Do you ever feel culturally deprived within the so-called bubble we live in at Whitman? Do you wish there was an efficient way to make up for all the opportunities a city or foreign country would offer without actually leaving the campus? All this and more can be found at the best blog I’ve encountered in quite a while: “Stuff White People Like”, which offers a world of insight concerning a people Whitman is all too unfamiliar with. But in all sincerity, there is certainly some perspective to be reaped from it: it is intuitive satire and unlike The Onion or The Daily Show, the target is not Bill O’Reilly, it is us: the liberal, cultured and all-too-ready to offer a tasteful opinion concerning indie music or a principled solution to climate change. Since its inception at the beginning of this year, entries have been posted with titles such as “Diversity” (“but only as it relates to restaurants”), “Mos Def”, “Knowing What’s Best for Poor People”, “Wes Anderson Movies”, and “Microbreweries”, with each taking an anthropological approach to the strange culture of “white people” (which essentially means liberal, college-educated, young white people if you hadn’t determined that already—Nascar and Larry the Cable Guy are nowhere to be found on the list).
What distinguishes “Stuff White People Like” from a thriving pack of smart, irreverent satirists—Stephen Colbert, the aforementioned staff of The Onion, et cetera—is the site’s integration of self-examination into cultural critique. One can assume, from the ironic tone of the entries and the depth of knowledge concerning the culture being examined, that the blogger is part of the “white culture” being critiqued.

This assumption is confirmed when you look through the blogger’s photos, in which she is revealed to be a youngish Caucasian woman whose interests seem to include many of the same things listed on the website.

Often times, the culture for which we can thank for the most esteemed satire of our age ignores the self-importance that its cultural critiques are predicated upon, detracting from its validity. “Stuff White People Like” joins the honored ranks of satire that avoids this pitfall, falling a bit short of South Park but possessing the same irreverent spirit and general disdain for the intellectually sterilizing cult of political correctness. It expresses an understanding that hyphenated last names and natural medicine are just as ripe for criticism as the requisite satirical targets of Red-State cultural obsessions. If the potential for obtaining a bit of perspective isn’t enough of an incentive to check out “Stuff White People Like”, do it because its one hell of an entertaining read. As Kanye West wrote of the site on his own blog—“This Blog is 2 Funny!”—and if there’s two things white people love, they’re Kanye West and blogging.

(url: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com)