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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
03-30-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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A very long detour: Responding to the mysteries and pathologies of “white culture”…
So Bitch | Lab had an interesting post this morning… one of those smack-yr-forehead kind of revelations. She’s thinking about psychology and she encounters this little snippet about white culture:White people don’t sleep with their children. They do…
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huh. Well first of all, you ARE whack, Bitch!
2nd of all, I don’t think it’d be a class thing ’cause I was definitely working class growing up and I almost never saw my dad and there was very little touchy-feely stuff with my mom. Once I was older she was working too and I was pretty much on my own. so I suspect it’d be more a white america thing than a class thing. but whew knows?
3rd, I suppose it’s a fair enough claim about white people in that like any generalization there are folks who don’t fit the mold and the idea is that it -hopefully accurately- describes a general cultural pattern. I mean, I think it’s fine to make generalizations about a group of people’s culture. It only becomes problematic when you make generalizations about something INHERENT in that group of people, right? Culture isn’t inherent. Anthropologists study it all the time. Although I guess it’d be more accurate to at least say “white American” culture as opposed to white European, or Irish culture or recent white immigrant
culture (like the Polish-American communities in Chicago)…
And 4th, is it a reasonable explanation for (a white tendency to the) expropriation of other cultures? I suppose it could be part of it, eh? I mean, there’s definitely a good argument for the soul-less-ness of “white American culture” and I think that’s why you see a bunch of new agey white people “discovering” a Cherokee grandmother (it’s ALWAYS Cherokee and it’s ALWAYS the grandmother -someone oughta do a study of the genderisms of that cliche) and adopting a psuedo-”Native American” spirituality, going to sweats and all that. I mean I can definitely understand recognizing the emptiness of our cultural heritage and wanting to have something different. I just wish they would decide to help create a better white american culture rather than expropriate someone elses. … then, again, how does one person create a culture? I dunno.
“(it’s ALWAYS Cherokee and it’s ALWAYS the grandmother -someone oughta do a study of the genderisms of that cliche)”
Holy crap. I’m glad I’m not the only that noticed this. I couldn’t believe it when I met somebody that claimed to be part Lakota.
But as to the post, I think it might be one of those areas that is a great illustration of how complicated the confluence/intersection of race and class assumptions is. For every generalization, there is an anecdote that says otherwise. I was thinking as I read this that my parents are something of an interesting case, where my mother’s background is working-middle-class, third generation Irish-American and my father’s is working poor and first generation Italian-American. As I explained it to the SO, Mom’s family was poor because of the Depression; Dad’s family would’ve been anyway. My mother does the buddy-pats and the air kisses, and Dad gives out big bear hugs and always makes a point of saying how good it is to see you. Not just with family. So there’s something to be said for the idea of inherent characteristics, but also as to the degree to which an individual, through cosntant bombardment, looks to the dominant culture as something to strive for, and then even subconsciously takes on those characteristics as a way of sort of getting there without getting there. Superficial gestures, etc. that mimic behavior in the next strata on the social ladder. I don’t know. This is interesting.
But The Boy does get lots of hugs and kisses.
” guess it’s hard to think back and remember the level of closeness other families had. But damn, I find it hard to believe that most white people are walking around without living in huggy, lovey, touchy families.
All of us? Most of us?
Is this a class thing?”
First, its a gross generalization. White people are not all living as the family in “Ordinary People,” and chilly relationships are not limited to the middle and upper white classes. The disconnect between parent and child and family that the initial observer made is real, but it is not limited to white families.
One of the many reasons I have been compelled to quit my job and be more of a stay-at-home mom/worker is because I am seeing the disconnect described in the kids at the junior high my kids attend. My son still holds my hand and is a hug monster at 12, but his friends vary, and his hispanic friends seem to have the chilliest relationships with their parentsl, which totally defied everything I knew about the hispanic families I hung with as a kid (my own stereotype). Our junior high has a population of half middle to high middle class white/black/hispanic kids and half lower class hispanic, many first or new generation immigrants. To my surprise, the disconnect has been greatest in the half with the lower middle class.
And why? Here’s a suggestion to throw out and dissect. Probably for the same reason that disconnect appears in an upper class white family: the parents are not available. They are out working their ass off, either to survive, as in the case of the new immigrants, or they are working their ass off to keep what they have, get more (now there’s the class angle) or fulfill a professional career.
