Plays golf, drives a mid-sized Chevy or maybe a Buick, eats ham sandwiches or peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder Bread, drinks ordinary American beer, doesn’t speak any foreign language, never misses Monday night football, refuses to try sushi…
It involves a whole complex of bland, predictable behaviors that we can recognize when we see.
Hi Conchita
Look here and here and especially here.
The expression “white bread” can be used to refer to anything that is very ordinary and boring.
In cases where it is used to refer to people, I have mainly heard it used by African Americans (referring to white people).
That’s my experience with the expression.
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I don’t agree with that one entry that says the expression originated in the 1980s, because I’m sure it goes back farther than that. I normally hear it used by white people to describe a specific type of white person (“African-Americans”, in my experience use other terms for that). Blacks who have that type of personality are usually called “Huxtables”, after the family on The Cosby Show. Not all whites are “white-bread Americans”. The category would not include anybody who has anything interesting or adventurous about him.
I have close relatives who are white-bread Americans. They don’t eat any sort of adventurous food. It’s a chore to sit at the dinner table with them, because their entire conversation revolves around golf and money. Sometimes the younger ones veer off onto the subject of TV shows, but they only talk about the most popular ones, and they all have the same opinion on them. Nobody has any conspicuous skill or hobby. Nobody can do any kind of trick, like wiggle their ears, look cross-eyed or anything that small children would find entertaining. They read no challenging books. The son had a passion for geology, but he suppressed that in order to become an accountant. The daughter was very good at painting when she was small, and she was extremely good at hard sciences when she was a teenager, but this was all suppressed, and she’s becoming an accountant soon. The parents have never switched professions all their adult lives.
I have close friends (I am called their kids’ “uncle”) who are NOT white-bread Americans. Their mentality is a weird combination of artistic bohemianism and political conservatism. The dad is a former fashion and commercial photographer who retrained himself and is now a hydraulics expert. He is an art connoisseur and has a 1970s-vintage German Merkur in the garage that he has customized into a racing car. The wife used to be a graphic designer, but she got more education and became an elementary school teacher. She paints a lot when she’s not at work. The son has a huge collection of rap and hip-hop CDs, and he knows them all thoroughly, even though the lyrics are completely opposite to his moral and political values. He’s looking for an idea so that he can start an independent business. The daughter is a figure skater and saves up money to buy DVDs of Japanese animé and listens to the Japanese dialogue, rather than the English, in an attempt to learn Japanese. She reads enormous numbers of very challenging books. There is no holiday meal for this family that doesn’t include some sort of culinary experiment that may or may not be successful. When the wife’s family is present for holiday celebrations, they shout a lot, but they’re not angry. This family is Catholic, so they don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. During that season, they go to ethnic parishes every Friday and eat whatever their Lenten meal is. Sometimes they break this up by going to an Indian or Ethiopian restaurant for a vegetarian meal. After the meals in the church basements, they take the paper place mats and draw certain cartoon characters in the personae of various political and historical figures. They’re very funny, and everyone doubles over laughing. The family’s basement is a museum of all types of obsolete computers from three decades. This family is white, but not white-bread.
I have my business and If I had 2 candidates , both professionals
1 of them Georgian and the other foreighner , I’d probably hired Georgian…
Well may be these guys want to hire polish,cause for example US citizen wouldn’t agreed to work for the salary they can offer…
Or may be it’s more comfortable for them to communicate in polish…
There can be many reasons…and this guy has the right to hire whoever he wants…
So what do you think could be the solution? In Ireland there are many Polish guest workers, probaly some 300,000 in a country of close to 4 million people. The Irish don’t like the fact, but at the same time a public outcry for all the Polish, Romanians, Georgians and Lithuanian people to leave remains unthinkable.
Surely you can’t just kick foreigners out. I think you can either help them integrate or leave them to their ways.
