Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. What has changed, however – changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably – is the cultural backdrop. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and “black music that black people don’t listen to any more” (#116). Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site’s age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”
“As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab on to,” Lander said in 2009. Yet there’s little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race.
The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who’d been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. I n 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation.
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