Fact Check Me: White People Don't Have Culture
White people don't have culture.
Before you fire up the comment section, let me explain.
That's not the same as saying people who are white don't have culture. Of course they do. My point is that "white" isn't a culture. It's a racial label.
I recently came across a video that was almost certainly designed to make me angry.
A woman declared, "White people have no culture."
Another creator stitched the video to prove her wrong.
"Oh yeah? Then what about this?"
Cue the montage.
Professional wrestling.
Monster trucks.
NASCAR.
Kid Rock.
Batman... for reasons known only to the editor.
I laughed.
Not because the original statement was profound. Not because the response disproved it. I laughed because the rebuttal seemed to reinforce the very point it was trying to defeat.
I couldn't resist leaving a comment.
"You just proved her point."
The responses were exactly what you'd expect. About half agreed with me. The other half were happy to explain why I was an idiot.
The funny thing is, I don't think either side was really talking about culture.
I've never been particularly attached to calling myself "white." I know that's the box society puts me in, and I understand why those boxes exist, but I've never confused race with culture.
When someone asks me about my culture, my skin colour isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
I think about my Portuguese family.
The food I grew up eating.
The traditions my grandparents passed down.
The neighbourhood I was raised in.
The values my parents instilled in me.
Those things shaped my culture.
Not the amount of melanin in my skin.
A white man from Tupelo, Mississippi and a white man from Oslo, Norway don't share a culture simply because they share a skin tone. Their histories, traditions, food, humour, languages, and values can be worlds apart.
The world has never been more connected or more mobile.
There are Black Frenchmen.
Asian Dutchmen.
Portuguese Canadians.
People don't inherit culture through melanin. They inherit it through family, community, language, history, and shared experience.
What is culture, anyway?
It's your grandmother's recipes.
It's the lullabies your parents sang when you couldn't sleep.
It's the jokes only your family understands.
It's the stories your grandparents refused to let die.
It's the holidays you celebrate, the words you use without realizing they're unique to where you grew up, and the values quietly passed from one generation to the next.
Culture isn't carried in your DNA.
It's carried in your memories.
And memories become richer the more they're shared.
Which raises another question.
Why do we keep treating culture like it's property?
The older I get, the more I think culture isn't something we're supposed to own.
It's something we're supposed to share.
Recipes are meant to be cooked by strangers.
Music is meant to cross borders.
Stories are meant to be retold.
Ideas are meant to spread.
If culture never left the people who created it, humanity would still be living in isolated villages, reinventing the wheel every few hundred miles.
Maybe the best evidence I have for all of this is my own life.
I'm a Portuguese Canadian who has spent most of my adult life teaching a Japanese martial art in Markham Ontario, often referred to as China Town North, to students whose families come from every corner of the world.
At no point did karate become less Japanese because I taught it.
At no point did my students become less themselves because they learned it.
Culture wasn't diluted.
It was shared.
If anything, that's what made it stronger.
Maybe we've been asking the wrong question all along.
Instead of asking who owns a culture, maybe we should ask what kind of world we'd have if nobody shared theirs.
Fact check me.