White Culture Has No Culture: What Racism Really Is, And Why So Many White People Don’t Understand It

By Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz

Oye, mira.

I get it. The title made you clench tightly. Breathe. You’re not being attacked, but the system that raised you is. Before you come at me with fragility, discomfort, or performative anger, understand this: these conversations are not about your comfort. They demand your discomfort, your listening, and your unlearning.

Questions are welcome. But feelings that derail truth-telling are not. And quite frankly, they’re not welcome here.

Let’s be real, White culture has no culture. Not after colonialism. Whiteness and race as a whole is a social construct. What you do have, is just culture. What you have is a legacy of erasure, theft, and domination that replaced ancestral memory with manufactured supremacy. Whiteness didn’t preserve European culture. It gutted it. It turned folk traditions into folklore, spirituality into control, language into obedience, and community into compliance.

So if you feel a sense of emptiness, of rootlessness, of trying to find meaning by consuming everyone else’s traditions, it’s not your fault. But it is your responsibility now. Because whiteness didn’t just colonize others. It colonized you, too.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about. Not to shame, but to shake the system that made you believe whiteness was an identity instead of a cage.Colonialism didn’t just strip land, it stripped identity. And the greatest theft was convincing people who identify as white that theft itself was their entire identity.

Before the system of Colonial white supremacy demanded assimilation into empire, people we consider to be white today had culture, real culture. Rich, rooted, regional traditions. The Celts of Ireland honored the earth with rituals tied to the moon and harvest, governed by matrilineal knowledge and community kinship.

Slavic peoples practiced animism, dance, and ancestral medicine before the Church burned it into silence. Norse cultures told epic sagas of gods, goddesses, and warriors not rooted in domination, but in harmony with natural cycles. The Basques, the Gauls, the Sami, these weren’t just ethnicities. They were entire cosmologies, systems of life, music, governance, language, and spiritual relationship with the land. But when Rome gave way to the Crown, and the Crown merged with the Cross, those cultures were either assimilated, exterminated, or rebranded as savage. And so began the great whitening, a centuries-long erasure in which European peoples were stripped of their earthbound, matriarchal, animistic, and cooperative ways of life and taught instead to worship hierarchy, empire, and “civilization” through blood and conquest.

White people weren’t the first to be colonized, but they were the first to be conscripted into the lie of whiteness.

Not because of their skin, but because their skin was weaponized against the black, brown, indigenous and other peoples. It was turned into a political tool, a pass, a weapon, a boundary. Whiteness wasn’t created to honor European ancestry. It was created to erase it. It replaced diverse, rooted cultures with a single false identity built on domination.

Whiteness was never about skin tone. It was about social control.

European empires like the British, French, and Spanish realized they could manipulate poor Europeans, "peasants", farmers, and workers, by convincing them that they were “better” than the people being colonized, enslaved, and dispossessed around the world. Even if they were starving, landless, and exploited themselves, they were told: “At least you’re white.”

Whiteness became the consolation prize for poverty. It offered no justice. Only hierarchy.

It told people to forget their languages, their stories, their sacred rituals. To drop their clan names and speak the king’s English. To abandon earth-rooted beliefs and kneel before empire and Church. It trained them to see themselves not as oppressed, but as deputies of the oppressor.

That’s what whiteness is: Not an identity. Not a culture. But a system that demanded Europeans trade their humanity for proximity to power.

And that deal came at a cost.

Because while whiteness promised superiority, what it really delivered was obedience. Obedience to empire. Obedience to violence. Obedience to forgetting.

In the 1600s, as European powers expanded into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they needed something bigger than flags and crosses. They needed a story. One that would justify slavery, genocide, land theft, and exploitation. That story was the system of white supremacy. But to sell it, they had to erase the inconvenient truths of their own people.

They made the Irish forget that they once revered goddesses and followed Brehon laws, a legal system based on restorative justice, not punishment.

They made the Slavs forget that their ancestors worshipped forests, water, and ancestral spirits, not money or monarchs.

They made the Scots forget the communal clan systems they lived under, replacing their tartans with Union Jacks and silencing their Gaelic tongue.

They made the Germanic tribes forget the matriarchal and nature-rooted traditions that once guided their cosmology, long before they were steamrolled by Church and Crown.

