A stereotype of ones own
Why it's safe for white folks to laugh at themselves
BY Chandler Levack
Photography by ISTOCKPHOTO: ALEXANDER SYSOEV
According to the latest internet superfad, white people can be categorized by the New Balance sneakers on their feet, indie rock in their iPods, and the Ralph Nader bumper stickers slapped on their Priuses. Our children are multilingual and our values rely on “hating corporations” and “having gay friends.” White folks have long been defining others, but affluent, pigment-challenged progressives now have a stereotype to call their own, thanks to the blog “Stuff White People Like.”
Written by 29-year-old former Torontonian Christian Lander, this deadpan satire of middle-class bourgeois desires has grown from a trickle of 30 hits a day to nearly 30 million in total. Written as an instruction manual for fitting in with North American white culture, it breaks down the wants and wishes of the white yuppie—from arts degrees to Wes Anderson movies—and explains, for the benefit of non-white readers, how to operate in white society.
Though it started as a mock-anthropological prank, Lander’s blog has touched a cultural nerve, and the result is internet superstardom. If you’ve felt proud of being the only white person inside a Chinese restaurant, this blog is for you.
Stuff White People Like began as an instant messaging conversation between friends, asking, “Why don’t white people watch The Wire?” The conversation quickly grew into a list of possible reasons. Perhaps white folks are too busy doing yoga (No. 15), going to plays (No. 44) or getting divorced (No. 66). Lander says his inspiration stems from his well-off, left-wing schoolmates at McGill University and a host of mid-western graduate schools, a group that, as much as he identifies with, he also detests.
“This blog probably represents the intolerable people on this continent,” says Lander. “They’re unwilling to listen to anything but their own opinion, equally intolerant of any other viewpoint. I think this blog reaffirms some of the conformity in that group.”
In the gospel according to Lander, Canada just might be the whitest place on earth—Threatening To Move To Canada occupies spot No. 75. “Within white culture, it is agreed upon that if Canada had better weather it would be a perfect place,” writes Lander, who now resides in Los Angeles (but rides a bike).
“Left wing Americans are essentially Canadians,” he elaborates in a phone interview, “They want the same things, but they just feel more powerless. I mean everything that Canadians believe in—multilingual kids, the liberal arts, free health care—it’s the same culture, the same beliefs.”
Lander, who moved to the L.A. in 2006 to become a copywriter for a corporate ad agency has—he acknowledges the irony—just achieved the ultimate white dream, a book deal from Random House. Stuff White People Like: A Guide To The Unique Taste of Millions was hastily published in July with two-thirds new material.
But as much heat as he’s taken on blog for what many readers perceive as racism, or reverse racism, or both, Stuff White People Like is as much, if not more, about class. Lander is poking fun of the privilege that goes along with being able to afford organic food and trips to Paris, after all, and the sense of righteousness that goes along with it. As Lander notes in post No. 62, Knowing What’s Best For Poor People, “the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.”
It’s not everyday people get to laugh at themselves while retaining a sense of superiority, and it’s that combination that has built so much momentum behind the blog. Its popularity has earned Lander mountains of press coverage—including in the white media-bible, The New York Times—and in April he attended an internet-trend conference in Boston, speaking on maxims of viral online entertainment alongside the creators of internet successes such as LOLCats, Homestar Runner, and One Red Paperclip.
Lander admits that it takes one to know one. “I’m a pretty supremely white person—I went to graduate school, dropped out of graduate school,” he says. “Some people become creeped out when they realize they can be lumped into categories, but it’s a legitimate guide, if you followed it you’re not going to get humiliated.”
