Explicit Whiteness

http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6480: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions, Christian Lander, New York: Random House, 2008

by http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6576

Does Christian Lander have our number? For a wide, mostly liberal swath of the white Western world, the answer is “yes.”

His observations about white tastes are so accurate, a goodly number of them apply even to this convert to white advocacy. While reading his book in the family room of my house on a fall Sunday, I was struck by how many of Lander’s items were within eyeshot: I was wearing New Balance shoes and a semi-ironic T-shirt (Items No. 94 and 84, respectively) after having gone for a run (Items No. 9 and 27), with an i-Pod around my neck (Item No. 40). There was a Sunday New York Times and several New Yorkers on the table next to me (Items No. 46 and 114, respectively), Netflix in the drawer below me (Item No. 39), a mug of coffee from earlier in the morning on the coffee table (Item No. 1), a bottle of water in my hand (Item No. 76), and, of course, a book—Stuff White People Like—in the other hand (Item No. 138).

Merely opening the garage door or walking upstairs would have put a dozen more items in range (Item No. 24, Wine; Item No. 31, Snowboarding; Item No. 61, Bicycles; Item No. 53, Dogs), and if I were to add the stuff preferred by just two or three family members or acquaintances, the list of “stuff white people like” would be covered, many times over.Talk about busted. I started to wonder if Lander’s been spying on me, but this would have only branded me yet whiter (Item No. 126, Conspiracies; Item No. 149, Self-Importance).

I was a tad disappointed by my overall whiteness score (a mere 56 percent), but as I say, the “white people” in “Stuff White People Like” are the NPR-listening (Item No. 44), Volvo-driving set (oddly, Volvos are not on the list, but the Toyota Prius, Item No. 60, is) found in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Item No. 26) and small college towns in the Northeast. Lander leaves out working-class whites, many Christians, and political conservatives (excepting perhaps the “crunchy cons” identified by writer Rod Dreher). In other words, none of Jeff Foxworthy’s rednecks (Item No. 8, Barack Obama—White people like Barack Obama because they are afraid that if they don’t they will be considered racist; Item No. 118, the ACLU).

So who is Christian Lander? According to the book cover and interviews, he’s a left-leaning Ph.D. dropout now living in Los Angeles who once taught public speaking at Indiana University. It was his wildly popular blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, that set the stage for his book.

Mr. Lander is not, at least wittingly, a white advocate. He expressed revulsion at the popularity of his observations among posters at Stormfront.org. But as with the honest observations about Jewish power in the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters,[1 sincere and principled gentiles from the hip left occasionally stumble onto the truth.

http://www.toqonline.com/2009/04/explicit-whiteness/

2009-04-23