• Water Bowl Slime
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    1 month ago

    There’d still be a ton of culture, but pretty much all the good stuff came from non-white people. Like the many genres of music pioneered by black people (country, rock & roll, blues, disco, rap, etc) or all the food from immigrants (texmex, Italian food, Chinese food as westerners know it)

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Most of those things would not fit the criteria, though, not as far as I know their histories (which isn’t super well tbf)

      Like, there’s a reason why people would mention Texmex, Italian-American, and Chinese-American cuisine, but would in all likelihood never even think to mention Ethiopian cuisine, despite the fact that there are plenty of Ethio restaurants throughout the United States. And that is because “American culture” implies general usage throughout American society, implies lowest common denominator, implies appealing to the tastes of mayos. And when the originators were non-white, this generally means that some form of cultural appropriation or at the very least profit-driven modification was at play, and then wrt things like music there’s also all the IP stuff to boot. So that’s between one and three criteria violated.

      Now I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll be able to find some bit of American culture that originated among non-white people, and passed into general usage among all Americans without anything to do with IP nor profit-driven modifications, and where this cultural exchange was favorable for everyone involved. But when the shaping of “American culture” is so clearly defined by an unequal relationship between different groups, I’d have to think that examples of such exchanges would be vanishingly few.