Comments on: Stuff White People Like

By: mechudo

mechudo — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:24:52 +0000

Well, I’ve got to say, I’ve been studying white people for a while now and SWPL makes sense to me.

By: gretchen

gretchen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:56:31 +0000

A cute essay about the “Stuff White People Like” demographic in New York, recent college grads (I assume) who have come to NYC for the “diversity” find themselves dating (and, most likely, marrying) the “right kind” of white people. Like the people they dated in college, presumably. The essay makes the point that this race/class/ethnicity/education level is completely endogamous.
http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/rubin/thesushisexuals/index.asp?page=1

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By: Victor Kumar

Victor Kumar — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:40:36 +0000

Sorry, my html tag seems to have failed. Here’s the link:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/18/science/18face.xlarge1.jpg

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By: Victor Kumar

Victor Kumar — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:39:24 +0000

I recently found an image that serves as a perfect metaphor for my feelings about SWPL.

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By: comet jo

comet jo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:25:11 +0000

Well my intro class is finishing up Bashkow tomorrow, and also reading Karen Kelsky on why Japanese women want to sleep with white men. I’ve just sent them the link to Stuff White People Like, so we’ll see what happens.

My initial take, is that yeah, it’s about class, and maybe that’s just fine, and given the degree to which it is completely focused on the PMC it probably knows its about class, at least at some level. The thing to think about is what it’s saying about class.

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By: Carl Dyke

Carl Dyke — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:14:08 +0000

“And even where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of disqualifying many persons. For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective, this constituting one sense in which one can speak of a common value system in America. Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself–during moments at least–as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable. The general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living.”

Erving Goffman, *Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity* (1963) – a work of evil genius.

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By: oneman

oneman — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:01:26 +0000

Oh, and classness of a different sort needs a modifier too: black middle class, etc.

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By: oneman

oneman — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:59:57 +0000

The trouble with all the comments about class in this thread is that class doesn’t exist in the US. (Not really!) Whiteness absorbs class, so that whiteness of a different sort needs a modifier — poor white trash, WASP, etc. Off-the-shelf whiteness presupposes a class position (and a gender position!).

In mainstream (non-academic) US society, the only reason to raise the issue of class is to dismiss it. So I have lots of students who respond to, say, an article about the continued (and worsening) segregation of American schools by saying “I think it’s really class, not race”. Fair enough, except class and race aren’t seperable like that. What they *really* mean is that it’s not *racism* that’s responsible, because everyone knows that went away when MLK gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” and the only racists around anymore are KKK nutjobs on Jerry Springer. No, it’s “class”, which means that really, it’s them minorities own damn fault, because really, class doesn’t exist, it’s just people who don’t try hard enough.

So, yeah, SWPL (which is also the acronym for the Southwest Pistol League, which white people also like) is about a tiny part of the “white” race. And if you’re not from that tiny part of the “white” race, but you’re white, you’re probably defective white. Maybe you “…belong to the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South…”, as Carrie Buck (the first victim of legal forced sterilization in the US) did.

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By: gretchen

gretchen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:49:35 +0000

Huh, and I thought the guy who makes the SWPL like website was making a really funny richly ironic set of jokes about the idea of whiteness in America (as distinct from say, the real lives of American citizens of European descent–let’s call them Euro-Americans?) with all of the assumptions of class belonging (or rather, the transcendance of class) that characterizes the “white” elite positioning. You know, the things “white people like” being the most tired sort of corporate monoculture (or “creative” rebellions against/within it) like, uh, “coffee.” I also thought it was an even richer joke, touching on the ways that the mass media imagines

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By: pithhelmet

pithhelmet — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:25:26 +0000

Regarding the conflation of class and race…

Since that blog appeared back in January or February, just about every single comment I’ve read or heard about the blog has been a variation of this point (seriously, this is the subject of every other post on the blog itself). I’m pretty sure the guy gets it. Part of the reason that the blog was funny was that it was about “the right kind of white people” and that it purposely excludes the “wrong kind” (not middle class, or if they are middle class, not hipster/yuppie-types). There’s an offhand line about Dane Cook in the Sarah Silverman post that supports this.

(And I just saw where posts #8 and #13 address something like this, but I typed all of the above, and I’m posting it–sorry if it’s redundant.)

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By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:12:35 +0000

I think the concern about class and etc is misplaced as well. At least one of the points in the SWPL joke is that it sucks to be identified as part of a group based on characteristics you don’t actually share. This is a step above the difficult realization that you’re part of the group when you do share the characteristics, but is even more important – after all, not all African-Americans wear huge jeans, shoot hoops, etc and yet what defines the ethnicity in our imagination? If you don’t like “White People” defined as “Grad School” and “Whole Foods,” well, tough shit: welcome to America.

Also, all of this has already been beaten to death so much better here:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2008_02_10.html#008245
than we’ll ever do.

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:13:08 +0000

Its linked in the middle of the article that Strong linked to, and I think its been mentioned on SM before, but I think the classic site: Black People Love Us deserves its own link.

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By: Chuk

Chuk — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:53:37 +0000

I’m with and without Rex, and I think Clugo pretty much nails it in comment #2 based on my personal experience.

I’m with Rex and Calugo: As one of these poor white people that sort of stumbled into academia (social science) and decided I’d take a stab at making a career out of it (because factory work sucks), I laughed looking over “stuffwhitepeoplelike” as it reminded me of all these strange customs that I have literally had to consciously learn just to advance. I’m not joking; I had to deliberately read several books that my peers had read in high school just to begin to grasp the significance of places like San Francisco to this community.

I’m without Rex: Keep in mind that most of middle and upper class America and Canada are white, and whites in every sense dominate this class. Becoming middle class often doesn’t just mean having an increase in income, but also, in large part, accepting or at least acting out the Anglo-Saxon norms that constitute it. Finally, I’m sure that I have had an easier time adjusting to academia because I am poor white and not poor anything else.

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By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:53:06 +0000

One paper in an edited volume I’m working on at the moment has a fascinating analysis of the rise of the concept of ‘indigenous’ in the 1970s and Goad’s “Redneck Manifesto” — it claims that both are ways of talking about ‘identity’ rather than ‘class’ which result because of shifts in capital which simultaneously make class more important than ever and yet also more obscure than ever. Fascinating stuff… make sure to but the book when it appears! :)

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By: narnia

narnia — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:45:23 +0000

p.s. and thank you to ckelty for demonizing reader feedback, but actually SWPL is an interesting ethnographic experiment. unfortunately, it’s also totally passé. the blog hasn’t been good since the author signed a deal with random house a few weeks ago and has been keeping his best material for the forthcoming book. alas.

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