The disconnect, the “chill”, as it were, could be more about time and who has it or makes it and why, than race or even class, though I wouldn’t discount the culture of consumerism as one of the root reasons why parents may not make that time with their children or families. And I see that “gotta buy, gotta have” culture run rampant all over the lower and middle classes. It’s hard to be laughing, loving and warm with the family when you put yourself in a large house (that has to be filled with stuff), a large car or truck (which is way more than you need), buy all the electronics that come out and clothe your family in the latest fads yearly. Hell, you have to work non-stop just to maintain, not just get ahead!
And I know that there are lots of us out there who have had to struggle, work our ass off and yet still have that close, loving, huggy relationship with our kids, but the question I’d ask is, “how addicted to this culture of consumerism were you?” Probably not a lot, if at all.
Hmmm, so time=money, and the lower, middle and upper classes all seem to be feeling the pinch. Which one is the chicken, which one is the egg?
But I haven’t had my coffee yet, so this could be an uncaffeinated crap theory.
- Deb
A very long detour: Responding to the mysteries and pathologies of “white culture”…
So Bitch | Lab had an interesting post this morning… one of those smack-yr-forehead kind of revelations. She’s thinking about psychology and she encounters this little snippet about white culture:White people don’t sleep with their children. They do…
And let me also add, for what it’s worth, that I’ve encountered my fair share of chilly, formal Black families (members of the church I grew up in) who exhibited, save for pigmentation and a few other variables, the sort of inter-familial distance usually associated with novels set in New England featuring vintage Volvos, anti-orgasms and long silences.
Indeed, the father of one of my oldest friends would, when his boy dared shed a tear, remind him of both the diamond hard hardness of life and the stark philosophical position of Arthur Schopenhauer, the happiest unhappy man of all. This fellow (the iceberg-y papa) was a beloved deacon in a Black Baptist church - a position that, if our pantheon of stereotypes is any guide, should have guaranteed a lifetime of warm smiles, bear hugs and heart to heart conversations on front porches over lemonade about life’s tender mysteries.
And yes, my friend’s mother was in lock step with this general program so there was no refuge from the wintry blast (except, come to think of it, his sister and friends).
Now that this portion of my memory is re-activated, I can dredge up many other such examples.
.d.
“…novels set in New England featuring vintage Volvos, anti-orgasms and long silences…”
Well, then there’s the idea that TRW brings up about where perceptions are coming from, that all white upper class familes are ‘The Ice Storm’ and all white working class families are ‘Roseanne’ and all black families are ‘My Wife and Kids’ when they’re not ‘Good Times.’ So in popular culture, the middle class and poor black families get aligned with the same sort of touchy-feeliness and frankness that the white working class family gets stamped with. So then throw the fetishization of the ’standard’ nuclear family on top of race and class generalizations, and the Volvo drivers are miserable because they have key parties, while all of the other families are just so happy to have each other for support that they don’t even need anybody else.
Man, I don’t even know who’s white anymore.
As for shame v. guilt:
Martha Nussbaum’s book Hiding From Humanity (wrote and blogwhored a review of it a month or two ago) argues pretty much the opposite point, that guilt is more focused on redressing an actual harm and therefore better than the sort of lingering, objectless emotion of shame. She argues too that shame leads quickly to self-indulgent defeatism.
I just couldn’t get past that “white people don’t sleep with their kids” business. I slept with my mom til I was 7 or 8, at which point I was sent off to sleep with my sisters, who argued about who had to take me into their bed each night. I didn’t even have my own bed til I was 12 years old. My kids always slept with me. Hell, if it hadn’t been for my youngest sleeping with me last night I wouldn’t have known that she started spiking a high fever in the middle of the night.
I never understood the thing about putting babies into cribs in other rooms, especially when it’s less disruptive for a nursing baby to just offer her a nipple and let her nurse herself back to sleep.
But you know, we watch tv and we think that we’re supposed to have “nurseries” with all the accessories that the babies don’t even give a damn about, just to satisfy some desire we have to be the perfect family.
I was such a bad mom I didn’t even own a diaper bag. I just threw a couple diapers and a bottle in my backpack, stuck the baby in the snuggly, and went about my business.
@ Barb
Obviously, the title of the post was a joke.
Oh, as a trained sociologist, I have no problem with generalizations. (I’m starting to think that I do have a bit of a problem with the ‘tone’ of that piece since it posits the explanation for things at such an emotional level.)
