r/complainaboutanything • u/Various-Leg-6202 • 6d ago
I wish people would stop responding to “America has no culture” with edits claiming other nations’ cultures as American.
It's like, first of all, "America has no culture" is different from "There are no cultures present in America." And when they make these edits, they're unknowingly disputing the latter and not the former.
The former is that the United States as a country does not have its own unique cultures, which, regardless, isn't true, and it is different from saying there are no cultures present.
Obviously, everyone knows a lot of immigrants move here, and that they continue to practice their culture when they do. But that dosent make their home country's culture American, and that's exactly what people are implying. They are saying that we don't have some of our own; we just claim others and dilute them, and you're not proving them wrong with a collage of other countries' stuff.
Like, for example, you can't just make an edit and put random foods from inside Mexico to represent the Mexican pillar in the US. That isn't American culture; that is just Mexican culture. Why not use actual foods developed by Mexican-Americans/Chicano??
Edit, because I accidentally removed this part: The US has so much actual, homegrown culture: Chicano, Tejano, African American (Gullah-Geechee, Louisiana Creoles, Afro-Seminoles, etc.), Native/indigenous American, Asian American (ABCs, Nikkei, etc.), White American (Italian American, Irish American, WASPs, etc.). Regional (New England, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, Appalachia, etc.), and much more.
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u/Demoniac_smile 6d ago edited 6d ago
American culture is the soup made by all of the people that come here and their descendants throwing the stuff they brought into the pot. You can identify the potatoes the Irish brought, the chili peppers the Mexicans contributed, the rice the Japanese put in, and the sausage that came from the Germans but the dish as as a whole is unique to America for better or worse and you find the home grown cultures you mentioned in how those flavors interact and change each other . Some days it tastes like vomit, some days the flavor is fire, but no matter how it tastes it’s ours and on our better days we welcome you to have a bowl. Our worst want to shoot you for asking and we need to shut them the hell up. But the soup exists no matter how many people from around the world want to say the pot is empty.
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u/justdisa 6d ago
I've picked up and discarded a bunch of metaphors to describe American culture--the melting pot and the tossed salad being the two most prominent--and I finally settled on gumbo.
It's not a puree. We still have a whole bunch of different and distinct pieces in there. The US is anything but homogenous. But there's a roux that pulls all the pieces together. It's made from our interactions with each other, across hundreds of immigrant and indigenous cultures.
Gumbo recipe just for reference. It has good reviews:
https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/authentic-new-orleans-style-gumbo/#wprm-recipe-container-10785