I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile; for no particular reason I wanted to wait until “Stuff White People Like” got to 100 things. It’s a funny site, well written and incisive, and it has rocketed through the cultural phenomenon stages: it got popular, it spawned numerous imitations, then it gained mainstream exposure, then the backlash articles came, and now it’s a pop culture reference that will eventually fade and become uncool. What’s on display though is not white people in general, it’s a very specific subset of white people. Christian Lander, the guy primarily responsible for it, is aware of that and it’s sort of the point.
Reading the site for the first time I felt more provincial than I think I ever have in my life. My feelings of displacement can be summed up in a single, glaring omission: Cabelas. If I were starting a list of things white people like, Cabelas would probably be number one. It covers all the rural (if you’re being kind) or redneck (if you’re not) stuff that Stuff White People Like completely misses. This includes big things like hunting and fishing and smaller niche stuff like camping and off-roading.
Let’s just briefly go over some of the things I’m talking about here. Jesus and the Bible are nowhere to be found. A search of the word “Jesus” turns up one thing (Religions that their parents don’t belong to) and a search of the word “Bible” yields zero. Even the near ubiquitous WWJD acronym brings nothing, not even a derisive post about the ironic poseurs who’ve thoroughly mocked the overly zealous morons who started the trend in the first place. Better known redneck fare like NASCAR and country music are omitted as well. Even the recent revival of Johnny Cash hasn’t been enough to crack the list (when there’s a Merle Haggard revival, then I’ll be impressed), though “Pretending to Care about Country Music” might make a good addition.
What makes all this funny, at least to me, is that many of the things currently on the list are being mocked for the way they let one subset of white people (the urbane sophisticates) distance themselves from other white people they mostly don’t want to be associated with (the diesel engine set).
For example, microbreweries (23) and wine (24) are on the list, but Bud Light is nowhere to be found. Also, marijuana (33) makes the cut, but methamphetamines don’t. Are you fucking kidding me? Marijuana is the most pan-racial drug there is! With the possible exceptions of huffing glue and paint thinner, meth is the whitest of ways to kill brain cells.
Check out Living by the water (51). The following activities are listed as reasons white people live by the water: “swimming, kayaking, canoeing, sailing.” Not one of those involves an engine. Then there’s this telling passage, which I will quote in full:
On the west coast, all white people want to live as close to the beach as possible. One look at the demographics for Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach will reveal this fact through tangible numbers.
On the East Coast, many white people dream of owning ocean front property in New England, where they can make their lives as close as possible to a J. Crew catalog.
And in the landlocked states, the dream of lakefront property is alive and well.
“And in the landlocked states”. Except even there the geography is incorrect because the post completely ignores the Gulf Coast (home of the Redneck Riviera) and the southern Atlantic coast where power-boating is a lot more common than “sailing”.
I make no claim to rural authenticity, I’m quite certain that there is no such thing. But I did attend a high school that had a corn field next to it (we used to hide in there when we’d go outside for gym class) and I’d be willing to wager that half of my graduating class wouldn’t understand a damn thing on the current list as anything but ways rich kids looked down on them.
And that’s the gag, Public Radio (44), The Sunday New York Times (46), and The Wire (85) can be used as exclusionary devices, to separate educated, liberal white people from the majority of white people. You can, of course, head over to Free Republic or Town Hall any time you like and find plenty of white people who don’t fit any of these caricatures. Those white people are as far removed from White People as it’s possible to get, nevertheless it is as White People that white people are perceived in most of popular culture.
Maybe that’s because popular culture largely comes from big cities where most white people act like White People. But maybe it’s indicative of something larger, apparent here only because white people constitute the largest ethnic group in the country. It’s not a cleavage between liberals and conservatives or red states and blue states; it’s a cleavage between the connected and the disconnected. Disconnected minorities, of whatever skin tone, ancestry or cultural affiliation, just don’t have the numbers to make their absence from popular culture easily noticed.
Stuff White People Like is a blog that makes fun of the kind of white people who often write blogs. It’s soon to be a book that makes fun of the kind of white people you’ll find in a Borders or a Barnes & Noble. That gives it an aura of universality, “Oh, that’s just what white people are like.” Except that it isn’t what white people are like, it’s not even what most white people are like; mostly it’s just the ones who happen to live in cities and spend a lot of time on-line. Which in turn raises another question, what else are we all missing? What else is being obscured by auras of universality, not only around White People, but any other group you care to name? That’s the joke I want in on.
For all I know someone’s doing that already, sadly though a Google search for “Stuff Redneck People Like” yielded nothing.
