Debate about StuffWhitePeopleLike.com

I suppose this is how it feels to have all the subtlety and nuance removed from representations about you. That's a lesson that white folks don't get a lot of.

This site and the book from it seem straight forward--explanations into white consciousness via analyses of the latest fetish or trend-- and it's often very accurate.    A lot of the things on it are painful as well.  It's sort of  one part: how would you explain white people to a creature from another planet? and a second part: predictability.  To put it another way, if white people value these five things: status, wealth, independence, popularity, consumption. Then you can punch all that into a calculator and guess everything they will ever do (at least, some of the time).  

There's a risk of taking this site too seriously.  But the thing that is genuinely disturbing and unsatisfying about it is that it takes symptoms (our behavior) and then assigns every negative reason as to why we do things this way.  So you can learn every shameful cause behind our fascination of those things--girls with bangs, being the only white person around, having gay friends-- when what really happens is that many people of all varities might like the same thing but for very different reasons.

It seems to me that it's a matter of nuance.  All of these things can be cool if done with the right frame of mind, during and after.  If a person does something meaningful, then gloats excessively and so irritates everyone, then that is a problem that is not restricted to white people.  It's like taking good circumstances and ruining them by the way you act about them.  That's what I get out of the list... that I can read the list, and think, 'so what?', but I do not relate to the method ascribed to us.  Certainly, I have to continue to grow and mature in order to not be constrained by the eccentricities of a person born in White Suburbs U.S.A.  So the list is helpful in that way. But I'd like to see it saying, 

"white people like .... because some white people are assholes about it" 

but then add 

'but others do it for the right reasons, too.'

So while I qualify for many of these, I know that I don't do them in order to gain cool points. Usually not.  I'd hate if people thought I did so, but what people think is not so important as me doing things for the right reasons, ones that are true to me and that aren't arising from warped conceptions about succeeding in the rat race, mass consumption, or those five things I listed above.  I think there's a worldview that has been attached to what the site says, something sold in the marketing blitz on us since we're very small. It's destructive, but if you can overcome that then you shouldn't feel guilty about liking the things on the site because you're not coming from the same place.  Part of that is simpling enjoying things because things are enjoyable, not because it gives anything back to you.  To enjoy something without feeling the need to capitalize on it somehow:  experience for experience's sake.