stuff white people like

There’s this website stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. I don’t like it.

Sorry, what? Oh, fine, I’ll explain. Before, in a similar vein, there was Black People Love Us, which is basically hilarious, because it plays on some very real race dynamics. And it was a brief, succinct, and effective parody.

Sally’s always saying: “You go girl!” while “raising the roof” to mainstream hip-hop tracks at cheesy bars. That’s fun! I relate to that.

I mean, come on. That’s hilarious. And it’s funny because it’s a parody of genuine interactions between black and white people that we’ve all experienced to some degree. “Stuff white people like”, on the other hand, is stupid, and you should stop liking it. “Ha ha, man, us white people are so lame!! GET IT?? Oh man, white people sure love facebook.” What? I think it’s endemic of some creeping sense of self-loathing tied to race. It’s like if you took white liberal guilt, applied it specifically to race, and cranked the volume to 11. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some funny stuff up there. Like this article about people studying abroad:

If you need to make up your own study abroad experience, they all pretty much work the same way. You arrived in Australia not knowing anybody, you went out to the bar the first night and made a lot of friends, you had a short relationship with someone from a foreign country, you didn’t learn anything, and you acquired a taste for something (local food, beer, fruit). This latter point is important because you will need to be able to tell everyone how it is unavailable in your current country.

This is pretty funny. And we all know these people. But what the hell does this have to do with being white? I know black people that wouldn’t shut the fuck up about their trip to Africa for a week and how they really connected with their heritage, and I’m like “dude, you grew up in Long Island.”

That’s all I got.


Comments

we are without a doubt related

I don’t like the way it conflates “white people” with “white urban upper-middle-class semi-bohemians in the 25-34 age bracket”.

Wait, are you implying that there are poor white people?

I had never seen blackpeopleloveus.com. That IS funny.

I hate stuffwhitepeoplelike.com too. Not only for the reasons you say, but because it makes it seem like it’s somehow really uncool to like the stuff white people like, ESPECIALLY if you’re not white. And that just seems like a guilty form of elitism.

I might even suggest coastal-dwelling, but otherwise, spot on. About 80% of the stuff I ever saw on the site mystified me, because apparently lower middle class rubes from flyover states need not apply. And the other 20% made me wonder why it’s supposed to be so funny. Because I’m such an uncool white person? No idea.

I don’t hate the site, but I see it as rather pointless for me to read because, well, I am white and about 90% of it is true for me. But when our Indian (by ancestry) brought the book in and laughed at it, I realized that maybe it has its place for teaching other people about us standard issue bourgeois white folk.

‘And that just seems like a guilty form of elitism.’

Seems to be so (guilty form of elitism).

I live outside North America and find it very sad that the majority of the North American public finds this ‘harmless satire’. It just reinforces a type of ‘bigotry’ regarding stereotypes and race that are typical to the continent.

Many middle-upper class whites and non-whites in the world’s major cities enjoy most of this ‘stuff’ listed in the blog/book. Many would find the author’s classification of this ‘stuff’ only being liked by ‘whites’, rather curious and typical of North American thinking.

The book/blog just reinforces typical North American ignorance regarding racial stereotyping …

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