The angle of Stuff White People Like

Why White People Like 'Stuff White People Like':

...Basically, this joke breaks down as "Congratulate a white person and they will feel smugly good about themselves." It's the perfect go-to punchline for Stuff White People Like, because it's really what the site is all about. Because if there's one thing white people really like, it's pretending to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior.

My friend Reiham Salam is not a fan. I have only read a few entries on Stuff White People Like over the past month. I don't have a visceral dislike of the site, but it is definitely more mass-market than boutique in terms of its product, and as an honorary white person I prefer the latter to the former.

There is one thing about the Stuff White People Like phenomenon which I think is important to point out: it isn't just white people who are subject to this dynamic, it's a human universal. It is the tendency to want to show you are superior all the while denigrating that same superiority or dismissing it, showing that you are so superior that you don't even care about your superiority! For example, one of the few weblogs where I'm a regular presence as a commenter, and have been for nearly 4 years now, is Sepia Munity. It is mostly brown American-centric in its orientation. Here is Wikipedia on Asian Indians:

Indian Americans have the highest educational qualifications of all national origin groups in the United States. According to the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, there are close to 41,000 Indian American doctors. According to the 2000 census, about 64% of Indian Americans have attained a Bachelor's degree or more...(compared to 28% nationally). Almost 40% of all Indians have a master's, doctorate or other professional degree, which is five times the national average...These high levels of education have enabled Indian Americans to become a productive segment of the American population, with 72.3% participating in the U.S. work force, of which 57.7% are employed in managerial and professional specialties

So one can adduce that many of the readers and participants on Sepia Mutiny are from upper middle class brown American households. Additionally, the vast majority are politically Democrats, and there is a tendency to lean Left in the discourse. In other words: brown White People. Like most humans I assume they want to signal their superiority, but don't want to be gauche about it (that's low class after all). So, for example, those of high caste will attack the caste system and emphasize how they don't think their high caste status means they're better. Even those of Christian or Muslim backgrounds will note their high caste origins before attacking the caste system. They get the positive kudos of being against caste, as all Right Thinking People are, while at the same time emphasizing their elite origins. The same dynamic is present when it comes to skin color. Most brown Americans are dark-skinned, but there is a lot of variation in complexion. In South Asia fair skin is preferred and quite often there is a lot of prejudice against those who are darker; in an intrafamily context darker skinned siblings will usually be slighted as uglier or inferior for years on end. Most brown Americans have moved beyond the crassest expressions of this, not least of which due to the fact that these distinctions aren't salient when you're flying-while-brown or racists are threatening you. Light, medium or dark, you're just a sand nigger at the end of the day.Yet still many individuals will bemoan skin color prejudice while at the same time emphasizing their own light complexion! You signal your hereditary superiority and disavow the ugliness of the social context in which said superiority was praised.

A few years ago I read Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil. The author is an African American, and though the work is a thorough empirical ethnographic survey it is also rather obvious that she is opposed to the pervasiveness of racism that she observes within Brazilian society. For example, she offers that many middle class blacks encourage their children to never eat bananas in public lest they be mocked by whites as monkeys in a jocular fashion. There are many more where that comes from. Additionally, the author notes that many individuals of mixed-race in Brazil deemphasize their African ancestry, and even those of overwhelming African appearance do not generally wish to define themselves black. This is a robust finding which one can confirm across many studies. Like many African American observers the author clearly feels that the legacy of hypodescent in the United States, where one drop of black blood denotes black status, has had a positive impact on African American self perceptions as a unified community. On the other hand, the author notes several times in the text that in Brazil she was defined as brown or mixed-race, and not black, and Brazilians have told her this personally. She obviously objects to the divisiveness entailed by these definitions, but I could not help but wonder if there was a psychological drive to still identify that white Brazilians would have classified her higher on the chain of racial being than some of her ethnographic subjects.

Sociology is coarser than psychology. In particular, human psychology is a very subtle and manifold thing. There are tensions and cross-purposes within the mind of one individual, so it stands to reason that one can barely keep up with all the interactions between individuals. We have a lot of pre-built software optimized toward interpersonal psychology, at least most people do. So I think it natural that many non-autistic human beings want to signal their superiority, while at the same time exhibiting a bit of grace and class about it. I don't think one need to wonder why this would be, read Animal Signals and you see that in non-human species interactive behavior is highly complex and conditional. The sociological models that we use to explain human interactions have big gaps and provide rather easy angles for our more fine grained psychology to exploit.

Since the Great Divergence the West has been way better than the rest. By way better, I mean that if you go to a doctor and get an antibiotic, that's thanks to Western science. The West is also coterminous with a white identity. So naturally many whites feel superior to non-whites, since the glory of modern material civilization is predominantly a product of whites. But this rather coarse social reality, and dyad between whites and non-whites, masks a great deal of variation within these groups. In particular, class, education and regional affinities still exist, and there are ways to accentuate how superior you are within this broad social reality where whites dominate non-whites. For example, you can be a white person who attacks the injustices of the white power structure, manifesting your moral superiority while accruing a non-trivial proportion of white skin privilege by the nature of who you are. In some cases, you may have individuals who can play a far more authentic game; e.g., someone who is 1/8 Native American, identifies as such, but can also pass as white. Now the options in the game of interpersonal psychology open up a great deal so long as no other white person is willing to call the obvious bluff in this case. One can collect on white guilt without abandoning white skin! (white Latinos does this regularly when they allow white Anglos to classify them as people of color despite the fact that amongst themselves many white Latinos are very racist and proud of their "pure Spanish blood")

But the overwhelming power of the white-superman narrative has other strange consequences. Eugene Volokh long ago observed that Asians have become white. The narrative of minority inferiority in state due to the overbearing evil of the white power structure can be subverted by the reminder that on occasion benighted people of color may actually be peers or superior on some metric of worth (e.g., academics). There are other peculiarities, on the Sepia Munity weblog many commenters over the years have mocked and denigrated lower class whites who are presumably ignorant racists. Despite the fact that many of these individuals are very affluent, have always been very affluent, have managed to obtain educations at the very best schools, and so on, the narrative of the white superman allows them to play the universal victim. Sometimes, it is best to not emphasize all the privileges you accrued by an accident of birth, and using sociological narratives you can invert the arrow of impact from positive to negative. At the end of the day the son of a cardio-thoraic surgeon and an anesthesiologist is still a sand nigger, right? Yes. But he is also the son of a cardio-thoraic surgeon and an anesthesiologist!

Stuff White People Like is just not that subtle, its angle is to exploit the chasm between the kludgey aspects of our explicit models and the implicit complexities of reality. Unless you're autistic or Aspergers you know the subtle & rough textures of reality and how they exist underneath the clean lines of our ideological superstructure. By all I have said before I hope it is clear that I do not believe that humans play the game of life solely to signal their own superiority, moral or otherwise. Rather, it is a piece of the puzzle, and one we should be a bit more candid about if we want to move past this weakness. Advertising that you don't own a TV is obviously a way to show that you have some self-control, that perhaps you're spending your time in a more edifying manner, such as reading a book, or writing a blog entry! Did I mention I don't own a TV? But you know what, not owning a TV might be a good thing even aside from the signaling value! We can't banish the psychological signaling arms race with candor, but we can take it a notch down temporarily, perhaps enough to focus on the possibility that good things are good in and of themselves as opposed to how moral it makes you seem.

Addendum: This post is an attempt to show that I'm superior by the fact that I'm admitting that I hint that I'm superior. But is this admission itself part of the game?....