"Blue Collar Comedy Tour ..."

Apropos of stuff White People Like ... can anybody explain how Scott Miller and the Commonwealth ends up being the "house band"? Given that 0% of Foxworthy's regular audience had ever heard of him, I figure that whoever was running the Foxworthy tour decided that if they had to listen to those 4 guys tell the same jokes every night, at least they would get to listen to a great band and songwriter every night. But who knows? Anybody?

Methinks you are giving the author of the blog too much credit...

White people like Barack Obama because... "Because white people are afraid that if they don’t like him that they will be called racist." Poignant, thoughtful, incisive analysis like this clearly deserves a book deal. It is obviously helping us define ourselves and giving us a "sense of belonging", right Ezra?

I'm into Asian fusion and Obama, but I don't even get HBO or Showtime, and watch very little TV, so no Wire. And I don't like to cook (and work evenings to boot). Does this mean I can't get in? Waaah!

The National Lampoon, back when it was funny, had a great set of white-sploitation movie posters including Founder and Schraft's Big Score along with a sample issue of Ivory magazine, the white version of Ebony.

beckya57:
You're still okay: #28 Not Having a TV

I spent over an hour at SWPL yesterday, and I'll admit that some pangs of [something] were racking my bod and mind.

I especially liked the story related by the young(?) female who moved into a mixed neighborhood (from a homogeneous one) and faced a barrage of comments from friends and co-workers about "You live where?" and "Isn't that a dangerous neighborhood?". Unspoken, but clearly communicated racial fear.

I'm not so sure about whether the site is aimed at the upper-middle class whites, since reading blogs is probably a class phenomena largely anyway.

But it's good reading, and good for challenging unthought assumptions and motivations. It deserves success and exposure, IMO.

A lot of white people like the site, I find it hilarious to laugh at yuppies. They really are a laughable bunch of people. Still, few things make poor whites tune out any discussion or racism than the 'white = wealthy' trope.

This site does highlight it, but in such a way as is likely to go over the heads of many. A lot of people do read the site as 'you're not really white unless you're rich too.'

But hey, I like that anger stoked personally. To many white people ignore how fucked up things are because they can say 'at least I'm white.'. That gets harder when they learn that they aren't viewed as white either, not really anyway.

The site is definitely funny, especially for those of us who either 1) grew up in socially educated, liberal circles in the Northeast (including me) or 2) really hate the first group (these two groups seem to overlap a lot, which is how we get both radical leftists and neocons).

With that said, Julian Sanchez did bring up a good point a while back about how the site tends to exclude minorities of similar tastes, politics and educational background. Such people then get relegated into the "acting white" box. Elite intellectuals and academics like Cornell West, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Eric Dyson and the late Edward Said probably could see a lot of themselves in the site as well, but I doubt anyone would accuse them of "acting white" (especially considering all of the baggage that carries) in good faith.

Personally, I get my taste for things like Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry movies and Haruki Murakami and Zadie Smith novels a lot more from my mom, an immigrant of Indian descent, than my dad, a white guy who finds Bob Hope and John Wayne entertaining. My mom's family has tended to be educated (the fact my mom didn't become a doctor or a lawyer was a bit shocking to some members of my extended family), which probably has something to do with it. The article is right that the site is definitely as much about class as race, but it's not called "Stuff Educated Liberals Like." As such, the site does seem to implicitly exclude Northeastern educated liberal minorities of the same tastes as inauthentic or something.

I've written a bit on the invisibility of whiteness as a white teacher in a classroom with mostly "minority" (hate that word) students, if anyone would like to take a read!

http://teachforpeace.blogspot.com/2007/10/practicing-what-you-preech.html

The article is right that the site is definitely as much about class as race, but it's not called "Stuff Educated Liberals Like."

Part of the joke is that Educated Yuppies have, in many parts of the country, managed to co-opt the "white identity" for themselves. Or, rather, that group of people views themselves as what it means to be "white."

Ezra, however, explains the popularity of the site best:

reading the site gives a lot of folks a warm sense of belonging. They're part of something

Plus, the fact that the author is a pale white city-dwelling graduate school dropout makes reading the blog seem like a bit inside joke for those of us inside the group.