I’m not sure there are many Georgians in Ireland,but I know most them work as an unqualified workers…they do it for money,they don’t care of Ireland at all…I know many of them are learned and professionals and they can earn more in Ireland working as a cleaner than working as a Doctor in Georgia…
I think, this is a greatest problem of my Country…
I know Public wants to kick them out and can’t … I think the best way is to strength Economy of these Countries,so they could go home and find good jobs there…
Everyday more and more Georgians come back home,this is because life becomes better here and I’m very happy ,cause We’re a very small Country
only 5 Million population …
We need Our guys back
Thank you, Amy and Jamie, for your interesting explanations of the term ‘white-bread’. Clearly I had misinterpreted it. The word ‘white’ in it seemed to hide some nationalistic/racist twist. It still sounds derogatory to me, though, in that it has a classist ring to it.
That’s possible, but if a US citizen won’t, there will be a Chinese or an Iraqi who will, as can be seen by looking at all the different kinds of people the Italians hire for similar stores.
On the other hand, some of the Polish people they hire are unable to communicate on a basic level with the store’s MANY non-Polish customers. It’s weird to hire customer service personnel who can’t serve the customers – a clear red flag that there’s discrimination going on.
Actually, he doesn’t have the complete legal right to hire anyone he wants, if it’s shown that he’s been engaging in ethnic discrimination. If the labor department expects that he’s been taking measures to prevent non-Poles from applying for jobs in his store, or hires less-qualified Poles instead of more qualified people of other nationalities, or that the job application form is printed in Polish and not also in English, he could spend a lot of time in court and be required to pay a lot of money in fines.
Hi Conchita
Up until about the late 70s/early 80s just about the only kind of bread you could find in most US supermarkets was plain old white bread. Though there were/are competing brands, one didn’t/doesn’t really look or taste much different from the other.
It also seems to me that “white bread” was in use considerably before the 80s to describe anything that was ordinary – i.e. not unusual in any way, often to the point of being boring. To me, the expression has a very strong connection to its literal beginnings: bread – and in particular, to the brand “Wonder Bread”.
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My mother refused to give us that bread, because one of us kids choked on it when we were small. After that, we almost always got tougher, chewier bread from the German or Belgian bakery, and the “Wonder Bread” style of bread was brought into the house only on rare occasions to stuff turkeys. We kids found this bread terrible for sandwiches (it’s very hard to eat a peanut butter sandwich made on that bread), and so when it did appear, we ate it all by itself, as if it were a type of candy.
If you are i.e. a Georgian and you work in Ireland, it is quite clear that you did not go there because you had some affinity with the country. All you want to do is make a living. And I think this is also what the American dream was initially about. Nobody wants to desert their roots, but everybody wants to live well. This is also why millions and millions of Irish people have been emigrating for hundreds of years.
Thing is, once you’ve experienced a good lifestyle, the odds are 10:1 against returning to your home country. Naturally, you make new friends and establish family bonds. Maybe you have a big network of fellow countrymen who speak your language. At the end of the day, you stay.
The question remains what you can do now. Integration is hard, just as it is for Chinese people in Georgia. You want them to leave, but sooner than you can say ‘lonesome George’, there’ll be a China town in your neighbourhood. Or a Georgian enclave in Dublin-Templeogue.
How would you put integration in motion?
That’s an interesting point, Ralf. Two friends of mine in Germany, both of whom happen to be British, were quite envious of me when I told them I was returning to the US. Both said things such as “Good for you! I wish I could do the same thing.” Both longed to return to the UK, but both felt that they couldn’t – for a number of reasons. Work was apparently the main reason in both cases. For one, there really were no longer any family-related reasons not to go back to the UK. She was a divorced mother of two grown kids (both born and raised in Germany), and the kids no longer lived at home. One was away at university and the other was actually working in the UK. Both of my friends apparently felt that they had to stay in Germany mainly because of their jobs. Both are free-lance ESL teachers.
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Oh, think again! I meet plenty of people every day who DID want to desert their roots! My classes are full of them!
There are people who wanted to desert their roots because where they lived families had death vendettas going on for centuries, and they wanted to live in a place that didn’t have that tradition.
