Stuff White People Like
By Psyche | February 25, 2008
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Stuff White People Like is a satirical blog “devoted to stuff that white people like” in the form of short, snappy posts stereotyping “white culture”. Its about page describes it as “a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like,” concluding that “They are pretty predictable.”
I wonder how predictable its wildfire spread across the Internet was?1 It’s barely two months old and already boasts more than 3.6 million hits.
There are seventy-five numbered posts as of this writing, where we learn that white people like Recycling, Bicycles, Natural Medicine, Japan, Kitchen Gadgets, and Awareness, among other things.
While it could be argued that the blog might be better titled “Stuff Hipsters Like” or “Stuff Yuppies Like” or, better still, “Middle Class Stereotypes”, this wouldn’t garner nearly as much controversy, and though this blog is young (the first post is dated January 18th, 2008), it already seems to thrive on it.
The blog is the brainchild of Christian Lander, a self-confessed “white person” himself. He writes:
Well remember a lot of the white people I’m lampooning (including myself) always can laugh at the comic view stuff because we’re like “yeah, those OTHER white people, they are ridiculous.” I grew up in Chinatown, in Toronto East Chinatown. a neighborhood bordered by a housing project, greektown, and little india. the neighborhood was always safe, but it’s gentrified like crazy in the past ten years. but I would say growing up there made me aware of whiteness right away. I knew most chinese slurs for white people by age 10. but at the same time, I wasn’t isolated. Toronto produces some pretty diverse crews of friends
The Assimilated Negro, “Stuff White People Like Interview: Part 1“
This should clear up some of the confusion regarding his ethnicity. He further clarifies: “My blog is not done to demean white people, it’s meant to point out common experiences. I write about the things that I like, I’m implicated in all of this.”2 Implicated to the extent that the blog is filled with pictures of himself: “I’m the dude recycling. and the guy at dim sum. and the guy holding the iphone. and the bicycle picture is my bicycle.”3
It’s all very cute, I hear you say, but what’s this got to do with a blog devoted to exploring philosophy, spirituality and the occult? Well, it turns out “white people” also like yoga and religions their parents don’t belong to. Oh.
Mark Kingwell’s comments in a recent issue of Descant, though referring specifically to fashion, are relevant here:
Exposing the workings of the system does not challenge the system, because the consumers are happy with their constant dissatisfaction of desire as are those who manufacture those dissatisfactions. Indeed, in an irony now more familiar even than the original critical theory, critical theorizing about the fashion system has the reverse of its intended effect. Instead of dispelling false consciousness, analysis of false consciousness now redoubles it by providing ’savvy’ consumers with the second-order delusion that they ‘get’ the system despite their participation in it. Advertisers and magazines, no idiots in their own terms, quickly adopt this rhetorical position of ’savviness’ and serve it up as part of the luxuriant codings they carry.
Mark Kingwell, “The Theory; or, The Fashion System Revisited”, Descant 138: Fashion
What can I do but admit I dig its irony? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really must head for Whole Foods to shop for expensive vegan sandwiches while listening to indie music on my iPod.
(Great. Now I can’t get that NOFX song out of my head.)
Footnotes:
- Including the Toronto LiveJournal Community which first brought it to my attention. [back]
- See Part 2 of the interview at The Assimilated Negro. [back]
- See Part 1 of the interview at The Assimilated Negro. [back]
I agree with what you’re saying here, that the site is fun, but hypocritical too (if that’s what you meant to say). It also trivializes with its humor a topic that too few whites are willing to take seriously, that is, their own whiteness. I blog about whiteness in a different way, actually; check it out, eh?
“Hypocritical” is the wrong word, Landers is deliberately poking fun at himself – many of the pictures are of him and feature his stuff.