Because of a tendency to shoot my mouth off without thinking, I have stayed away from writing on Stuff White People Like, the wildly popular blog written by comedian Christian Lander. There has been a lot written on the topic from a variety of perspectives so I expected that everything that could be said on the topic already had. But there was an interesting piece written by Adam Sternbergh [via] a couple of days ago that, rather than singing its praises or calling it racist, criticised the site as a sort of vapid and weak satire. And, going back to look at the blog, Sternbergh certainly has a point. He suggests that that when a ‘white yuppie’ reads about white people liking coffee and Toyota Priuses, s/he slaps his knee, saying ‘it’s funny because it’s true’, and then moves on. The site works by having white people “[pretend] to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior”. To Sternbergh, SWPL comforts, rather than challenges its audience and as a result, actually pats people on the back for their behaviour instead of questioning them or forcing them to question themselves. Ergo… weak sauce.

While I agree with some of Sternbergh’s arguments, my response would be that there is still an interesting something going on in a couple of potential misreadings by the blog’s audience that is, besides being funny, actually good satire. First, as soon as the blog hit, you just knew that there would be a slew of comments that said something along the lines of “this wouldn’t be funny if it were about Black or Asian people” – and , sure enough, the site is littered with them. One response to such a criticism might be that the blog works because there is no real threat behind it. It is difficult to imagine the sudden disenfranchisement of thousands of white people because of a blog full of stereotypes, or even that that a white person might suddenly feel unwelcome in a store or bar because someone there has read the blog. What SWPL lays bare is white privilege: that the reason that it’s ‘okay’ to make fun of ‘white people’ is because of their dominant position in society, one that is not being challenged any time soon. Of course, there are a slew of necessary disclaimers to that statement involving class and sex among other things, but there’s also something quite true about it as well.

Another fun (mis)reading may be that Sternbergh’s inverse response – that the blog is kinda’ dumb because there’s no real critique in it – might actually obscure the fact that the blog is doing something challenging: it actually names whiteness as something other than a norm – that it instead, like all identities, is a thing constructed and performed. Furthermore, it introduces the idea of a ‘normative’ whiteness that one can or cannot adhere to, which injects the idea of power into the mix. All white people are ‘white’ but, as so often also happens to minorities, a particular version of ‘whiteness’ is conceived of and positioned as normal. In a sense, the blog does not describe whiteness but an ideal of it, the vague sense amongst white progressives that, ‘if only all white people were ironic hipsters like us’, the world would be a better place. Think about the Southern accent as a marker of backwardness or the liberal dismissal of conservatives as religious kooks and you get an idea of what I mean.

And Gregory Rodriguez’s LA Times op-ed on the blog hit onto something when he argued that “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”. But where Rodriguez goes wrong in his suggestion that SWPL is effective because now ‘everyone is a minority’. Statistically in some cities (like Lander’s hometown Toronto), sure. But we are long way from arguing that a particular cultural perspective isn’t still privileged in the public space. So while Sternbergh makes a valid critique, what I believe he misses is that the misreading of the blog by its intended, white yuppie audience, in addition to making me chuckle, is actually pretty smart satire. You have a bunch of yuppies patting themselves on the back from a position of comfort while not recognising it’s the very position that is part of the problem i.e. that the prioritisation of white, liberal values as normal is a form of ethnocentrism with very real material effects, a concept itself central to the blog’s otherwise shaky satire. And that possible misreading – at the sort of obliviousness at the core of the knee-slapping – is why I like Stuff White People Like. (And yes, I am fully aware that I like it because it makes me feel superior – why exactly do you think I’m a grad student… )