By talking about modern furniture, Mos Def and farmer's markets rather than inner city poverty and affirmative action, the site starts the conversation on a nonthreatening platform. Lander posts about one item a day and almost all of them inspire many hundreds of comments.
"As a black woman who wants to understand white people, this blog is great!" someone wrote on the site.
"Question? Does it make me a racist to laugh at white people? You guys are funny to me. Are we (black people) funny to you? I think the world would be a better place if we learned to laugh with each other."
Another person, a self-described white graduate student, responded to post No. 81, Graduate School, writing, "Funny, funny, funny!!! I fulfill so many of these I feel all ashamed and dumb, but still have to redeem myself by posting a reply to a blog telling everyone how inferior I feel because of your blog. It's such an evil circle."
Which is not to say everyone gets the joke.
Hundreds of people have fired off angry messages to Lander, calling him everything from humorless to racist.
One person wrote in, "Please remind me again how stereotyping people based on the relative dark or lightness of their skin is funny again. ... I must have forgotten."
The negative comments surprised Lander.
"You think going after wealthy middle-class white people is OK. What's the problem, right?" he says. "It's just amazing to see it really bothers people a lot."
Stuff White People Like has inspired people -- black, Indian and Asian -- to consider their own stuff. (There's even Stuff Stick Figure People Like).
Charlee Renaud, a law school graduate in New Orleans, started Stuff Educated Black People Like after a friend sent her a link to Lander's site.
"I have all types of friends, all races, and it zoned in on certain friends of white descent," she says. "The sushi. The coffee. I like some of those things too, but I guess just by them putting `white' on it makes it more funny, I don't know why."
Kesava Mallela, a Berkeley student from India who followed Lander with Stuff Brown People Like says he's heard from a number of Indian-Americans who his site offends.
"Brown people don't talk about these things out in open -- it's kind of taboo to point out these shortcomings," he says. "I'm trying to depict this longing for what we want to be instead of what we are. ... Everybody wants to be white, so ..."
