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I don't know if it makes you feel better or not, but my life is very much a product of, and continues to be oriented around, the same rugged individualism, family structure (to some extent), emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, written tradition, etc that you are pointing toward here. Those are strong values that I hold and respect, and I am grateful to those before me who established them.
(I'm not a Christian in any real sense but I share both your edgy atheist history and your coming-around to view it as a net positive.)
This does not really factor into the equation for me in terms of my racial identity.
There have been people in my life who have told me that I "act white" in a pejorative way because of how I speak or write or what kinds of things I like or don't like, especially other young people growing up, but I never really gave that too much weight, and those people were few and far between. I always wrote it off as inconsequential.
It's unfortunate that it seems like there is in fact a growing current of thought that really does seem to resent and push back against those values as inherently suspect and unwanted. I think it's a real problem and I worry that a lot of young people are growing up right now being told that it's racist for people to want you to do well on standardized tests or to ask you to be polite. That was not happening while I was growing up at all, it would've been borderline if not completely offensive, but I think it's clear that the kind of kids who would've told me I "acted white" pejoratively have in fact not grown up to be inconsequential at all and apparently have captured the messaging of institutions like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But this type of mentality is not what I mean when I say that the world has made it clear to me that 'white' is not a word that's accurate for me to use about myself. My impression of what whiteness means as a racial identity, and what the boundaries of it are, mostly come from people who assign a positive or neutral value to whiteness.
The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)
To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I suspect I would if I had two white parents or two black parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the values I (or the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) might associate with whiteness.
I want to be absolutely clear. I do not consider those values "white", but I was pointing out the framing activist use. I hate everything about it. I hate how much it increasingly dominates the terms of the argument, and even institutional policy. And I hate how it confuses what exactly you mean when you say you identify as "black" despite having a "white" mother.
I don't even consider those prosocial values inherently western. At least most of them, save Christianity. Asian cultures and Indian culture has a lot of the same values, with many of the same, and a few unique, foibles that we in the west have towards them as well. Nobody is perfect, but at least these cultures appear to acknowledge there are prosocial and antisocial behaviors, and you should encourage prosocial behavior. It's hard to say the same about the current state of the art crop of racial activist.
I'm glad to you hear you are older and haven't been sucked into the self inflicted systemic dysfunction of the modern "black" identifying community.
Understood, I wasn't sure initially if you were saying that yes, these are white values, but they're obviously good instead of bad.
It's probably clear from my indecisive wording that I also don't really think of them as inherently western values any more than I think of them as white values, so I think we're actually totally on the same page here.
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