Stephen Steinberg, a Queens College professor and author of Race Relations: A Critique, detects anxiety in Lander's postings, some embarrassment that in current pop culture, blacks are the paragons of hip and, by contrast, whiteness is played as goofy.
"They seem to be disowning, kind of nervously, the nerd that lurks within," he says. "As the dominant and privileged group and the preponderant majority, whites don't have the same claim of distinctive community, except in opposition to blackness."
Grace Elizabeth Hale, a University of Virginia History professor who wrote Making Whiteness, a book about the genesis of the American social hierarchy, finds Stuff White People Like not only "hilarious," but a rare critique of white privilege.
One of her favorites is No. 9: Making You Feel Bad about Not Going Outside, a riff about how your white friends will urge you to go hiking with them and "much like most things with white people -- they win both ways. If you decide to go with them, they feel good about getting someone off the couch ... and if you don't decide to go, they can spend their entire time outdoors saying "boy, this is great ... running on a mix of self-satisfaction, Odwalla juice and muesli."
Hale particularly likes how the site, probably without intending to, turns on its head the long tradition of white people toying with black images to ease their insecurities.
"They're using images of white people to do this," she says. "On some level that seems like progress."
jill.rosen@baltsun.com
Top 10 from Stuff White People Like
1.
Coffee
2.
Religions their parents don't belong to
3.
Film festivals
4.
Assists
5.
Farmers' markets
6.
Organic food
7.
Diversity
8.
Barack Obama
9.
Making you feel bad about not going outside
10.
Wes Anderson movies
[from stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com]