They criminalized ancestral languages, burned medicine women, called their dances "devil's work," and replaced their spiritual practices with Christian imperial dogma.

Then came enclosure. Communal lands in Europe were fenced off, privatized, and stolen from the people to create wealth for the elite. This was a dry-run for colonialism abroad. Europeans were displaced and forced into urban wage slavery, then told their enemy was not the landlords or monarchs who took everything, but the “savage” in Africa or the “heathen” in the Americas.

It was theft of land, of tradition, of soul. And then a sales pitch for superiority.

So when we say white supremacy is an inheritance, we mean it precisely: It is not your bloodline. It is the trauma in your bloodline. It is not culture. It is a cover-up. It is the loss of who you were before the empire told you that domination was dignity.

Your ancestors were colonized. Then they were deputized. And now? You are socialized.

To perpetuate the very system that erased your own past.

And that is the tragedy. And the turning point. Because if you can name it, you can unlearn it. If you can trace it, you can dismantle it. If you can remember who you were before whiteness, maybe you can finally stop trying to dominate everyone else and start liberating yourself, too.

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White Supremacy Isn’t a Choice, It’s an Inheritance.

If you were born anytime after 1492, whether in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, India, Canada, South Africa, or Europe, you were born into a world already scripted by colonialism. A world redrawn by conquest, reprogrammed by empire, and rigged by a logic that worships whiteness as the measure of humanity and the center of all value.

You didn’t choose this system. But it chose you. It raised you. It educated you. It surrounded you with media, policy, and institutions that made the world look white even when it wasn’t. That taught you that the victors wrote history because they “deserved” to win. That made violence look like virtue and domination look like development.

This isn’t about Klan hoods and Nazi salutes. That’s the cartoon version, obvious, grotesque, and easy to condemn. No, the real white supremacy is far more sophisticated. It’s not just extremism, it’s the operating system of modernity itself.

It lives in:

• What stories get told and what gets erased.

• What languages are called “articulate” and which are “broken.”

• Who gets to walk into a room assumed competent, and who must prove their humanity before they speak.

• Which bodies get care and which get cages.

• Which cultures are “global” and which are “ethnic.”

This is the quiet terror of whiteness as norm. It defines value by proximity to itself, skin tone, dialect, gender performance, family structure, wealth, ability, and beliefs. And it names all else as “divergent,” “exotic,” “dangerous,” “unqualified,” “illegal,” or “uncivilized.”

Let’s be clear:

White supremacy is the foundation. Capitalism is its economy. Patriarchy is its gender. Ableism is its body politic. Anti-Blackness is its anchor. Colonialism is its global distribution system.

They are not separate evils. They are branches of the same poisoned tree.

If you were born into this world, this was handed to you. You inherited its logic. Its myths. Its reflexes. Its borders and boundaries. And if you are white, you inherited benefits too, whether you asked for them or not.

But here’s the catch: inheritance is not identity. It’s a burden. It’s a responsibility. It’s a decision point.

You don’t get to rewrite your ancestry, but you do get to choose whether you weaponize it, or interrogate it. Whether you cling to it, or compost it into something liberatory.

White supremacy is the water we all swim in. Naming it doesn’t drown you. It’s how we learn to breathe.

The Theft at the Center of Whiteness

White colonialism didn’t just steal from the global majority, it stole from its own.

It looted land, knowledge, rhythm, language, and spirit from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. But in doing so, it also hollowed out the descendants of Europe. It severed them from their ancestral cosmologies, burned their folk traditions, outlawed their dialects, shamed their earth-based mythologies, and replaced them with the machinery of empire, war, and control.

What was once culture became currency. What was once ritual became performance. What was once spiritual became extractive.

And so, generation after generation of white people were born into a spiritual vacuum, raised with wealth but no wisdom, comfort but no connection, power but no rootedness.

And when you are taught that whiteness is all you have, but you look out into a world alive with color, story, scent, sound, language, soul, and resistance,

ENVY IS INEVITABLE!

But colonialism trained white people not just to envy, but to feel entitled to what they envy.

So instead of turning inward and asking, What did empire take from me? They turn outward and ask, What can I take next?

And here’s what that looks like:

• They wear dreadlocks but cross the street when they see Black men.

