There's a blog out there called "Stuff White People Like" which aims to poke fun at white people by waxing anthropologic about their quirky, illogical, or silly desires. (You can google it. I'm not linking.) However, these include wanting multilingual children, Priuses, modern furniture, and hating corporations. These are not the desires of white people. They are the desires of relatively wealthy people and I'm a little disgusted that it is encouraging people to conflate the ideas of being white and being well-off. Don't get me (entirely) wrong: it's funny and I find myself identifying with the posts. I'm just offended by the title and the "white" theme... am I just not getting it? Am I overcompensating for my own latent racism?
Thursday, March 06, 2008
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5 comments:
As someone who has heard you profess your love for 75 out of the 82 items on the list of Stuff White People Like, I have to say that I think you're just fighting with the reality of how white you really are. Perhaps they should add "White people like telling themselves that they cannot be stereotyped" to the list. But then, that one applies to you, too.
Love,
Leslie
Do "white people" engage in "thinking about going over to the bodega (corner store) to watch the news in Spanish with the shop keeper"? Maybe you do 75 of the 82 things, but those 82 are things that MOST people like, and you like a bunch of stuff that's never even been considered for the list.
True, very true. I just don't think it's meant to be taken so seriously. Sure, a lot of people like a lot of those things, but let's face it, the list applies to a lot of us white folk. Can't we just sit back and giggle at ourselves? Does it have to made into something larger than it is because the title is "stuff white people like" instead of something more accurate? Would you be less offended if the title was "Stuff relatively wealthy, new-age yuppie white people like" and it still all applied?
I still love Chrystina, a lot.
I'm not contesting being "white" and all the dorky things that go along with that. But I think that sitting back and giggling in the face of something that subversively encourages racism and the conflation of race with socio-economic status is not something I want to do. So yes, I would be less offended if the title were to change -- especially if we left "white" out of it.
I still love Leslie a lot too.
Girls, girls!
There's no lack of love, or even any thought of such things. I take the MP's post (and the comments herein) as a healthy curosity regarding whether self-analysis is really possible, and if so, is it distorted or less than the full data set when focused through the lens of another's sense of humor?
Blah blah blah blah blah . . .
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