Marcus Wilson Shared Culture Summary

To understand the meaning of culture and identity, it is important to refer to William Julius Wilson's analysis of a 'shared culture' based on social networks. Wilson writes that culture is "the sharing of outlooks and modes of behavior among individuals who face similar place-based circumstances or have the same social networks (as when members of particular racial or ethnic groups share a particular way of understanding social life and cultural scripts that guide their behavior)" (2009). Other cultural sociologists would argue, furthermore, that culture is essentially socially-given frameworks - such as historical narratives or conceptual “toolkits” - that facilitate understanding of one’s social world (Lamont and Small, 2008). According

This theory suggests that culture forms not from an experience, or even a shared experience, but from the possible combinations of experiences, habits, and other forms of identity of a group of people. People use their tool-kit to guide them along in their social realities. The grand thing about the tool-kit is that everyone in a given culture does not have to have the same exact tools, or to use them in the same way, but they will all have a similar tool-kit. All black people may not have the same mannerisms at home or the same understanding or appreciation for certain music, but they can have similar mannerisms within their families that they can identity with, meaning it may not be a universal rule to say “ma’am” or “sir” in every family, but politeness and respectfulness can still be

For example, one of the most popularly used “tenets” of black culture discourse is that “there is a distinct black culture that is different from (and perhaps, though not necessarily, in opposition to) white culture.” (Shelby 2009). This is relevant to every study about black people, in which blackness is always analyzed in comparison to whiteness, white culture, and white people. This is not without reason as it is hard, especially when discussing American society, to separate “blackness” from “whiteness” wholistically, considering blackness was originally viewed as a physical performance - of strength, talent, and physical and sexual entertainment - which led to whites literally “putting on” black physical identities to embrace that performance (Lott 1993; Shelby 2009). Other tenets of black culture include the idea of black people rediscovering their black culture, as well as black people viewing their culture as a positive ‘social good”, as opposed to the negative social rhetoric of black