• They chant mantras on yoga mats but call the cops on Indian immigrants.

• They blast Afro-beats at festivals but vote for politicians who demonize African refugees.

• They devour tacos, twerk, and turmeric but mock accents, tokenize Latinx coworkers, and cheer for border walls.

• They slurp ramen, pho, bibimbap, and sushi, but host "Asian-themed" parties that reduce entire civilizations to caricatured costumes, bad accents, and cheap dragon décor.

• They buy Korean skincare, Chinese silk, Japanese tech, and consume Buddhist memes, but express open xenophobia toward Asian communities, especially when global crises spark scapegoating.

• They love belly dancing and Moroccan tiles, but demonize Muslims, criminalize hijabs, and feed into Islamophobic policy without hesitation.

• They dress their children as Moana for Halloween, but couldn’t name a single Pacific Islander nation or explain the history of colonization in Polynesia.

This isn’t culture. It’s desperation dressed up as discovery. Consumption without connection. Proximity without solidarity. Admiration without accountability.

They want the aesthetic of the global majority without the burden of standing with us. They want the rhythm, the food, the words, the looks, but not the people.

That’s the haunting symptom of cultural amnesia. Because when whiteness erases your ancestral memory, you start to mimic what feels alive, but without understanding it, without protecting it, and without earning it.

And it shows.

It shows in the way whiteness devours everything: soul food, spiritual practices, languages, dance, textiles, tattoos, and leaves nothing behind but a Pinterest board and a tourism photo.

So let's be honest, it isn’t because white people lack culture. It’s because the system of whiteness severed them from it, then trained them to scavenge instead of remember. To mock what they once had. To consume what they helped destroy.

There is no "white culture" past Colonialism.

That’s why white supremacy isn’t just violence against the global majority, it’s violence against white people’s own history.

And deep down, they know it.

• That’s why they study Black art, but don’t support Black people.

• Why they photograph Indigenous rituals, but never defend sacred land.

• Why they echo the songs of colonized peoples, but stay silent in the face of imperial violence.

• Why they love brown and Black babies on Instagram, but support politicians who cage them at borders.

• Why they practice mindfulness but ignore the genocides of Buddhists and Hindus across time.

• Why they adorn their homes with West African masks, Navajo prints, or Balinese sculptures, but wouldn’t show up to a single landback protest or reparations meeting.

Because empire made them forget who they were, and trained them to envy what it stole.

But here’s the truth that never made it into textbooks:

You don’t need to steal from others to feel whole. You need to grieve what empire took from you. You need to reckon with what your ancestors lost—and what they helped erase. Then you need to get to work undoing the harm the system made you inherit.

Because real culture doesn’t come from copying. It comes from remembering. From repair. From returning to the root.

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What Racism Isn’t

Racism is not feeling uncomfortable when someone names your harm. It is not reverse discrimination when people of the global majority create sacred spaces to breathe, organize, and heal without white presence. It is not about being left out of the room. It is about centuries of being the only ones allowed to build the room and lock the door behind you.

And no, racism is not about a few bad apples. It is about bad trees, poisoned soil, and the plantation that gave birth to the entire orchard. This system did not break. It was built this way.

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Stop Confusing Discrimination with Racism

This is where many white people get lost. They mistake being called in for being called out. They confuse hurt feelings with systemic harm. They cling to the myth that everyone can be racist, when in truth, racism is not just a matter of personal bias. It is about access, history, and inherited power.

Anyone can be discriminatory. Anyone can say something harmful, ignorant, or disrespectful. But racism is not just about individuals being mean. It is about entire structures being designed to advantage one group while punishing, excluding, or exploiting another.

Bias may be human. But racism is not humane.

Racism is not a feeling. It is a framework. It is not personal. It is political. It is not just in what you say. It is in what you are protected from, and what others are punished for.

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What Racism Is

Racism is a housing system that still redlines entire communities. It is a classroom where white boys are seen as leaders and Black girls are called aggressive. It is an algorithm that predicts children will fail based on zip codes shaped by decades of racial segregation. It is a hiring manager who says “they didn’t feel like the right fit” when reading a name they don’t know how to pronounce. It is a nation that sanitizes Dr. King while killing the very dream he died defending.

