White As The Driven Snow

There's a blog making the rounds called Stuff White People Like. It has its charms, but of course it's really Stuff White Urban American (and Canadian) Liberals like. I don't know the writers' background, but it seems part of the Vice magazine-style hipster self-backlash movement. While entertaining, this brand of bourgeois anti-bourgeois irony is in itself a white person trope. As with postmodernism, affectation and self-recognition becomes an excuse to carry on exactly as before but smarmier. Where I'm from, Hamilton, the "stuff white people like" list would look something like this: hockey, Tim Horton's, classic rock, meat and potatoes. But those kinds of white people don't read or write blogs. I'm obviously not one of them, but I'm not the target audience for SWPL (white people like acronyms) either. At least I hope not.

By accident of birth I've been enough of an insider to live comfortably in the culture but enough of an outsider to realize how crucifyingly corrupt it is. I'm from a smaller urban center (Hamilton) neighbouring a big urban center (Toronto) and from a smaller laboratory of Western decline (Canada) neighbouring a big laboratory of Western decline (the U.S.A.). I'm also white but not Anglo-Saxon, so I could use that as an excuse to check myself off the target-list; though I won't because it seems disingenuous. As much as I occasionally enjoy railing against blonde hegemony, I'm not enough of a Women's Studies major to mistake private whinging for universal truth. As the homeless black man in San Francisco who cursed "you and your white family and your kids and your grandkids etc." when my dad brushed away his request for change proved, for all intents and purposes I am white.

In urban Canada at least, upwardly mobile Asians are gradually inheriting the yuppie white culture lovingly criticized by the site, and I look forward to the day when the process is complete. Then we can all get over the tired left-wing racial obsession-cum-anxiety cliché and stop worrying and love the bomb. In the meanwhile, for the sake of full disclosure, I do like the following items on the list: coffee, traveling, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, breakfast places, indie music (not exclusively), art degrees, living by the water, t-shirts, dogs, et al.