White People Stuff

[mrdankelly]

The Stuff White People Like blog has turned into one of those subjects where I can't stop writing about how much it annoys me. It's a bad situation. If I protest too much about a bit of Internet trifle, I look like a kook. Maybe it's best to scrap the essay and just run the points that I feel are most salient to the issue

Comments

[ortho_bob]

I don't think it's right-wing. It's that apolitical, post-Gawker, post-Go Fug Yerself, I'm-a-little-too-old-to-be-a-hipster-but-I-still-want-to-distance-myself-from-the-mainstream, must-provide-a-metacommentary-on-everything mindset that once was funny (YES, WHEN WE DID IT, HA HA) but has become too diluted.

It's Bobby Hill doing his "White people drive like this" routine, although I feel obliged to whisper the dread words Nathan Barley.

Have they featured Obama yet, btw?

[mrdankelly]

Yeah, I keep going back and forth on this. Left? Right? Just plain stupid 'n cynical hipsters trying to sound smarter than they are? Arggh. It;s Karl Rove's new wingnut stealth comedy project, I'm telling you man...

It's Bobby Hill doing his "White people drive like this" routine

Lord God, I thought the same thing, except I was thinking of Homer Simpson watching a black comedian delivering the same line. "AH-HAHAHAHAHA! AH-HAHAHAHAHA!!! IT'S TRUE! WE ARE SO LAME!"

[sclerotic_rings]

Then full speed ahead on the essay. You probably have about thirty or forty salient points that none of the rest of us would have ever considered, and you'll make it funny, too.

[saltbox]

I think what annoys me more is how so many people really like it, because I Just Don't Get It. I mean, I kind of get what it's trying to mock or whatever it's doing; what I don't get is why it's supposed to be so amusing. (Then again, I'm not so much into humor anyway, unless it's either overly academic humor or dark humor about serial killers.)

Part of it, though, is that I don't like its trivializing of some of the things that I think are objectively good things, like recycling and farmer's markets and nonprofits.

(p.s. I think they have mentioned Barack Obama.)

[ayun]

The blog had just enough of an out-group vibe to be genuinely interesting to me, as well as funny, though I found it funnier to skim the titles and think of them as shorthand: Architecture, Netflix, Marijuana. Helped that the context I saw it in (an honest-to-gosh discussion of race-marked tastes) predisposed me to find it at least semi-sincere.

I'd love to read a totally sincere blog on passing for middle class and/or socially white (by which I mean "unremarkable"), just because so much learned taste is never discussed explicitly. Like the "Apple Products" entry would include advice on how to navigate a conversation in which everyone assumes you want and can arguably afford an iPhone.

[buscemi]

That site annoys me, too. Whoever writes it falls into the Church Lady category of, "Yes, we like ourselves, don't we?"