I had a student who had founded a chain of electronics stores in his country, and even though he was rich, his real goal in life was to be some kind of teacher. The system in his country was so corrupt that he couldn’t get into a university without paying big bribes, so rigid that he couldn’t get in at his ripe old age of 37, so he wanted to leave that mess and come to a place where he could achieve what he wanted to without bribery and without constantly having to worry about getting cut up with a machete in a senseless tribal war. He loves the US, and he doesn’t want to live anywhere else now.
I know MANY people who wanted to leave their roots because, even though they were law-abiding citizens, they woke up every morning wondering, “Is this the day I get arrested?” A famous lawyer they admired opened her mouth one to many times and was arrested, subjected to electroshock until she was stupid, and then let out on the street to eat out of garbage cans as a “warning” to other people. The young women had to worry because in the capital city, it was relatively common for the dictator’s son to notice a girl on the street, point her out, and have the police later pick her up and deliver her so that he could rape her. The Christians might receive visits from Muslim gangs who would tell them that if they didn’t convert to Islam, their house would be given to a Muslim family. If they didn’t convert, and refused to move out of their house, they were killed. If they did convert, the gang was liable to come back, take their daughters, and force them into marriage to someone they didn’t know.
I could give you stories and stories, but the point is that these people hated their roots, wanted to leave them, and never wanted to return. They tell me things like, “If I had a choice between being rich in my country or picking up garbage in the US, I’d rather pick up garbage.” They say the same thing about Canada, if they live there.
Ralf, you come from a country “with liberty and justice for all”, as it says in the American pledge of allegiance. It’s hard for someone from a country like Ireland or Germany to imagine someone actually WANTING to leave his roots, but I hear about it from people every day.
That’s understandable. I often want to move back overseas, but I can’t, because in my home town I’ve got a whole complex of contacts that allow me a good freelance living. If I moved, it would take me years to build that back up in another place. And I’m one of those people who feels safer if I don’t have an employer.
Jamie, there is some truth in what you said and yet there isn’t. Surely there are people such as political refugees or poverty struck peons who seek escape from the hands of their homeland more than anything else. But I’m convinced that even those people miss there homes in one way or another.
In our debate we have mainly been talking about immigrants from Poland, Georgia and China. I’m not too familiar with life in China, but I’d say that Polish and Georgian people do miss there homes. Those people are proud of their heritage, probably similar to the way Irish people have always been proud of their country. The Irish fled from the famine and the opression of the crown, and abroad they produced folk songs and reels lamenting the loss of their home.
Well, it’s only not true if someone chooses to misread it as a generalized statement about ALL immigrants, which is what Westerners on this site tend to do when I make a point.
They miss their culture, but they somehow graft it onto their present circumstances in a way that satisfies them enough. It’s very strange to see them adapting. Chaldeans from Iraq don’t have their local pilgrimage sites, so in my area they’ve discovered places that they’re using for the same purpose. Their apartments now usually have on the wall pictures of Fr. Solanus Casey, who was an Irish-American monk in my city who is being considered for canonization.
You can also experience different levels of homesickness. When I lived in Europe, I would insist that I never felt homesick, but on the rare occasions when I listened to American radio there (through the armed forces network), I would get an occasional twitter in my heart when I’d hear an American woman introduce herself and her first name didn’t end with “a”. But that was about all of it. Abroad I felt like I was home, and I didn’t really have any desire to return to my birth country.
Anyway, just because someone misses his birth country to some degree, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t accept his new country and actually wants to move back.
There’s another phenomenon I witness, most often among Polish women, for some reason. After immigrating, some of them miss no opportunity to talk about how much they hate the US and would like to return to Poland. They particularly like to tell this to Americans, whose typical reaction is, “Nobody invited you here anyway, so nobody will stop you from going back.” Then the person will buy tickets back to Poland. They’ll flaunt the fact around, and make sure everyone knows they’re leaving this hell hole America and going back home. The big day comes, and they leave. They’re gone for two or three months. Then you suddenly see them back in the US, and they’re no longer complaining about America and no longer talking about their idyllic homeland. It’s anybody’s guess what happens in Poland to change their minds.
