The youthful anti-war demonstrations of our 60’s era were nothing compared to the normal, daily, violent demonstrations of Central and South America.
In the last few weeks alone violent drug gangs have kidnapped and/or murdered several local and national government officials in Mexico, and those are only the ones we’ve heard about! In one instance, a local politician’s head was left on the steps in front of a media outlet. That sort of uber violent behavior has, thankfully, never been sanctioned by the majority of U.S citizens, but that could quickly change. Perhaps our politicians should consider the implications of that sort of “cultural volatility” next time they entertain thoughts of an “amnesty”. Just how eager are they to have “heads”, perhaps their own, used as “political footballs”? Literally.
Well, in a way, yes... what you describe about 'latin american' culture is familiar to me as someone who lived in south america for a while. Violent, tawdry, corrupt and predatory ...It just doesn't seem like 'white culture' by any reasonable definition to me, and, so, shouldn't be ours.
But then, increasingly, over the last 30 or so years, American culture doesn't seem to exemplify 'white culture' so much either. And this kind of answers Raybbr's point (aprox. Post#97?) about hispanics/latin americans being racially classified usually as 'caucasian/white'. By the usual basic three categories of race (Asian/african/caucasian) that's so.
Which is why I think there's a more important functional distinction by culture. As the anthropologists say, the 'folkways,mores,norms, and behaviors' define a culture. And we should probably name the kind of culture we favor in order to move toward it behaviorally.
Even if 'white culture' isn't quite the right term for it, it has something to do with the inventiveness of Edison and Ford, with the literary tradition of the Bible and Shakespear and Joseph Conrad, traditions of political legitimacy that restrain government, a general 'work ethic' that MaxWeber wrote about, and a heritage of discovery and its applications from NASA space exploration to the advanced designs of wind turbine electric power from scandinavian countries.