Ask Lemmy

Even within States, there is a diversity of culture. Looking at Louisiana, the New Orleans area is highly influenced by French history resulting in Cajun culture, while the rest of the state is generally Southern. Florida is similar to Ancient Greece and its city-states in that the metropolitan areas have their own culture. But even within the southeast metro area, Miami and West Palm Beach are culturally quite different. Even more zoomed in, consider the Bay Area (Frisco). The Haight-Ashbury district is commonly considered the birthplace of the hippie movement, whereas across the bay is Oakland, birthplace of the Black Panthers. Both were quite progressive yet at odds with each other due to cultural differences stemming from race.

We can zoom out and look at cultural differences across the country within the same racial group. For example, there's the famous East Coast vs West Coast rivalry in hip-hop that is so real, it resulted in the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Even within the same coast, New York hip-hop, such as Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang, is noticeably different from Atalanta hip-hop, such as Outkast, Missy Elliot, and Ludacris. Even as static as race is, white rapper Eminem is often included in Black culture.

Within the White rural sphere, we can contrast Upper Peninsula Michiganders (Yoopers) with their major influence coming from long harsh winters to the Appalachians who are known for being culturally isolated, having a mistrust of outsiders and a history of conflict with mining companies. Then, we have rural white people from West Texas to Nevada that are influenced by the Wild West period and local native cultures. Even within that, Texans are much more conservative with social matters whereas Nevada has legal gambling and prostitution. They way I make sense of culture in the US is that it is an overlapping area of varying fields that interact with each other so that even direct lifelong neighbors can have have vastly different cultures.