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S. ~ Alex Morritt

Koolaid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes - goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish - very Jewish cake. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them. ~ Lenny Bruce