Racism is systemic. It is historical. It is legal. It is economic. It is embedded in borders, in budgets, in ballot boxes, and in every institution that was never built for us, only built on us.

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Why White People Struggle to See It

Because they were never meant to see it. Whiteness is designed to feel neutral. Innocent. Invisible. It teaches white people that being challenged is an attack. That discomfort is oppression. That being asked to step back is somehow exclusion. This is not cruelty. This is fragility that has been weaponized to protect the status quo.

White people were given a fairytale. A story where colonization brought civilization. Where enslavers were called founding fathers. Where meritocracy was real and the playing field was ever level.

But truth is not fragile. Justice does not wait for comfort. And liberation is not something you negotiate through politeness.

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What Now

If you are white, this is not about guilt. Guilt is performative. It keeps you in the center and keeps everyone else locked out. This is about responsibility. About unlearning the myths you were fed and learning the history that was hidden from you.

You may not have created white supremacy. But you were raised inside it. You inherited its benefits and its blindness. And now the question is, will you defend it, or dismantle it?

Start with truth. Read history written by the colonized, not the colonizer. Learn what whiteness made your ancestors forget. Reclaim what empire told you to erase. Your culture is not whiteness. Your culture lies buried in the earth your people once honored. It lives in the songs they were forced to forget. It lives in the languages empire tried to shame into silence.

Stop reaching for other people’s cultures as if they are accessories. Reach back to your own. Back to the time before conquest. Before empire. Before the lie of whiteness swallowed your ancestry and called it superiority.

Because you do not need to take from others to feel whole. You need to remember what was taken from you. And then decide what you will do with that truth.

Because the future is not white. The future is decolonized. And the invitation is still open.

Will you join it?

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Sources:

1. Whiteness as a Social Construct & Tool of Colonial Control

“Whiteness wasn’t created to honor European ancestry. It was created to erase it.”

• Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

• Explores the invention of “whiteness” in historical and political terms, especially how it evolved in U.S. and European discourse to justify enslavement, hierarchy, and exclusion.

• Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

• Outlines how race — and particularly whiteness — was written into the foundation of modernity and global systems of domination.

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2. Erasure of Pre-Colonial European Cultures

“Before the empire, they had earth-rooted, matrilineal, animistic traditions.”

• Ogilvie, Sheilagh. Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

• Traces how localized European communal economies were undermined and erased through emerging capitalist and imperial institutions.

• Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

• Details the matriarchal, animist, earth-centered spiritual and social systems of ancient Europe prior to patriarchal conquest and Christian imperialism.

• 3. Enclosure & the Internal Colonization of Europe

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“Enclosure was the dry run for colonialism. It displaced people before empire expanded abroad.”

• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.

• Connects the violent transformation of feudal European societies (enclosures, witch hunts, and class warfare) to the birth of capitalism and colonial expansion.

• Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

• Examines how dispossessed Europeans were conscripted into empire, and how resistance and erasure shaped both colonialism abroad and oppression at home.

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4. Whiteness as Obedience, Not Identity

“Whiteness offered no justice. Only hierarchy.”

• Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

• Shows how Irish immigrants in the U.S. traded solidarity with Black people for access to white privilege under American racial capitalism.

• Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

• Explores how whiteness was constructed among European laborers to divide the working class and reinforce white supremacy.

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5. Colonial Theft and Cultural Amnesia

“It’s not that white people lack culture. It’s that whiteness severed them from it.”

• Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018.

• Details how white settler identity was violently constructed to justify land theft, genocide, and dominance under the banner of “civilization.”

• Ortiz, Christian. The Decolonial Awakening: A Complete Roadmap to Collective Liberation. Justice Press, 2025.

• Exposes whiteness as a global algorithm of control that colonized both the oppressed and the supposed beneficiaries, and calls for ancestral reclamation and justice-rooted futures.

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6. Systems of Supremacy: Capitalism, Patriarchy, Ableism

“White supremacy is the foundation. Capitalism is its economy. Patriarchy is its gender…”

• Hooks, Bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981.

• Connects racism, patriarchy, and capitalism as interlocking systems of domination historically rooted in colonialism and white supremacy.

• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

• Explores the intersections of race, gender, and class oppression within historical movements and structural systems.