White people really really like “Stuff White People Like,” even as they keep dissing it and themselves in a site-flattering, self-flattering manner, as Adam Sternbergh’s pointed out in “Why White People Like ‘Stuff White People Like.’”
But white people can’t stop talking about “Stuff White People Like.” The latest, Joey Rubin in Nerve, who after numerically proving how he likes everything white people like, writes: “Stuff White People Like often lampoons the touristic nature of white people’s interest in the world — the idea that by merely sampling from various cultures, we become more worldly, more sensitive, more refined.”
Alright. So you’re white. And you’re so smart and worldly that you can talk about it and laugh about it and critique it. Get over it.
Here’s stuff giant squids like: “Injured prey, yearning to be free. While we enjoy watching them huddle, shivering, at the bases of cyclopean statues commemorating abstract concepts, we love coursing after them as they pound, panicked, across the pavement. Their grocery-sack boots slap the concrete but offer little firm footing. The bearings of their shopping cart’s wheels cry out for mercy and absolution. None shall be had.”
Photo by Tarnie via Flickr
March 29th, 2008 at 10:11 am
But none of the yapping about SWPL deals with the heart of the critique behind the site, or at least none of the yapping that I’ve read. Namely, the notion of authenticity (and, by extension, identity). When you’re the “default” ethnicity, you get no identity of your own, and therefore you pine after authenticity, after difference, after something unnameable to call your own.
Someone recently described the prose of penis-enlargement spam as expressing a doomed poetry of longing. I’d say that goes for SWPL too.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:57 am
That’s hilar about the spam :) I think I’m in an odd place re: this notion of authenticity for whites b/c I hear a lot about it in academia — for ex we had a class on “Whiteness” taught a couple years ago –
March 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I’m certainly in an odd place about the notion of authenticity (w/ and w/o whites) myself. Many of the things I teach have the concept of identity (in both the good and bad senses) as one of the underpinnings, and I suck at teaching it effectively.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I hope the sabbatical helped :)
April 9th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Look at this hysterical knockoff:
http://stuffwhiteparentslike.com