In the case of the Polish and the Irish in America, there is this pride. But starting with the third generation, when this pride remains, it’s disembodied from any real knowledge or experience of their country of origin. You get later generations who are indistinguishable from other Americans, except for the fact that they broadcast their ethnic origins in various ways. They hold weird festivals that are not really Polish or Irish and are embarrassing to real Poles and Irishmen. They go to “Polish” churches where everybody is “Polish”, but nobody is from Poland, and nobody can speak more than a few sentences of Polish. They even have masses accompanied by polka music, which would be appallingly sacrilegious to real Poles from Poland. The “Irish” will have their own social clubs that involve mostly drinking and bragging about the superiority of the Irish. Once I went to a “Czech” festival held by people like this, and I unintentionally infuriated a woman by saying – based on years living in the Czech lands – that the Czech nation has about the same proportion of smart people and idiots as any other nation. This enraged her, because her whole self-esteem appeared to be based on the idea that her ancestors’ nation is some kind of master race.
And that leads up to another point. You only seem to find this disembodied, distorted ethnic pride, and the conviction that a nationality is superior, among people who are not superior. Strange but true. You can meet skilled, educated, accomplished third- and fourth-generation Americans who, when asked the ethnicity of their great-grandparents will say, “I’m not sure. I think they were from Poland or someplace like that,” or, “I think they were Irish, but I’d have to ask my grandmother.” Meanwhile, people in the same generation who are chronically unemployed due to a refusal to retrain, for example, know the exact origins of their ancestors and will bark about their ethnic superiority all day. Its as if ethnic pride comes from having nothing else to feel proud about.
When writing this I had your comment
This was also a based on a somewhat diliberate misreading of my statement implying that noone would leave his home if he didn’t have to.
But I totally agree with you, there are certain degrees of homesickness, but you still wouldn’t want to go back. All you do is maintain some kind of nostalgic attitude towards whatever you see as your heritage; first or third generation alike. I’m not too sure about
, but I’m sure you could tell a few tales about those clubs as well (please don’t read this as an encouragement). In my previous life I would have considered “Irish Superioity” an oxymoron. “German Superiority” rings dismal bells, though.
Jamie, this is the most assumable and accosting comment of yours I’ve ever read. I’m saying this sans irony - to me this is what determines grace and appeal of a person.
Could you distinguish the American mind from lets say the Polish then?
If you’d run into these people, you’d know what I’m talking about. They claim to be of a certain nationality, but they’re not. They don’t develop anything in their lives to be proud of, so they decide to be proud of something they’re not, which is Polish, Irish, Czech, Italian, whatever. I’m not talking about people who really COME from those countries and are proud of their origins. I’m talking about people who DON’T come from those countries, have virtually no knowledge of those countries, have never been able to speak the languages of those countries, can’t pronounce the names of those countries’ foods correctly, but nonetheless claim those countries as their bogus homelands and never let you forget about it.
In this case, I wasn’t talking about Polish people, but about Americans who think they’re Polish and don’t know they’re not Polish, because they don’t know anything about Poland.
Hi Ralf
This is a pretty common phenomenon in the US. You might meet an American on the street, and in the course of the conversation, you might be told “I’m Italian” (for example) – even though the person and his/her parents and grandparents were all born in the US. I would agree with Jamie that this tends to happen more often with people of certain national roots, but I think most of us do it to one degree or another. Most Americans are simply aware that their family roots can be traced back to a country other than the US. We are a nation of immigrants.
An American friend of mine met a German man who was here in the US on a three-year job assignment. They fell in love and got married not long before his assignment ended, and then they both went to Germany. After she arrived in Germany, my friend laughingly told me that it was quite an adjustment for her to suddenly have to say “I’m American” rather than “I’m Italian”. :lol:
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Hi Ami,
I know what you mean. There were a few times in the US that someone told me “I’m German-Irish, too”. One guy in Texas had to show me his passport because I couldn’t figure out what his surname was. It turned out to be “Grauman” :o
How do you feel about foreigners in your country sealing themselves off from the English language?
Do you think those people have a right to claim the American citizenship?
Should there be an official language in America so that people can be forced to adopt it? As far as I know there is an exame you can take to gain a certificate of citizenship, isn’t there?