Stuff White People Like: Redux

LAST WEEK, WHEN THIS site was mentioned in a Houston Chronicle story about the web-phenom, Stuff White People Like, The Weekly Rader received more hits in one day than it had received for the entire calendar year of 2008. Clearly, the interest was less in TWR and more in what TWR had to say about what white people like. One thing I do know, white people like Stuff White People Like.

There is no question, the site is crazy, over-the-top, steal your beer popular. In fact, at the time of this particular post, Mr. Lander's site had over 17 million hits since whitening up the web in early January. Indeed, the main question the reporter had for me was why SWPL is so popular. Though I was quoted correctly, there is much more to say about this site and why it has struck such a chord.

The first reason it's popular is because it is benign. The topics are funny, the photos are oh-so-recognizably vanilla, and the tone is non-threatening. In short, as I say in my previous post and as many others have observed, the site is not really about race but about other things like class, yuppiness, and coolness.

Because the site is innocuous, people feel free to post unfettered. Were the site really about race, racial politics, Affirmative Action, slavery, Native American genocide, Japanese interment, or modern day hate crimes, the site would have a different look and feel. It would lose its breezy self-mocking tone. Right now, the site does not ask to be taken seriously. If it confronted true racial problems (racial profiling, graduation rates, anti-Arab sentiment), then it would have to change its presentation.

So, one reason the site works is because it points to harmless signposts of racial differences that we all know exist. We are all painfully aware of racial divides in the United States (see my post about Obama and race, for example), and SWPL gives us permission to laugh at the commodities that are the fetishes of a certain kind of whiteness--the whiteness of San Francisco, Austin, New York, Seattle, Portland, Boston, and Chicago. These signposts of whiteness are iPods and coffee rather than the Stars and Bars or the swastika. In other words, they are more about consumption than skin color, more about acquisition than Aryans.

The site pokes fun at cultural affluence as practiced by left-leaning college educated people in urban areas. As I write elsewhere, I grew up among many White people in rural Oklahoma, and almost no White person I know in Oklahoma fam land likes anything on this site. Stuff White Oklahomans like (which, as I type this sounds like a winning Web site), would include Chicken Fried Steak, trailer parks, iced tea, OU football, the 4th of July, watermelon, The Old Testament, and Ronald Reagan. I don't foresee any of these on SWPL, though I guarantee that in the United States, more white people like Chicken Fried Steak than Asian Fusion.

One more reason SWPL has resonated is due to its very smart awareness of what I call "Overculture," which is the subject of my next book. Stuff White People Like is fantastic at mapping the icons of Overculture--those popular texts that indicate an ubiquity in American consumer and popular culture. For example, Starbucks plays music heard on The Wire, which gets written about in Slate, which has an agreement with NPR, which reviews books available in Borders, which sells coffee and expensive sandwiches. Overculture is a new kind of cultural map that circumscribes everything that has hit a tipping point, everything educated people should either consume or be aware of--any text, whether it is a book, a film, a TV show, food, a city, or a belief that can help shape identity.

Stuff White People Like has struck this chord of Overculture like no other text, so it will stay popular as long as there are icons of identity formation out there that make their way onto America's cultural playground. As long as they stay on the playground (and not the battlefield), this will continue to be fun. If SWPL really turns racial, though, play time will be over.

Stuff White People Like: A Blog Review

OUR FAVORITE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, Mike Spencer, wrote in with some smart observations and questions about a relatively new blog called Stuff White People Like (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/). The blog has only been up a couple of months, but it's already received almost 2.5 million hits--roughly 2.5 more than this one. Though it's difficult to tell much about the main personalities behind the blog, it appears to be curated mainly by a guy who posts under the name Clander, a resident of Los Angeles who rides a bicycle (see post #61). His ethnicity is undetermined, but he has a disarming ability to look at mainstream American culture the way an anthropologist might see some heretofore undiscovered tribe.

Each entry on the site features a snazzy picture and an example of stuff White people like such as products (coffee, tea), stores (Whole Foods), items (kitchen gadgets, Apple products), personalities (Mos Def, John Stewart, Ira Glass), experiences (difficult break ups, marathons, recycling), ideas (knowing what's best for poor people), and culture (Juno, NPR, irony). Most of the entries are pretty funny and in general, delivered in a self-aware droll tone that endears more than annoys. There is a playful mocking of the fetishes of upper-middle class North America that is hart to resist.

In his classic investigatorial way, Spencer hits on the main issues of the blog? Does the race of the person posting affect the tone of the post? And, is the site about race or, as Spencer correctly intuits, really about class?

At present, the entries are warmly sarcastic. There is a sort of meta-teasing involved. No one really asserts superiority or inferiority on account of race. The site is much more about icons of accomplishment and learning.

Which makes the site, as P. I. Spencer notes, about the icons of economic class, and, more specifically, left-leaning urban markers of class. A conservative site in the rural South on "stuff white people like" would probably not include Michel Gondry (#68), Sarah Silverman (#52), or Asian Fusion food (#45). I grew up in Oklahoma around a lot of White people, and pretty much no one I know in Oklahoma likes John Stewart, the Prius, marathons, NPR, Juno, or Mos-Def. They sure don't like Barack Obama (see #8 and my previous piece about Obama and the Plains).

What the site gets right, though, is how American culture associates mainstream urban and suburban whiteness with yuppiness. There is a kind of predictability absent of edge or self-awareness that infuses a great deal of what we might call literate commercial culture. SWL does a nice job of poking fun of the things a lot of us might be embarrased to live with but don't want to live without.