If you blog long enough, you'll discover that there are at least 100 people out there saying the same thing you are, and the vast majority of them are saying it better than you do. This isn't to discourage the 20 loyal readers I have, but to point to this book review of Stuff White People Like (which is also a blog).
The very funny Stuff White People Like holds up an unflattering mirror to upper middle-class liberals. You know the type: dressed in shorts and Free Tibet t-shirts, they drive their Obama bumper sticker-adorned Toyota Priuses – iPods blazing ‘black music that black people don’t listen to anymore’ – to their local farmer’s markets. There, they stuff organic veggies and free-range chicken into reusable shopping bags, before getting ready for yoga class, followed by an oh-so-ironic 80s night or a dinner party with friends.
Of course, you don’t have to be white to be one of the ‘white people’ that Lander satirises. As he says, ‘this is fundamentally about class, though there is a race element to it for sure’. He explains that ‘white people’ is shorthand for those ‘who don’t have to worry about paying the rent, who have followed college degrees that are based more on their interests or appearing smart than on any actual economic application. They are people who are doing things that appear to be beneficial to the world but are essentially just being used as status symbols.’
Stuff White People Like sounds like every poster and commenter on virtually every liberal blog I've read in the last five years.
I'm often astonished at the ridiculousness of comments on sites like Pandagon or Echidne of the Snakes, where suggestions include making all children's shot records available to all other students or allowing the government to dictate your health care. As Lander explains, these people feel superior by virtue of driving a Prius or eating organic veggies while planting their asses on an IKEA Ektorp sofa, not because they've actually done anything worth doing. For them, the superiority comes with not buying things from Wal-Mart, even if those things are affordable.
We all desire to see ourselves as unique, yet long to fit in. That's just part of human nature. But as Nathalie Rothschild notes, White People are concerned with not enjoying the best of modern society, whether it is technology, lifestyles, or food. Instead, they exhibit an odd sort of Puritanism, bent on societal regression (in arguing for smaller and smaller housing, for example, or forcing people to have smaller and smaller cars) as opposed to celebrating our advances. Stuff White People Like examines the silliness of these upper middle class behaviors.
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