"Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. " - Ayn Rand
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/racism.html
I hate, hate, hate the fact that today's atmosphere is such that one has to preface any statement that is even mildly controversial with a, erm, preface statement. However, I did get a flash of inspiration, a bit of revelatory thought, as I got up to take a leak last night at 3 AM, and, well, you kinda have to run with stuff like that, if you're a writer.
But I am not a bloody white supremacist. I don't feel particularly prideful of being white, nor am I ashamed of it. Accomplishments and pride are the product of individuals. Or should be. Collectivism is an ugly, false thing. Should I feel proud to be 7% Portuguese? Or possibly Sicilian/Moorish? Iroquois? Like most Americans, I'm a mixed bag of genetics.
But if you were to pigeonhole me based on appearance, I'm white. If I have to check my race on a form, I'm white.
I suppose that counts against me in this essay. So be it.
It is enormously popular of late to make the declaration, 'White People Have No Culture' in a click-baity headline (rather like my own headline above), and then go on to declare that Black Pride, Asian Pride, etc. are valid because those are actual cultures/races, but being White is not a thing, as such, and therefore being proud of that heritage is mere racism. It's a pretty tortured and convoluted thought process, really.
Such articles usually go on to explain that being Irish, for example, is a thing, a culture, and perhaps, begrudgingly, even something to legitimately be proud of. But that there is no such thing as 'White Culture'.
What bothers me is that this an erroneous attempt at negating reality. A debasement of simple logic. Logic is at its core, math. Trying to deny math I find highly offensive. It's worse that believing the Earth is flat, to me.
If the Irish, French, Polish, etc. have cultures, and they clearly do, and they are considered white, which they clearly are, then they are a subset of the group 'White People'. That group then inherits their properties, and so the group 'White People' does indeed have a culture.
But, you say, their root cultures are not held in common. That is indeed true. It also applies to every other collectivist grouping. The Congolese culture is not the same as South African culture. The culture of the Japanese is not shared with the Koreans.
We CAN find commonalities of each. But if we care to look, we can find similar commonalities between ANY two cultures. Culturally, we are all humans.
And so the entire thing begins to unravel. You can't simultaneously say that there is no such thing as white people, and declare white people as the source of the world's woes. You can't condone pride in one race, while condemning it in another.
That is irrational. Each has a list of positive and negative attributes, which vary in a mostly subjective manner.
While irrationality bothers me immensely, hypocrisy strikes me as worse. One may not be well-versed in clear thinking. But people using the veil of being anti-racist in order to be racist should be reviled.