Culture: No, there is harm in that. After all, the ‘Culture of Poverty’ thesis, which has been around since the 1950s, is what conservatives and liberals use to apply to the poor to explain their poverty and, in the end, blame it on the poor.
Daniel Moynihan, for instance, was famous for describing blacked families as a “tangle of pathology,” not b/c of their biology, but b/c of their culture.
The most notable person to engage in same recetly was Bill Cosby — that I know of anyway. Heck, brownfemipower has a post up now on the use of these explanations about themselves.
so, no, I can’t agree that it’s only bad if you apply it to biological characteristics. This is absolutely the case for me if the person refuses to tie it to material, economic situations (e.g., as Elijah Anderson does in Streetwise, where he did a 15 year ethnographic study of race, racism, class, and change in a Philly neighborhood. That is, he explains why women have children at young ages in terms of lack of economic opportunity and not in terms of some tangle of ‘black pathology’ etc. Similarly, he talks about how racism and lack of economic opportunity shapes “the game” for a subset of young men who see manhood as achieved through having as many girlfriends as possible. This is not b/c Anderson thinks that these young men are naturally that way or that they are too ignorant to pick up on dominate cultural values. Rather, he points out that, to be a man in this society you are pretty much supposed to be a wallet. If those opps are closed off for you, what other way is there? The same as contained in hegemonic notions of (white) masculinity: getting laid. Thus, he connects it to a material analysis _and_ refuses to let an examination of cultural hegemonies escape his analysis. You know? Like when people say that “hustlers” in ghettos are somehow repellant, when they wouldn’t say the same about the hustler who graduates from Ivy League college and shares all the same traits. One is pathologized, the other often celebrated.)
If one just attributes it to this mysterious, free-floating culture that just seems to operate by itself and is not shaped by the material conditions of people’s lives in any way, then such a theory can be just as bad as biologistic claims about the behavior of various groups of people.
(Thinking this through and thinking about piny’s post about friends v. allies and who gets to claim the name has made me realize that this is my problem with superficial treatments of ‘unpacking white privilege’. Lack of a material, economic explanation for why a culture is the way it is.)
@ Jean
Oh yeah about the cultural mythology of families on TV. And man, I wish the old Bad Subjects crew had more time because we used to have some pretty fun times with Roseanne — the ubiquitous working class crocheted afghan on the back of the sofa!
I was having this weird day a few months back and I got into a ramble that turned into a weird kind of reminesce/short story: Oleo Acres: One of the Cheaper Spreads about “all you need is love, honey” sentiments.
@ Tex
This is great, the book review. Not so great, though, coz I hate when someone I respect disagrees with me. That means that then I have to maybe be wrong. LOL JK JK
I want to point folks to Tex’s book review, “Book Review and a Call to Arms” as well as this piece I read a while back Separate Spheres, which is a great rejoinder to a problematic telling of women’s history a la Hugo.
experience leads me to think a reserved family as a family with an aspirational class objective no matter the ethnicity. Are they modeling behavior of u.s. middle and upper class whites (I guess based on western european immigrants that made up first wave—british, swedes, etc.)? Maybe its perceived behavior of middle and upper class whites that has been cemented in over the generations by cultural texts? Perfect example is my italian american side—they get progressively reserved the longer they’ve been in country and as their goals for class advancement become more pronounced. I am always leery of saying things like this but ther you go. I said it.
And on shame–funny because I brought it up in another comment here. I think there are two ways to look at it. Systematic shame (Tex) is the great repressor–men, women, class, race, whatever. It keeps people feeling insignificant and “beneath.” But there are moments of shame which can be productive and instructive. Systematic shame is a whole other ball game.
This reminds me of something I say all the time (rather flippantly): guilt is a useless emotion.
James Baldwin had a good word on this:
“As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”
This sort of thing always tends to irk me. On my mother’s side, I come from a large, loving, WASPy family. No, babies do not sleep with their parents. Yes, everyone moves away to college at 18, and an adult child living at home is a sign of shame. Yes, many of the men shake hands instead of hugging.
But folks, let me tell you, I grew up in such a family and I know I was loved. I didn’t need to grow up in a Mediterranean/Latin environment where everyone emoted all over the place to feel treasured. It’s absurd to suggest that only in physically demonstrative families is love really happening, and that in families that are more subdued and restrained, love isn’t present. This is what pissed me off about “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”: once again, WASP “style” was seen as less valuable, less loving, less worthy of being passed on than something earthier, browner, louder.
