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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Stuff White people Like (SWPL), as it has become known, started out as a blog by Christian Lander and Myles Valentin in 2008. Lander is white; Valentin is part Filipino. The blog went viral, and a book was released that same year, single authored by Lander (Lander, 2008). A second book followed in 2010, as well as a set of cards: Stuff White People Like (to Talk About): 50 Ways to Start Conversations with Caucasians in 2011. Since it would be too complex to try and disentangle authorship, I refer to the author of the blog as Lander and Valentin, regardless of when the text was actually produced.
The blog is still available, but is frozen at entry #136 in 2010. It reports, as of December 2022, more than 100 million hits. Among the list of “stuff” are TED conferences, Vespa Scooters, Moleskine notebooks, hummus, The Onion, Facebook, appearing to enjoy classical music, grammar, bad memories of high school, study abroad, irony, Apple products, wine, David Sedaris and Farmer's markets. Some topics are explicitly about race: Barack Obama, being the only white person around, having black friends, black music that black people don't listen to anymore (jazz, blues and “old school” hip hop), but the majority of topics are consumerist and/or cultural. The format of the pieces is fairly uniform: they are short essays, illustrated with generic images, that make a few humorous points about the phenomenon, generally couched in the form of observations about white people; for example, in the Grammar piece, we find: “Without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.” (https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/12/99-grammar/)
My interest in SWPL is motivated by the fact that it has been the object of a sophisticated analysis in Walton and Jaffe (2011), Grzanka and Maher (2012), and Jaffe (2016). However, despite the fact that Walton and Jaffe and Grzanka and Maher make some claims about the humorous nature of SWPL, no actual discussion of the humor is included. I intend to remedy this lacuna and at the same time engage some of the more interesting points. I think that these authors miss or deliberately choose to ignore (part of) the joke.
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