Hoping to prove to myself that I am a badass nonconformist, I read through all 76 entries to date at the Stuff White People Like blog and tallied up my score to see how many applied to me. I was as truthful in my answers as I could tolerate.
My white person score: 27 out of 76, which rounds up to 36% white.
*More technically, 36% whiter than the average white, since what that blog really describes is the kind of status whoring that upper middle class coastal city liberal whites like to pursue to separate themselves from the masses of unenlightened whites in flyover country.
I’m pleased with my score. It shows that I have just enough taste to enjoy the good life (green tea has anti-oxidants! NASCAR makes no sense to me!) but not so much self-righteous whiter person status posturing that I become the very thing I loathe (no, I really don’t give a shit about raising awareness!).
I’m so convinced that a lot of these things that whiter people like are merely grabs for status over other white people that I have an experiment in mind. According to this entry, white people love to go to ethnic restaurants (not including Italian) that are patronized by non-whites for the “authentic” experience, so they can tell their fellow whites about their new favorite foreign cuisine. This earns them major bragging rights. The more foreign-sounding the food, the better. Listen as they take great pains to pronounce the dish they had in its native tongue.
Now I like Ethiopian food, even though it gives me tremendous gas one hour after eating it. But I wouldn’t stop eating Ethiopian food if suddenly it was served in a bland cookie cutter suburban eatery and the waitresses were not real Ethiopians, like they are in the place I go to in Adams Morgan. I would continue to enjoy their delicious injera bread even if a hundred other white people were sitting around me eating the same thing, and that is because I go for the food itself.
So in my experiment I would take the most popular Ethiopian restaurant in a hip neighborhood in DC, one that the hippest white people rave about, and move it into a vacated McDonald’s restaurant in a 100% white suburban neighborhood, where I would then sell combo meals of authentic Ethiopian food at $4.99 a pop, with a big gulp honey wine and plastic utensils, served at the cash register by a non-Ethiopian, preferably a dour white hipster with a lip ring or a Chinese woman. If whiter people are truly going to exotic ethnic restaurants for the enjoyment of the food as they like to claim they are, then business should remain brisk in my new McEthiopian restaurant. If business slows to a trickle, then I know that the whiter people were only singing the praises of Ethiopian food when eating it had an “authentic” feel so as to score culinary gotcha points in the neverending struggle to reign supreme at the top of the elitist cultural heap.
Stuffwhitepeoplelike in a nutshell: Making fun of the tribalism of people who think they have risen above tribalism.
[crypto-donation-box]