If some Texas Republican starting mocking as anti-American certain voters as a bunch of "gentrifying, Wire-watching, fancy-furniture-buying, Macintosh-toting, scarf-wearing, rugby playing out-of-touch elitists," we'd tell him to fuck off and die and/or point out the hypocrisy of the claim.

As it is, with the guy who writes it, reading the blog provides the experience of being able to nudge each other, laugh at the entries, and gives us the feeling of participating in a shared experience.

The site isn't very funny to me. I don't relate at all to most of the things on that site, and neither do any of my white friends. The Wire? Asian fusion? Not having a tv?

As ezra points out, these are yuppie interests, not relatable to even 90% of the white population. Luckily for the site, yuppies tend to have a lot of disposable income, and spend lots of time on the internet.

"See, black guys, black guys drive like this. But white guys, white guys drive like this!"

"It's true, it's true, we're so lame!"

Is there more to this seemingly-epically-banal site than that or am I missing something?

It seems to me that they might as well just have called it Stuff Rich People Like right off, and saved themselves the over- *and* under-inclusiveness.

Lots of rich people are white and vice versa, but the exceptions all disprove the idea that SWPL or the cultural phenomenon it exemplifies/mocks/whatever is about whiteness.

Klein: "I think that's what white people -- or what white yuppies -- like about the site, too. Yes, it's mocking them."

actually, this is the main appeal of the site. white yuppies love to mock themselves. This is no cute pastime--it is a serious psychological disorder, rooted in a deep sense of self-loathing and hatred of one's own existence. the Stuff White People Like phenomenon is just one prominent example.

contracting this life-hating disease, or worse, spreading it to other people, is nothing to be proud of.

Stuff White People Like = Bourdieu's Distinction done for laughs.

white yuppies love to mock themselves. This is no cute pastime--it is a serious psychological disorder, rooted in a deep sense of self-loathing and hatred of one's own existence.

raft, people who are economically and culturally secure in themselves do not exhibit the sort of defensiveness that you expect others to have when subjected to such mockery. Particularly when mockery is done by members of one's own group, which went on long before SWPL came around.

Mocking the poor, the homeless, the marginalized, and the lower-middle classes can be downright mean. Joking around with my friends about how we're all a bunch of highly educated stereotypical hipsters, on the other hand, is pretty funny.

I was about to respond to raft by saying that "you're half right but, you know, not all mockery indicates hatred of the target", when it occurred to me: maybe he *doesn't* know that. There certainly are some people who only mock people they hate. This is a rather different species of mockery than the friendly kind (and most self-mockery is of the friendly sort, because otherwise it really would be self-hating).

Maybe we need different words for the hateful and non-hateful forms of humor, so people won't continue confusing them.

Thinking about this further: friendly mockery relies on the assumption that the target can have flaws without becoming a bad person, and pointing out those flaws is not an attack on the person. An absolutist worldview with no room for that kind of complex view of people may be incompatible with that kind of humor. (Such people must be very confused if they happen upon something like a Friars Club Roast...)

Yeah, that site got me banned from mydd.com. I used that site in a response to Armstrong over at his blog mydd.com. Basically, during the Wright affair, he kept saying what Wright was saying was offensive. I asked him why and in what way. He responded by telling me that he is, well, essentially "post-race" because he's spent time in Africa. So, I posted a link to the site's mention of white people using their travels to place like Africa so they could a) become the expert on all things related to Africa and b) deflect from any discussion that makes them feel uncomfortable about race. In other words, I asked a specific question about Wright, and got back a response about his travels to Africa. I wanted to also joke back that I went to two upper echelon predominantly white universities, and by his theory- I am also post race, but somehow the mirror always shows me with a deeper tan than that.

I think STWL can be funny, but it has some real weaknesses, and yes, I know that pointing this out reveals me to be a white person according to the list (#101: Getting Offended).

I'm not so much offended as I am annoyed at the laziness of the analysis, which falls into the David Brooks/Maureen Dowd school of social criticism that is far more predictable ("ha! ha! liberals are do-gooder pussies!") than actually penetrating or even funny.

