All Whitey, Then!

According to Stuff White People Like blogger Christian Lander, some of the stuff white people like includes documentaries, Michel Gondry, film festivals, the Criterion Collection, and Wes Anderson. Those are all film-related, right? So I can get away with posting this interview I did with Lander for SEE Magazine on this blog, right, and nobody's going to call me on it? Gosh, I certainly hope so, because here it is...

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Entry #1, posted on January 18, was about coffee.

Then, in quick succession, came a flurry of other posts exploring other topics. Film festivals. Farmers markets. David Sedaris. Yoga. ’80s nights. Having two last names. Oscar parties. Mos Def. Standing still at concerts. Having black friends. Microbreweries. Earlier this month, entry #108 appeared: pretending to enjoy classical music.

By this time, just eight months after it started, the blog Stuff White People Like had become a genuine internet phenomenon — the site’s exhaustive catalogue of the favourite people, products, and pastimes of an entire generation of culture-conscious, consumerist hipsters had gotten over 40 million hits, and its author, Christian Lander, had landed a tidy book deal with Random House, said goodbye to his day job at an interactive ad agency, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities as a comedy writer. (The book, which contains several new entries, came out in July. Naturally, it’s laid out in Helvetica, white people’s favourite font.)

Lander’s success is amazing, but not unearned: far from being a self-congratulatory celebration of hipster culture, Stuff White People Like (the book and the blog) is a frequently devastating work of satirical sociology. Take his entry on the Toyota Prius: “The Prius might be the most perfect white product ever. It’s expensive, gives the idea that you are helping the environment, and requires no commitment or life changes other than having slightly less money. It’s a pretty sweet deal for white people: you can buy a car, continue to drive to work and to Barack Obama rallies, and still feel like you are helping the environment.” Or his entry on Tibet: “In the history of white causes, there might never be one bigger than the need for China to ‘get out of Tibet.’ Unlike many other problems that have exceptionally complex solutions (global hunger, poverty, the environment), Tibet presents a rather clear-cut solution and is much easier to support blindly.”

For a white person, reading Stuff White People Like can be a uniquely painful experience, one where the guffaw of recognition quickly gives way to uncomfortable chuckles as Lander dissects the hypocrisy underlying white people’s professed hatred of corporations, our desire to eat only in ethnic restaurants where no other white people are at a table, or the absurd contortions we will go through at the office in order to avoid any kind of confrontation with our co-workers.

Christian Lander spoke with me last week just a few days after appearing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, a show that doesn’t appear in the book or the blog, but ought to. So should alternative weeklies, come to think of it. Here’s our conversation.

Q: I’m sure you’ve told the story about the origins of the blog many times before, but let’s hear it again. What made you decide to become an amateur white-person sociologist?



Christian Lander: Well, on January 18, my friend Myles and I were having an IM conversation at work, and we were talking about the TV show The Wire, and Myles said he didn’t trust any white person who didn’t watch that show. And so we started joking about what those people were doing instead of watching The Wire — how they were probably going to yoga, going to therapy, getting divorced. And I had been interested in comedy writing and getting some kind of side project going, and it seemed like a funny idea. But of course, I never in a million years expected it to get where it is now. I just thought it would be like any other blog, and get read by my friends — if I was lucky.

Q: Do you have a sense of where the tipping point came and the blog was really starting to catch on?

CL: I sent it to about 20 of my friends, who sent it to their friends, who sent it to their friends, and the next thing I knew, it was on the Comedy Central blog and the Good magazine blog. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never reached out to them; they both just discovered it through friends of friends of friends. And it grew from there.

Q: You made a key decision right from the start of the blog, to write the entries as if they were directed toward non-white readers seeking to understand their white friends.

CL: Absolutely. These are good tips! Aside from all the humour, if an alien came down from space or a robot needed to be programmed to interact with white people, you could put the book or the blog in there, and white people would go, “This robot has pretty good taste!” There’s actually good advice in here, and I think that’s why it resonates, because the things I tell non-white people to say to flatter their white friends really would work on me.

Q: The other thing that really elevates your blog above just namechecking aspects of white culture is that just about every entry makes this underlying assumption that white people don’t necessarily like these things for their intrinsic qualities, but because of the way that these things make them feel, or the social signals that owning these objects or expressing these beliefs sends out to the wider world.

CL: That’s what it is. Some people take the blog the wrong way and say, “Why are you criticizing vegetarianism? Vegetarianism is a great thing, it helps the earth, blah blah blah.” But I’m not making a judgment on vegetarianism or nonprofits or whatever or saying they’re inherently bad; I’m just saying that part of the problem is that a lot of these things that people like, they like more so for being able to tell other people they like them and are therefore better than them.

Q: As you assembled this book, did you spot any constants or any qualities that the things white people like tend to have in common?



