Everyone loves to hate on Americans not having culture, but we very clearly do. We have our own dialects that are unique from the rest of the world. We have sports and holidays and foods that were created here first.
The reason that it looks like America doesn’t have culture is because we’ve exported our culture around the globe, and now you just think those things are normal.
American culture is also an amalgamation of the different ethnic groups and cultures that have settled here with 17th/18th century British culture being the frame work. Halloween is uniquely American although its roots are in Irish and Scottish traditions that are themselves derived from Celtic Paganism.
Another example is music, everyone wants to argue which culture invented different styles but generally different musical genres borrow and build upon other previous styles.
It could be argued that Rome didn’t have a culture either because their’s was an amalgamated culture of the groups they conquered with 5th/6th Century BCE Greek culture as the frame work.
You can’t touch our history with music and cinema.
I’ll give you cinema.
Music!?!?!?
A few musical genres that originated in the US: ragtime, jazz, gospel, zydeco, rock n roll, rockabilly, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, surf, hip hop.
Sure, many of those have roots in European and African folk traditions, and have had notable contributions from outside, but all of those came into existence in the US, mostly thanks to Black Americans.
You mean white America? Black America developed one hell of a culture which changed the rest of the world.
That is actually pretty good. This joke could be repurposed well in many contexts.
plenty of culture in america. you eat tacos all over the world don’t you?
Not really, no.
Baa, dum, hiss.
Another version of the joke: “How can American cheese exist if America doesn’t have any culture?”
Brutal.
is racism a ‘culture’?
They didn’t develop that, they brought it with them.
Our culture is appropriation of other cultures.
Wait, shit, we got that from the British.
Who got it from the romans, who got it from the Greeks.
I don’t know where the Greeks got it from, but they probably appropriated it, too.
I’d say rather than appropriation, it more like tossing a bunch of cultures in a blender and cooking something that hasn’t been seen in that exact form.
