Irrelevance Glorified

Since I consider my Super Power to be the power of the Internet, I had always wanted to just mention weird web sites that I had found. The thing is, I take so long to put stuff up that by the time I want to mention it, the web site in question has gone ‘mainstream’, with national new sites going all Ric Romero on it. So instead of being prescient, I just seem like I’m echoing the talking heads. This is one of those web sites. But it has, for better or worse, clouded my view of the world, so I’ll talk about it anyway.

Stuff White People Like has been going on for a couple of years; the earliest posts on the current incarnation of their website show a date of January 18th, 2008, but I’m pretty sure that’s just when they migrated to their current hosting. The website is, accurately enough, a compendium of things that white people like. While the site owners use the blanket term “white people”, I would consider their focus to be almost exclusively on two groups of white people : yuppie white people and hipster/indie white people. These two groups of people are pretty safe to make fun of. Yuppies are going to be above average on the income scale, so it’s not like you’re picking on poor people or something. As for hipsters and indies, they are often hilariously self-absorbed, so they might not even notice you’re making fun of them. And, since they are white and thus in the dominant ethnic and cultural group in the country, no one is really going to bother calling your racist. Much like almost every other cultural segment of America, both of these cliques engage in hypocrisy that can be pretty amusing when looked at from the outsider’s perspective.

This the brilliance of Stuff White People Like; it is written almost like an anthropologist’s notebook. If you were from another culture, come to study America, how would you blend in with the majority? How would you befriend the white person, gain their trust so you can study them further? The best way is to get them to feel better about themselves, and bring them to places where they will feel comfortable. Perhaps take them to a sandwich shop. Or take them to an ethnic restaurant and compliment them on their adventurous palate. You should be very careful about talking to them about classical music, though, as you might scare them off.

To fully enjoy SWPL, you need to be an outsider, or be willing to put yourself into the outsiders mindset. I first told Cameron and Gina about the website one day over lunch, and when we got back to their apartment, Gina (a Korean woman) rushed to her computer to see if it was as enlightening as I had maintained. For the next hour or so, all Cameron and I heard from the other room was “Oh, it’s so true!” Being graduate-school educated people living in the midwest, we’ve had plenty of experience with yuppies and hipsters (and hipster wanna-bes), and this explains it all!!

Every once in a while the authors throw in a “White People In the News”, for example this post on people doing yoga with their dogs. They take an article, often from The Times, and look at how many SWPL items get covered in the article. In much the same way, ever since I started following this website, I tend to view everything through the prism of SWPL. I might make references to “highly advanced white people”, a phrase I picked up from posts like this one on music piracy. I made two recent trips to Portland and Seattle, two extremely white towns. When in Seattle, Cameron and I went in search of a local doughnut shop, which happened to be in a trendy area. There was a little pond, with lots of people enjoying the weather outside. They were walking their dogs, decked out in their performance clothes. It turned out that the doughnut shop we visited was a local place, and of course it was organic and possibly vegan. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the whiteness of it all. So, as a warning to all you white people out there that I hang out with, if we’re ever somewhere and I just start smirking for no good reason…..don’t take it personally. It might just be all the stuff white people like.

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