Why do white Americans think they have no culture?

[Damocles]

Because the very idea of an overlapping “White” culture is a falsity. I myself have ancestry from Czechia on my dad’s side and the North of England on my mom’s side, and I was raised in a rural Pennsylvania town which was originally colonized by Germans (where German language and culture experienced something of a contemporary revival).

Identity and individuality are all delicate subjects. Groups of immigrants may shift language or religion over time, and their children generally assimilate, but to differing degrees. This results in a rich cultural tapestry in which many different things can be American, but where they are all bound together by the Enlightenment values originally created in eighteenth-century Great Britain.

The idea of “White” as a radical, racialized, reductionist identity only makes sense in the context of the highly authoritarian South, where one’s position in the antebellum world was measured mainly by their proximity to the slaves. The whiter you were or were perceived to be, the greater social prestige you had. The institution of a “White” identity was always a defensive reaction to “Black” cultural solidarity and can only be understood in a reactionary context.