CL: One big theme is that white people like anything that makes them feel like they’re saving the world without having to make any sacrifices. Priuses, Whole Foods, that kind of thing. You’re still getting into a car, you’re still going to the supermarket and eating mass-produced goods, but everything about them tells you to feel good about what you’re doing. That’s one of the things that got me upset after graduate school, was the insane groupthink of the people I was surrounded by. I mean, I was living in Ontario, I was voting NDP, it’s not like I wasn’t a part of it, but as I got older, my eyes opened to the way that everyone thinks they’re so unique, so different, so counterculture when they all think exactly the same! They’re almost more of a bloc than the conservatives who they hate so much.

Q: I have to admit, there’s something a little depressing about reading the book and realizing over and over again that so many things I thought I had come to on my own are in fact proof that I’m just one big cultural cliché.

CL: And I’m making fun of myself too — that’s why I put my picture next to so many of the entries. And I’m including all sorts of pretentious things that I say and stupid things that I like.

Q: What’s the most ridiculous, absurd thing that white people like?

CL: For me, it’s probably bicycles. I ride a fixed-gear bike and it’s absurd how much I love it and how much I’ll talk about how amazing it is. Expensive sandwiches, that’s another one. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re paying $14 for a sandwich. And waiting in line for food — that’s gotten absurd over the last 20 years. That’s how you know it’s a good restaurant when you’re a white person, when you see a long line of people at a breakfast place or a sandwich place. You just instinctively get in line — you just know at the end of this line, there’s going to be something with prosciutto on it.

Q: Have there been any entries that turned out to be unexpectedly contentious?

CL: Yes, Myles — who I must stress is Filipino — wrote a post on Asian girls, which is by far the most offensive, racist post on the site, and Myles happily calls himself a racist in interviews. It sparked, like, 5,000 comments and caused what Myles calls a “race war” on the site. There was some ridiculousness to it, but some truth to it as well, and I think that’s what bothered people the most. But I find that it’s almost exclusively white people who get offended by the site.



Q: Are they mad about getting stereotyped? Or are they misunderstanding the premise of the site? What’s going on there?

CL: Well, in the ’80s and ’90s there was this big equality push, these campaigns that were really about equality of treatment — which is unequivocally a good thing — but which a lot of people misinterpreted to mean that everything is equal in every single way. And what that meant was that some people started thinking that recognizing difference was a value judgment and was therefore racist. So I think what my site has done — and maybe this is part of the reason for its success — is say that we are different, we do have a different perspective on things, but it’s not a value judgment. There’s a spinoff site called Stuff Educated Black People Like that includes things like “moving to Atlanta.” And it’s about the weird things that connect black people together. It’s not done in a hateful way. Stereotypes have been used for so long in a hateful way, to say, “You’re stupid. You’re a savage.” But the stereotypes I’m putting up are not in any way meant to make people hate white people. These are common experiences that I’m talking about in a fun way.

Q: By the end of the book, though, it all starts to seem like this narrow echo chamber of a lifestyle. Is there a way to break free of the prison of stuff white people like? Is there a way to pursue a more “authentic” life, away from all the Criterion DVDs and the New Balance running shoes? Or is the pursuit of “authenticity” just one more dumb thing that white people like?

CL: Yep. One of the things I’ve been talking about lately is the idea of gentrification. Do you have any idea how much work it is to keep up an authentic neighbourhood? You have to stop stores from opening, you have to put in building codes, you have to have homeowners’ associations — being authentic is a real fight against the way the world is going. Ultimately, I think the book’s message is to worry less about what people think. Winning and being declared the person with the best taste on earth doesn’t mean anything. The real focus should be on enjoying life for what it is. And the other thing to realize is that latching onto someone else’s culture isn’t going to provide you with what you need either. That’s not to say you should never go to a Chinese restaurant or never explore other cultures, but I think there’s an entry on “trying too hard” that should be read by some people. But it’s hard. We’re the first generation that will be downwardly mobile from our parents. Most of us can’t afford the house we grew up in. It’s not like we’re facing the end of the world in terms of a nuclear holocaust, but there’s a sadness about it.



Q: It does seem like there’s some kind of minor cultural crisis coming for our generation in that we don’t have as much money as our parents did, but our tastes are much more expensive. Something’s gotta give there.

CL: That’s exactly right. I grew up in Riverdale, which was a working-class neighbourhood in Toronto near the centre of the city with these older Victorian homes that are big and gorgeous but the area still has a “city feel” to it. That’s what I thought I’d have when I grew older. It was a reasonable lifestyle for my dad in the late ’70s, but it’s fucking expensive right now! Where can I go? I can’t live like that in New York or Chicago or Toronto. Where can I get that life back? And I can’t. It’s tough. I guess one of the answers is just give up on that dream and start an organic farm.

Q: But that’s not going to happen to you just yet. What’s your next project? Has this “white people” thing pretty much run its course?

CL: Yeah, I’ve had nine solid months of white people every single day. You know, my life’s dream growing up in Canada was to be a comedy writer. I grew up in the same neighbourhood as The Kids in the Hall and just looked up to them as idols. So we’ll see if I can make it as a comedy writer in TV or film. I’m in L.A. now, which is certainly in the right city for it.