[lbo-talk] stuff white people like

Andy F andy274 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 10 13:47:46 PDT 2008


On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:20 PM, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Also, as me another member discussed offlist, it
> really is -- as one commenter noted -- stuff white
> yuppies like. Where are the potato chip and mayonaisse
> sandwiches? The chili and fritos? The Piggly Wiggly
> and Stuckey's peanut brittle? The stuff poked fun of
> on King of the Hill, the Blue Collard Comedy Tour
> demographic? This is "coastal utopia" white-dom, on
> that blog,

Quoth the column I posted: <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rodriguez25feb25,0,1952462.column>

[...]

By "white people," Lander doesn't actually mean the more than 221 million Americans who check that box on the decennial census. But that's part of the fun. Lander is doing to whites what scores of journalists and politicians do to non-white minorities every day, "essentializing" complex identities -- that is, stripping away all variety and reducing them to their presumed authentic essences.

One irony-deficient reader complained that the blog was less about white people than it was about yuppies. And without knowing it, she was cutting to the heart of the joke. Lander is gently making fun of the many progressive, educated, upper-middle-class whites who think they are beyond ethnicity or collectively shared tastes, styles or outlook. He's essentially reminding them that they too are part of a group.

[...]

Still, Lander is less concerned with cross-ethnic and racial relations than he is with how whites treat each other. As a onetime graduate student in the Midwest, he got tired of coastal condescension of the fly-over states and the glib assumption that "red staters are evil and stupid."

"Too many white people don't like to be reminded that they're white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But 'enlightened whites' are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have."

[...]

I have my own problems with this. Maybe I'll get into it later.

-- Andy



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