A question that I constantly wrestle with is "What is culture?" Maybe because I've spent so much time in higher education, I'm constantly confronted with questions of culture and identity and how people construct the communities they belong to. These questions are important for everyone, but I don't think people outside of academia confront them as explicitly as academic folks do.
At this point in my life I think I have a fairly well-developed concept of culture. Of what it means and how it shapes people. For me, the most remarkable instantiations of culture are in the moments when 100 or 100,000 people who have never met can be in a room laughing at the same inside joke because, even though they've led 100,000 different lives, they share some basic experiences. They share a culture.
Culture is what makes things like this Cedric the Entertainer clip not just funny, but socially remarkable to me. The joke is only funny if you know the song. And because he knew his audience would be a few thousand Black people, he knew they'd be a few thousand Teddy Pendergrass fans. It's part of the culture.
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