When you're not driving around in a Prius, you're standing still at concerts, eating expensive sandwiches, raising multilingual children, worrying about dinner parties, listening to public radio, joining Netflix, hating your parents, doing yoga and sipping fair trade coffee.
You're so white.
At least, you are according to Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com), a blog that with a wink explores the art and science of being embarrassingly Caucasian. It's among the hottest sites on the Internet and even inspired a book due this summer. Less overtly, it's provoking people of color to think, talk -- and joke -- about race.
"It's bordering on some sort of cultural tipping point," says Dean Rader, a University of San Francisco professor who writes about American culture.
It all started with two guys messaging about The Wire, the Baltimore crime drama. Christian Lander's friend wondered why more white people weren't watching it. This sparked a riff about what whites were doing instead: shopping at Whole Foods, seeing a therapist, becoming vegan, browsing vintage stores, trying to be the only white person at ethnic restaurants.
Lander launched the site Jan. 18, mainly for the amusement of his friends. But they e-mailed the link to other friends, who did the same, who did the same and in 30 days, the site reached a million hits. Last week, about 19 million hits later, Lander, a 29-year-old, white Los Angeles copywriter, scored a six-figure book deal from Random House.
He's basking in attention he can't quite explain. Except to say he's found a way to call out the contradictions of his brethren -- educated liberals with money. And by doing so while Barack Obama's presidential campaign introduces more serious race issues into the national conversation, he's finding people more than ready to laugh about it, too.
"One reader wrote in to say that the reason the site isn't racist is because no one has ever been denied a job because they like yoga and expensive sandwiches," Lander says. "None of this is done in a hateful way. I grew up hearing it's wrong to recognize differences. But to think everyone is exactly the same is really misguided."
Rader thinks the key to Stuff White People Like's draw is how it skewers yuppies and their icons rather than white people as a whole. (As he points out, he grew up on an Oklahoma farm surrounded by white people, none of whom listened to NPR or ate expensive sandwiches.)
