I've really tried to stop replying to every bait reply, because I don't think long arguments are productive or that we'll reach a middle ground.
But this for some reason struck a nerve. I never claimed racism at all?
"It's not racism, it's culture" is literally a white supremacist talking point. To be clear, I'm not accusing you of that.
My claim is that you can't make country wide generalizations, and yes, attempting to do so by culture is doing so by race. I'd bet if I brought up how foreigners in Japan score on tests, you'd then claim it's not real Japanese. Because you meant ethnic Japanese people.
But that's way, way harder in the US. Is it white culture, that doesn't really exist? Would you be surprised to learn that most people born in the US today are not white? Is 'American culture' the hispanic immigrant family getting by in Fresno? Or is the the Indian spelling bee winner from Virginia? Or is it the white farmer kid from Nebraska? Or the black inner city kid in Chicago? At some point you have to pick one, they have little 'culture' in common. But I'm not asking anyone to pick one, or defending any race. I'm saying such generalizations are stupid.
Culture pretty heavily implies race, perhaps not location, unless one pretends to be race blind.
> "It's not racism, it's culture" is literally a white supremacist talking point
I was not aware of this, and I always thought (independently, without consuming whatever white-supremacist propaganda might have mentioned this) that it made more sense to realize that cultural differences are really what is at play most of the time when people conflate them with racial differences. Cultural differences also make more sense to frame things in since they are mutable.
If all you have is a racism hammer, everything looks like a racist screed I guess.
The only point I saw made is that cultures matter. There should be nothing wrong with that. You're reading malevolence into it. Stop that, please.