The main problem with equating "white" with "well-off" and "educated" is that it implies that all people who are not white are poor and uneducated, and it conflates the well-off and well-schooled with the vast majority of white people who have no or only some college education, make less than $60,000 a year, use PCs, eat at chain restaurants, proudly own TVs, and never shop at Whole Foods. You know, the majority of all people in this country, regardless of ethnicity.

In fact, labeling a relatively narrow subset of well-educated urban-dwelling 20- and 30-somethings as "white people" seems to be symptomatic of the supposed navel-gazing mindset of that very group that the book claims to mock.

(Yes, there are "millions" of these white hipsters, but just a few million. By rough math from census data, there's about 15 million white people between the ages of 18 and 40 with bachelor's or better; and it's a safe assumption a lot of those people were suburbs-bound with business-related majors and do not adhere to the stereotypes of the blog.)

Also, I hate the derisive tone of the posts on "Being Offended," "Diversity," "Barack Obama," "Awareness," "Having Black Friends," "Being the Only White Person in The Room," "Knowing What's Best For Poor People," and "Being an Expert on YOUR Culture."

Cut and paste together those posts, search/replace "white people" with "liberals" and you've got a rough draft of either Ann Coulter or Jonah Goldberg's next book.

Yeah, I'm white. Yeah, I like a lot of the shit on that list.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to be curious, tolerant, and open-minded. And I hate that that this site seems to imply that a) these beliefs are a superficial trend and b) these beliefs are something that only white people care about.

And yes, I would be a lot more okay with the mocking of my sincerely held liberal beliefs, if it was the subject of just a couple light-hearted posts rather than a half-dozen nasty ones.

Tyro: "raft, people who are economically and culturally secure in themselves

i don't know about economically, but they aren't culturally secure in anything, which is my point

there is a curious species of 21st century american who would rather be Guatemalan peasant women than the white rich educated liberals they really are, and this is the tragedy of the self-loathing yuppie.

uhm- every critic that is being leveled here can be leveled against any sature or humor or entertainment. its suppose to get a truth, not all truths and certainly not provide a dissertation while doing so. lighten up. this is a little like a woman I know who hated Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor etc because she says she didn't grow up like that.

there is a curious species of 21st century american who would rather be Guatemalan peasant women than the white rich educated liberals they really are

Yes, and those white rich educated liberals who feel that way are usually self-aware enough to acknowledge the silliness of that attitude. In any case, the people who genuinely, truly feel that way are the people who indignantly argue that SWPL isn't funny. Which, strangely, includes yourself.

Of course, the author of SWPL can be hit-or-miss. Being witty is hard, but raft seems to take it a bit too personally.

white yuppies love to mock themselves.This is no cute pastime--it is a serious psychological disorder, rooted in a deep sense of self-loathing and hatred of one's own existence.

This is just what pisses me off about this bullshit business of setting of white yuppies from everyone else.

Are you telling me that blue-collar whites, urban blacks, Chinese-Americans, and Mexican-Americans don't like mocking themselves? Or if they do, they secretly hate themselves?

That's going to be a shock to every Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Roseanne Barr, Tyler Perry, Martin Lawrence, Margaret Cho, and Carlos Mencia fan out there.

i didn't say SWPL wasn't funny. Some of the stuff is, some isn't. i did say that the SWPL phenomenon is emblematic of a life-hating disease among white yuppies, and it is.

Okay, here's my real point, put far more succinctly:

"Stuff White People Like" is the hipster Jeff Foxworthy.

And Jeff Foxworthy sucks.

and again i repeat- so do you feel the same way about Eddie Murphy, Red Foxx, Margaret Cho, Richard Pryor, etc. They all do the type of humor you are bitchin' about

Well, there's a question of quality. Margaret Cho has a lot more interesting thing to say about gender than Asianess. Richard Pryor is brilliant. Eddie Murphy used to be but now puts out utter crap that actually verges towards black self-loathing. Red Foxx is a little before my time, but I think he's somewhere in the middle of the quality spectrum. My beef with this SWPL is that it's only really funny to a [liberal arts degree-holding young] white person if you have no self-awareness and haven't noticed that there's thousands of other assholes just like you with with the same taste in music and the same sense of fashion. I suppose the big joke is that this educated subculture is conforming to a supposedly non-conformist ethos, but all group cultural identities are based on some notion of non-conformity with everyone else.

