A few weeks back, on a listserv that I currently have no good reason to subscribe to, let alone read, someone posted a link to the Stuff White People Like blog. As a response, today someone posted a link to Adam Sternbergh’s recent critique of that blog. A link in that article led me to Sternbergh’s March 2006 piece about 30-somethings who have only sort of grown up. This eventually led me to look into the archive of his work at NY magazine, where I found a few articles about gentrification in New York and the weirdness of the whole “neighborhood X is the new neighborhood Y,” especially now that it’s been going on for over a decade.
Now I’m awake partly because 1) Although I’m glad to see a thoughtful contribution to a conversation outlining the distinctions between good and bad “edgy” comedy, I think he’s missing something about SWPL: He only glosses the fact that many people, including several that have posted comments on the blog, have pointed out that the people that actually like the things listed are “a very specific demographic sliver of left-leaning, city-dwelling white folk–in other words, people like me,” who “have previously been trapped and tagged alternately as yuppies, or Bobos, or (by yours truly in New York magazine) grups.” He sort of brushes this critique aside and adds his own, which is that nothing that is a truly cutting satire is ever accepted by the satirized as great entertainment; rather, white people laugh at SWPL only because it makes them “feel superior” (to?).
Aside from the fact that I might disagree that no true satire is acceptable to the satirized (I think Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real! has an example of a rock band who became very popular in ethnic-conflict-torn Yugoslavia by enacting negative stereotypes about their own people), I do agree that SWPL doesn’t feel the least bit offensive, and is rarely funny. (I wonder how the laughter in response to SWPL would land on the coordinates of Diane Davis’s taxonomy?)
But I think that there’s something else going on besides a feeling of superiority. And it’s related to the simpler critique about the inaccuracy of the “White People” in the title. Basically, it seems like SWPL also allows this “very specific demographic sliver of left-leaning, city-dwelling white folk,” Bobos, grups, whatever, to be thought of as the group that defines whiteness…. This, of course, adds to… or maybe even accounts for the feeling of superiority… possibly even answering my asswholly-parenthesized question above. The “White People” described on the blog can feel superior to other people who happen to share the former’s skin tone and possibly ethnic roots because the latter are “not really white.”
partly because 2) Ugh… all I can think about lately is growing up and growing up too late and not really ever growing up.
partly because 3) Reading about the socio-economic-cultural-lifestyle-realestate dynamics of the NY metro area makes me totally anxious, in both the giddy/excited sense and the puke-y/run-for-your-life sense. Sternbergh has one article about Jersey City and one about Red Hook, a “remote” part of Brooklyn; both of these are places we’ve talked about moving. In those two articles he seems to be developing this argument about how gentrification has gotten ahead of itself (post-gentrification, obviously) and now no longer happens in stages (artsies with cheap cafes and bars-> hipsters with boutiques and fancier restaurants-> investors with developers’ plans and construction equipment-> totally rich people). Now, since the boom-to-come is so expected, the artsies and the developers land at the same time… Why do I care? I guess I’m trying to figure out at what point I’m supposed to be the one to move into the neighborhood….
partly because 4) My blog is now not only not-posted-to; it is also about neither math nor rhetoric.