I am sorry my ancestors did the things they did. But I was raised on mayonnaise, the Social Register, Brooks Brothers and firm handshakes; on bloody marys and croquet and Buick Roadmaster station wagons and back issues of Town and Country. And in all of that, I felt loved and cherished.
Whew. I ought to stick this on my own blog.
@ Hugo
Actually, you make a good point.
Thinking back, I can remember times spent with the families of undergrad chums - families that could fairly be described as WASP - that were very enjoyable. The dynamics were often different from my own family’s but still obviously loving.
And now, a quote:
“…I was raised on mayonnaise, the Social Register, Brooks Brothers and firm handshakes; on bloody marys and croquet and Buick Roadmaster station wagons and back issues of Town and Country.”
Nothing wrong with that. I was raised on dreams of building a race of nuclear powered robot ants that would overturn humanity and usher in a bold new age of machine dominion (thus ending racism via the skillful application of lasers).
And look, I turned out all right.
So, there are obviously different ways of reaching the goal of being a decent adult human being.
.d.
reserved not = non-loving. I agree with you H.
@ Hugo
“Mediterranean/Latin environment where everyone emoted all over the place to feel treasured”
You say that like it’s a bad thing! :)
Not a bad thing, sister — just not the only way to do it right.
I picked this up at my place in more detail.
@Bitch … Obviously I got the joke, dummy, the revelation is wondering about the connection between that part of white North American culture and the current fucked up ness of our system.
Re: generalizing about cultures being problematic as well… yeah I see what you’re saying there. This is good and could be a post in and of itself:
“If one just attributes it to this mysterious, free-floating culture that just seems to operate by itself and is not shaped by the material conditions of people’s lives in any way, then such a theory can be just as bad as biologistic claims about the behavior of various groups of people.”
But we probably won’t get to talk about it because Hugo wants to get defensive about north american white culture (WHICH ISN’T EVEN THE POINT, you jerk!) but I already said that on his blog.
I’d much rather talk about the material context of culture.
I meant to say the material context of cultural generalizations.
And the material context of culture.
BOTH!
I am NOT having a good night.
—
On another subject, can you help me out with Judith Butler? We’re reading gender trouble in my fem theory class and it reminded me of your post on why you don’t like the word patriarchy. I wanted to see if y’all had the same or similar analyses of it. Anyway I can’t find the post, can you send me the link?
Hee I didn’t even know you linked me ! Tex I’m thinking it really depends on how you define guilt and shame and I would also liek to know teh cultural background. of her critique ” makes note to read book*
Thank you. I admit I was talking about my own family and a gross generalization because I want people to think about race and class. And I do think the cold family stuff it’s a class thing but can be healed. I don’t think it’s human nature… (I sleep with my babies and breastfed and hug and play and laugh and yes, I’m white) LOL
Just chiming in to say I’m white, middle-class, AND I drive a Volvo, and I also hug my kids to death and still (at 9 and 11) crawl into their beds to snooze with them once in a while when my guy sleeps with the 20-month-old. One day the grown ups will get some alone-time!
But I was raised in a cold, prickly family. I don’t recall ever being hugged by my mom or dad. It just wasn’t done. Not even a handshake. Maybe we were supposed to be saving our hugs for God or something. Or maybe my folks were just shy about being affectionate. Who knows.
What I do know: we can overcome our childhoods.
As I was posting on Blackamazon’s site, I had always understood shame/guilt somewhat differently: that is, shame was about feeling bad about one’s *essence* as a person, and so could never really lead to change or healing. Just maybe constant scrubbing at the stain, for something to do (and maybe someday if you’re *really* lucky you’ll be forgiven/absolved).
Whereas guilt was about something you’d *done* (or hadn’t done); and while it might not be something you can ever truly make up for completely, you *can,* usually, do something that will lead to reparation, learning, healing, growth.
Then again, I come from what is almost certainly a “guilt culture” (anyway I’ve heard my mom use the term), and, well, it doesn’t always work so good. But I had always chalked that up to a deficit in the practice as done in my family, rather than the theory, per se.
Maybe I need to go look up the terms again.
Maybe there’s a healthy and unhealthy way of either (shame or guilt).