I've been thinking about race lately. Partly it's because when one teaches post-Civil War history, it's pretty hard to ignore. Partly it's been in the context of the current political season, and the on-going question of whether racism or sexism is the bigger unsolved problem. Certainly Obama's recent Speech offers powerful commentary on the experience of race in this country.
Right now I am getting the most pleasure and having the most thoughts provoked by the site Stuff White People Like.
The site works well enough on the surface, as a collection of observations about stereotypical behavior displayed by a certain category of white Americans. As a number of commenters note, it also engages with issues of class and regional identity, and ethnicity. Where it really works for me is in the way it cleverly and quietly satirizes the larger social activity of reducing a given racial group to a stereotype based on a small, not necessarily representative, subset of that racial group. Such stereotyping has typically been done to racial groups that lack power and numbers, and typically such stereotypes are negative; even the positive ones, though - think "blacks are good at sports" or "Asians are good at math" - carry within them a dialogue about who gets to say what about whom, and whose stereotypes are given the weight of social approval and whose are not.
So it is both hilarious and intriguing to see white people reduced down to a bunch of liberal neo-yuppies of the sort typically found in the Style section of the New York Times.
It is also productive to read the comments, some because they are in fact insightful and often funny, others because they illustrate the dynamics of race in our society so well. Not least is the way that white commenters often fail to recognize the ways privilege has operated (and still operates) to protect them from more malicious stereotyping with the weight of our legal and social institutions behind it. (Making fun of white people in this country simply is not the same as making fun of other racial groups, despite the surface similiarities - and that's part of the joke.)
There are the white people who are offended because the site appears to be mocking white people in general (many assume that the site author is a non-white person - which is not the case).
There are the white people who are offended because they don't fit the stereotype and resent having it applied to them.
There are the white people who express enthusiastic recognition of themselves in the posts; there are those who express rueful recognition of themselves in some of the posts (I'm in this camp, as I sit here on my Patagonia-clad ass while typing on my blog on my Apple iBook and drinking Britta-filtered water from my Sigg water bottle).
There are the self-identified people belonging to other racial groups expressing their enthusiasm at seeing white people being given this all-too-familiar treatment. Sometimes this produces angry rejoinders from the offended white people - but this is surprisingly rare.
There are others who want to add their own observations about what white people like.
A few express a certain chagrin at how much they themselves resemble these stereotypes when it comes to their own choices in food, clothing, etc.
And there are a very few (belonging to a variety of racial groups, at least when self-identified - not everyone does) who understand what the author of the blog is doing with these stereotypes - though the more aware are cognizant of the possibility that this sort of meta-reading may itself be part of what "white people like" and that what we're seeing as satire may be more a massive joke on all of us.
(Hence perhaps the calls from a regular contingent for a post about how one of the things that white people like is reading and commenting on Stuff White People Like.)
In the end, the reason why I like it is that it does a nice job embodying the complexities of the issue and how challenging it is to think about them clearly.
That, and it makes me laugh.
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