There’s some truth in those bizarre charts about ‘whiteness’

The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History used a flier that made some pretty crazy claims about racial differences.

Critics, including some on the Left, had a laugh at the suggestion that valuing “the nuclear family,” or “objective, rational, linear thinking,” were both dangerous symptoms of “Whiteness.”

But the poster parallels the arguments pushed by some leading writers on race. The New York Times reports on one anti-racist seminar where the instructor “expounded that white culture is obsessed with ‘mechanical time’ — clock time — and punishes students for lateness.” So being on time is white now.

It’s reasonable to laugh and also to be startled by what these claims imply about black and Hispanic children. But it’s also worth trying to understand these arguments on their own terms because they have grains of truth.

For one thing, we should understand that cultural values are a real thing and that in a multicultural society, you’ll end up with at least subtly clashing values.

There is no doubt that different cultures have different ideas of what’s “on time.” After years of being told we can’t generalize about culture or ethnicity, you’re probably afraid to admit it, but that’s the way it is. My wife and I once attended my cousin’s wedding in Puerto Rico, and cognizant of “Island Time,” we didn’t show up our standard 15 minutes early, as we would have for a once-in-a-lifetime event such as a wedding or a funeral. We showed up about five minutes early. Everyone who arrived at the scheduled time was an off-islander. The wedding started about 45 minutes late, and most of the guests seemed totally unfazed by that.

In fact, a surprising number of formal studies have shown how much culture determines one’s perception of time.

So if you’re a principal in a school and many of your students are from less punctuality-sensitive cultures, you may need to make special efforts to encourage punctuality, or even to make special accommodations.

To be clear, such differences aren’t racial or genetic. They are cultural.

It’s the same with speech. America has many different dialects. Listen to people from Queens, and then listen to people from Vermont, and then listen to people from Pensacola, and then Pittsburgh, and LA: Even if they all have the same skin tone, you will find their grammar, pronunciation, and word choice will vary.

But these cultural differences sometimes also appear along racial lines, as with the difference in the English vernacular used in many parts of the United States between white people and African Americans.

Teachers, coaches, police officers, and bartenders would all benefit from understanding cultural differences, many of which run parallel to racial differences. Our cultural differences make America really interesting, but understanding them is important to clearing the hurdles these differences introduce.

Still, such generalizations are only so useful, and that’s why most of what’s in the Smithsonian document is garbage. What makes these assertions about “Whiteness” absurd — and, if you like, racist — is their impossible overgeneralization and focus on skin color as opposed to culture.

All white people are too centered in the nuclear family? JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy writes of how his family’s life in rural Kentucky was hardly about nuclear families isolated in a home — in-laws, siblings, grandparents, nieces, and nephews were a constant presence.

The Smithsonian poster asserts that white people value two to three kids and believe every child should have their own room? Have they heard of Irish Catholics? Or Mormons? It wasn’t even a decade ago that the Washington Post’s religion columnist was blasting very white Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for the uncouthness of their “family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margin…”

One problem with these supposedly anti-racist definitions of whiteness is that they seem to confuse the attitudes of Swiss Bankers (very timely, do not share their emotions) with those of all white people. They also ignore that black Americans come from vastly different backgrounds (African Americans from the rural South, African Americans from northern cities, West African immigrants, Kenyan immigrants, immigrants from the West Indies, and many more).

Despite all these failings, we shouldn’t blow off the suggestion that different cultures have different understandings and expectations when it comes to work ethics, timeliness, manners, family size, and makeup. We just shouldn’t try to draw too many conclusions from those differences.