Stuff Rana Likes

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. 

Comments

[Lorianne]

I find that many of the posts on SWPL are more about class than they are about race. I'm white, but I inhabit the "in between" place of having been raised in a working class Midwestern family, being the first one in my family to go to college, and now working as an academic in the liberal northeast. For me, the humor of SWPL is recognizing things that I and/or my educated white friends do, but my working class folks back in Ohio would never do. Many of the things parodied on SWPL are exactly the things I sometimes find myself saying "WTF?" to myself about when I'm "passing" as a Northeast white liberal. You can send a white working class girl to college, but you can't entirely take the "working class" out of the girl.

[Jill Smith]

Not to mention the blog to... riches? story that is behind it...

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.

Jill beat me to it, but the joke is on the readers in the writer(s) getting a book deal out of this. Another SWPL? ;)

[Amit]

Oops, that previous comment was by me.

[Rana]

Yeah, I read that WaPo article, and was amused by it. White People Like to read books that were blogs and to write blogs that will become books? ;)

Lorianne - you are correct to point out the class element of the posts. I read them (from my position of relative class privilege - even if I'm not always making a lot, I was raised firmly in the middle class) as examples of the way that racial stereotypes are simultaneously class stereotypes (virtually all the negative black stereotypes I'm aware of are also negative stereotypes of poor and working class people, and the positive ones are usually ones that reinforce middle-class norms).

The issue of "passing" is interesting to me, too - there are a lot of people on the site threads who are quite indignant to be lumped with those "other" white people, or who angrily feel that it's not appropriate to make fun of privileged white people - that the only white people with "race" are "white trash" - i.e. poor and working class people who have been negatively stereotyped.

It's a fascinating dynamic of overlapping privileges. It almost makes me wonder how it would look if it were viewed through a gender lens as well. (I didn't notice such, particularly, but I wasn't looking for it actively, so if it's there, it's more subtle than overt.)

[miguel]

It's always interesting to interact with white non-Japanese here in Japan who've lived here for a while and have had to deal with suddenly no longer having the position of privileges and often having to listen to racist comments or not having advantages in situations that back home they would take for granted. It's even more interesting when I sit around with them while they rage at the society around them and then they deny when I tell them that it is the same for me back in their homes.