In Progress

Sites like Stuff White People Like are guaranteed to give me a mid-morning existential crisis. It’s funny, self-aware, and I identify with it. But, huh, I had no idea I was white. Ok, actually, I have to admit, I always had suspicions that I was a white girl trapped in a South Asian body — albeit one that people mistake for Ethiopian, Brazilian or other South American origin. On top of correcting people about the whole “not Indian” thing, I’m often left very confused, trying to comprehend rapid-fire Spanish on the street.

So if I like a bunch of the things on this list of stuff white people like, does that make me white? No! It does not! It makes this list, and hence the site, inherently miscategorized. This site is actually poking gentle fun at a socio-economic class, not at a race.

Racial profiling has always been a bit of a puzzle for me. I think it was the uproar over affirmative action that really made me stop and take stock of what people were so up in arms about. I had to agree that quotas along racial lines seemed like a horrible idea. But I still thought there were fundamental imbalances that needed to be addressed somehow. Reading Lynell George’s Gray Boys, Funky Aztecs, and Honorary Homegirls (a quick shudder for the outdated terms) helped me put my finger on what was bothering me about the whole question. These kids, all raised in the same geographical area, shared a fundamental perspective and experience that superceded any racial divide. Aid given along geographical boundaries in combination with economic boundaries seemed like the obvious solution. My guess is, if affirmative action was practiced according to those two indicators and explicitly ignoring race, many of the racially charged arguments would die away and we could effectively target those in need.

So in conclusion, Stuff White People Like is cute and reasonably clever, but I really wish they’d change their name so I could shamefully acknowledge a parody of myself in peace.

Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, Uncategorized