Black hip-hop culture places itself at odds with white middle class values, playing up the perils of urban life using them as justifications for materialism and hedonism; white Toby Keith-NASCAR culture places itself at odds with coastal elites and cultural diversity. White McMansion/golf culture (David Brooks's beloved "Patio Man") places itself above the working class and against the more academic/urban elites.

That's the ideological basis of all subcultural groups: people who wish to set themselves apart from the rest of society and therefore conform to the fashions, values, and tastes that demonstrate their non-conformity.

Comedian Martin Mull did this a lot funnier over twenty years ago with his "History of White People In America" books and HBO mock documentaries.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089277/

"Did you know that the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven was at least partially white?"

I think you are over thinking this. It's fine if you don't find it funny,b ut all this analysis is just a bit bizzare from a creative perspective. Its like when I used to write my screenplays. I used to overthink it, but now I try not to. Either its good or not.

"I'm not so much offended as I am annoyed at the laziness of the analysis, which falls into the David Brooks/Maureen Dowd school of social criticism that is far more predictable ("ha! ha! liberals are do-gooder pussies!") than actually penetrating or even funny."

Good point. In SWPL's favor, it was until recently just a blog done for free. Meanwhile BoBo and MoDo get paid by the most respected and famous newspaper in America to peddle pop sociology crap that is just repackaged stereotypes, like how Obama wouldn't fit in at an Applebee's salad bar (probably because Applebee's doesn't have salad bars), white Northeastern educated Ivy-connected former socialists hate themselves (which is basically the life story of Brooks) and how MoDo can't get a date.

"Yeah, I'm white. Yeah, I like a lot of the shit on that list.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to be curious, tolerant, and open-minded. And I hate that that this site seems to imply that a) these beliefs are a superficial trend and b) these beliefs are something that only white people care about.

And yes, I would be a lot more okay with the mocking of my sincerely held liberal beliefs, if it was the subject of just a couple light-hearted posts rather than a half-dozen nasty ones.

Posted by: Philly | July 13, 2008 7:49 PM"

Another good point. There does seem to be a weird implicit presumption in American political discourse (and this seems particularly strong among older conservatives) that white people can never actually be true non- and/or anti-racists, so therefore when white people speak against racism, show shame about things like imperialism and genocide committed by white people or have non-white friends, they are doing it out of some secretly racist, self-loathing masturbatory political impulse. It seems to be driven by the need for conservatives to pretend that the GOP doesn't have a horrible record on race since the Sixties. Basically, the old right seems to believe that a white person can't actually be against racism and in favor of acceptance. At the same time, these same conservatives attack you as racist if you dare point out conservative racism. You would think at this point it's pretty obvious that modern liberals of all races have a better track record overall on race than conservatives.

With that said, I did love the line in the "Knowing about YOUR culture" one about asking "Have you heard the new Andy Lau CD?" I do have a pet peeve of hipsters who listen to J-Pop, Canto-pop, K-Pop, etc. and think this is making them cultured while shunning the American equivalents (that annoying "You're Beautiful" guy) as beneath them. Mindless, bubblegum pop is crap in any language.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to be curious, tolerant, and open-minded. And I hate that that this site seems to imply that a) these beliefs are a superficial trend and b) these beliefs are something that only white people care about.

Thanks, you're the first commenter that's put their finger on what I find disappointing about SWPL.

"White people love feeding their kids fresh vegetables!" "White people like high-quality child care!" "White people love reading!" "White people love to get proctological exams!"

Half the stuff on the list is a cheat-sheet for attacking minorities for "acting white".

Lazy blogger writes lazy book about life in a sixteen block area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Lazy bloggers everywhere cheer.

BTW I think that you, Ezra, are the quintessential "white person" of that blog.