I grew up with culture and assumed everyone else had culture. Then I came across a white person who fetishized black and Asian people.
She grew up in America completely without contact with their ancestral tree for generations. I'd sit down, and they'd tell me their DNA is part Asian around 20x before I got up from my seat. She and her entire family looked completely white. That's how far back she was digging.
She's not black by any stretch, but she claimed she couldn't understand white slang because she only speaks black slang... even though she grew up with my also white boyfriend in the same white suburb neighborhood. My boyfriend simply talks like a white person.
She wore cultures as costumes. Like not growing up wearing durags then wearing one at 25 and dressing up in gang colors and lying about being in a gang, growing up in a ultra-rich suburban neighborhood and explaining to my boyfriend what is like to grow up in the hood(you grew up in the same ultra rich suburb shut up!), Buddhist beads(in her chosen gang color) with long "Buddhist nails" when they were cruel and dehumanizing at every chance, and nothing else about them was Buddhist. She is also immunocompromised, but started the pandemic insisting she wear a paisley bandana(also in the gang color) instead of medical masks I gave her a full pack of.
She claims it's distasteful to talk about feeling animosity towards the 1%, but she loves watching videos of black gangs getting shot.
They were constantly trying to look like "an exotic white person." They never realized they are just white and can only be shown around other people's cultures as a guest, but can never become "one of them." Always just as an outsider.
They taught me part of what whiteness was. Because of them I know about people who are white and nothing else.
IDK Denny's is exotic to me. You can't not have a culture. Theirs is just hegemonic. I assume you grew up in the US so neither you or her notice it. Which means you/your family is basically one or two generations removed from being like her.
I had trouble thinking of what to say because there are dynasties in my ethnicity's culture. With many cultural traditions centered around the dynasties and the concept of money. My parents are immigrants and my childhood was filled with cultural practices. If I were to say my culture is worth more than a chain restaurant, I'd believe it.
But the question stands: Where does the hegemonic culture begin and end? What is the answer when capitalism existed in the making of my ethnicity's culture? Where does one end, and another begins?