Christine Delp, a 2012 DukeEngage Dublin participant, connected her experiences in Ireland with a discussion she had in an Ethics, Leadership & Global Citizenship course in a piece she wrote for Metro Eireann, Ireland’s leading multicultural newspaper, reprinted with permission below.
Being White In America
by Christine Delp
July 29, 2012
I first discovered the plight of being a white American during a public policy discussion course my freshman year in college.
For introductions on the first day of class, the professor asked the class to describe our individual identities.
A boy two seats to my right spoke first, “I’m half American, half German.” A low murmur of interest drifted among my classmates.
The girl beside me was next. “My mother is Thai and my father is French,” she said. The murmur turned into a few side conversations. I was next.
“I’m a white American.”
The conversations paused. Nobody in the class looked particularly impressed. They just kept their mild smiles and looked to the girl sitting on my left.
“I’m half Korean, half American, and I’ve lived in Japan my whole life,” she said.
The side conversations resumed again. By the end of introductions, over two thirds of my classmates had identified themselves as a dual citizen, ethnic minority, or both.
An unexpected feeling of embarrassment was creeping over me. For the first time in my life, I felt that my identity was boring—I was an unimportant white girl from small-town America in a room full of global citizens.
In the United States today, diversity is extremely important. American institutions and organizations, such as universities and businesses, are no longer selecting diverse populations solely out of any obligation to comply with affirmative action policies. In a rapidly globalising world, persons with multicultural or multi-ethnic backgrounds are valuable because they offer unique perspectives, knowledge, and skills. Furthermore, within American society, minority multicultural and multi-ethnic groups pride themselves on maintaining distinct cultures and traditions.
But what about white Americans? What sort of unique perspectives do white Americans have to offer to the discussion? The problem in answering this question first comes in the difficulty of defining American culture. The paradox of Americanism is that, in the democratic and immigrant tradition, the American culture is the preservation of many other ethnic sub-cultures. But few white Americans still feel emotionally tied to their ethnic heritage. My specific mix includes German, Scotch, and British ancestry, but my family has been in America far too long to celebrate Oktoberfest or Hogmanay.
Black Americans offer a similar but different case. Most are also removed from the cultures of any African roots, but cultural institutions predominantly associated with the Black community such as gospel music and the television network Black Entertainment Television (BET) contribute to the idea there is even a black American culture.
But it’s as if the national heritages of white Americans have been bleached out, and nothing new and distinct has come to take its place. The idea of the existence of white American culture is almost laughable. Apart from the 4th of July, fast food, and baseball, there are very few entirely American cultural traditions, and these traditions are all-inclusive—not white American traditions. And if any white Americans somehow overcame the impossibility of crossing such inter-white cultural diversity to define a unified white American tradition, this would provoke outraged cries of racism, probably most vocally from within the larger white population itself.
I am not advocating for the creation of a white American culture. It’s far too late for that. Nor would I ever want to assimilate minority cultures into the white blob of nothingness—not only would that be wrong, but minorities enrich what would otherwise be a very bland American culture. But there is something very satisfying about being in Ireland where the members of the majority will always have distinctly Irish, Celtic-rooted culture. And even though Ireland has an increasing immigrant population, no one should fear losing Irish culture. Outsiders can’t threaten culture. Culture only dies when people don’t preserve it themselves, perhaps the major mistake of white America.
