Stuff that white (liberal) people like

Gregory Rodriguez:

Six weeks ago, 29-year-old Culver City, Calif., Internet copy writer Christian Lander started a blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, on a whim, thinking he'd poke fun at himself and fellow white people.

Spending roughly two hours a day writing satirical posts about "stuff white people like," Lander had no idea how much his little inside joke would catch on. In the first week, the site received about 200 hits a day. The next week, it jumped to 600, and then to 4,000 the next. By last week, he was averaging 300,000 daily hits.

Lander, who arrived in Los Angeles from Toronto 2½ years ago, came up with the idea for the blog after talking to a Filipino friend about how much they both liked the HBO police drama The Wire. For some reason he's already forgotten, they both wished that more white people watched the show. Which got him thinking: What exactly do white people like?

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.

"I'm writing about the white people who think they're absolutely unique and individual," Lander told me. "I'm calling them out and poking fun of myself. The things I post are all the things I like too!"

And what are those things? Recycling, expensive sandwiches, standing still at concerts, Toyota Priuses, natural medicine, irony, public radio, breakfast places, vegetarianism, organic foods and being an expert on ethnic cultures are just a few.

Lander thinks that most of his readers are actually members of the elite group he's lampooning. Some of the comments on the blog suggest that he's right. "Oh, lord, it only hurts because it's true! Love the blog," one reader who calls herself White Lady wrote.

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While I think The Wire is a great show, recycling, expensive sandwiches, standing still at concerts, Toyota Priuses, natural medicine, public radio, breakfast places, vegetarianism and organic foods, not things I particularly like. Almost all of those things in this list are for liberals who make up a minority of white people. For stuff that conservatives like, read PrairiePundit. This blog is for conservatives of all colors though.