stuff white people think

In 2006, Smirnoff's viral video "Tea Partay" became one of youtube's most-watched videos. A satire of the New England "preppie" culture, it features P-Unit, a cohort of three pastel-colored polo shirt upper-middle class "old money" white rappers talking about their Ivy-league educations, croquet games, yacht rides and Martha's Vineyard vacations. An undeniably hilarious commentary, it exposes quite a startling truth, and raises an often unasked question: what, exactly, is white culture?

One of comedian Daniel Tosh's routines combats this quite bluntly. It's easy, he says, to imitate the "hispanic," "asian" and "black" stereotypes, or at least create a caricature that is fairly recognizable and understood as somewhere along an ethnically appropriate continuum. What is the white stereotype? Is it the plaid-clad hillbilly? Is it the glasses-wearing young intellectual? Is it the yuppie? Is it the American? the European? the Australian? the South African? Is white culture, perhaps, the most difficult to pin down? Is there an advantage in struggling to establish some identity of race and ethnicity, and how do we go about actually establishing it?

History would appear to comment on this in a tongue-in-cheek way; it was occurrences such as the slavery movement of pre-Civil War America, the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, apartheid in South Africa, the Holocaust, the establishment of Native American reservations, etc., that seem to have been most influential and formative to that end. The effects of British, French, German, Dutch and Spanish imperialism don't seem to have extended so far into the present day lives of white people nearly as much as they have for those in Rwanda, the Phillipines, South Africa and Haiti, to name a few. Is the most accurate box to check in the ethnicity portion of a census questionnaire for a caucasian, then, "other?"

The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in January of 2009 called "The End of White America?" by Hua Hsu, a professor at Vassar College. The article included the following commentary from Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University. "[These students are in the midst of a racial-identity crisis.] They don't care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized." Commenting on the self-deprecation which whites often employ in order to avoid external lambasting (Smirnoff's video as one example), Wray notes that "the best defense is to be constantly pulling the rug out from underneath yourself...You're forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment."

So it would appear that white culture is not so much bland as it is "unmarked." Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains unmarked culture to be "a virtually open-ended archive of differences" and marked culture to be one in which "particular differences are emphasized as constituting the defining features of group identity" (from Diaspora, identity, and religion: new directions in theory and research, by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso). America's pride as the "melting pot" hasn't so much left it bereft of white culture as much as it has allowed white culture to be touched by all others, leaving its borders undefined and its constituents, well, in somewhat of a retro-diaspora.

All this to say, enjoy the two linked videos...thoughtfully, ironically and responsibly.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-4XKTHJGs&feature=related