White Lite

It’s one of life’s great ironies that everybody wants to feel he or she is special. Or maybe that’s one of life’s great oxymorons. Or paradoxes. Anyway, that was what I was thinking about as I totaled up my score about an hour ago and found that I’m only a shade over 20% white. Because that made me feel a bit unique, even though all it really meant was that I’m not one particular Caucasian satirist’s perfect cultural stereotype.

For Christmas, my friend Karen gave me the book Stuff White People Like, by Christian Lander, who also created the Web site of the same name. In the book, Lander describes 150 different things—ranging alphabetically from the ACLU to yoga—that are so “white” that were you, the reader, to concede fealty to each and every one, you would be downright albino. There’s a check-off list in the back, in fact, that equates a perfect score of 150 with being “100% white.”

The book’s subtitle is “The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.” The implication being that the “whiter” one is, the more one thinks him- or herself to be something extra-special, and the more one in truth actually is exactly like millions of other people with the precisely the same tastes and prejudices.

I’d heard of the Web site and knew that both it and the book are meant to be more lark than indictment, more good-natured jab at pretension than serious sociological classification system. Still, my hope from the get-go was that my tastes would prove to be far less white than is my pigmentation.

The description on the back cover, however, didn’t look promising. Defining “The White Stuff,” it began, “They love nothing better than sipping free-trade gourmet coffee, leafing through the Sunday New York Times, and listening to David Sedaris on NPR (ideally all at the same time). Apple products, indie music, food co-ops, and vintage T-shirts make them weak in the knees.” While I’m not an Apple snob and I happily drink 7-Eleven and McDonald’s coffee, those words hit a little too close to home for comfort. I subscribe to and love the Sunday New York Times. I seek out indie music. Lynn and I would shop at the food co-op down the street from us all the time if the staff and patrons weren’t all so sour and unfriendly that we’d rather kill ourselves than spend any amount of time in their company. While I never listen to David Sedaris on NPR, I do buy his books and read him in the New Yorker, and confess to finding him hilarious. And, oh my God, aren’t my two favorite T-shirts machine-faded vintage images of old Pittsburgh Penguins and Pittsburgh Pirates logos?

The copy on the back cover continued: “They believe they’re unique, yet somehow they’re exactly the same—talking about how they ‘get’ Sarah Silverman’s ‘subversive’ comedy and Wes Anderson’s ‘droll’ films. They’re also down with diversity and up on all the best microbrews, breakfast spots, foreign cinema and authentic sushi. They’re organic, ironic and do not own TVs.” As much as I wanted to triumphantly point out to the inanimate object in front of me that living without TV for three days during a recent outage had just about killed me, I was given further pause by the facts that I find Sarah Silverman both hot and funny, that I did kind of like the Wes Anderson-directed Rushmore, and that I’m a fan of microbreweries, organic food and most things ironic. So what if I don’t specifically seek out foreign films and seldom go out for breakfast. Could I, in fact, be afflicted with what Stuff White People Like calls “the unbearable whiteness of being”?

That perusal of the book jacket had occurred in December. It wasn't until this morning, however, before I actually started reading the book’s contents. Sure, the holidays are a busy time, and then there’s the business of settling back into work and everyday life. But I think I also was a bit afraid of what I might discover about myself and the depth of my lameness.

So, earlier today I took a deep breath and started reading, filled with curiosity and trepidation about just how white I might prove to be. The first listed “thing white people like” was coffee—especially at Starbuck’s, the accompanying blurb specified. Damn! I was just there this morning. The second thing was “Religions Their Parents Don’t Belong To.” Well, my parents are staunch Catholics and I’m an agnostic, so, sort of. But what the book was getting at was more how white people tend to wear as badges of honor their alleged appreciation of such faiths and religious offshoots as Buddhism and Kabbalah. That’s not me. I docked myself half a point. The third “white” thing on the list was film festivals. Ha! While I’ve nothing against them, I don’t seek them out—even though the AFI in Silver Spring holds them all the time. Score one for Ries iconoclasm. But all told, items one through 10 were a mixed bag. I do like Barack Obama, for instance, and ethnic restaurants. My score already was 6, with 140 items to go.

Thankfully, however, I never would be that white again. While I had to admit my attraction to Asian girls (number 11), nonprofit organizations (12), veganism/vegetarianism (32) and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (35), I reached the halfway mark with a score of only 20. (Number 75 was “Threatening to Move to Canada,” which I’m abashed to admit I’ve done any number of times—most recently when the shooting in Tucson predictably elicited from American lawmakers fewer calls for gun control than demands for everyone to pack heat.) Among the many white likes I do not have are snowboarding, marijuana, Arrested Development (I found it only intermittently funny—so there!), hating my parents, living by the water, kitchen gadgets, the Prius (we test-drove one and hated it—its fuel efficiency be damned), bicycles (I find cyclists annoying and arrogant; they’re lucky I don’t run them all off the road), Michel Gondry (who?) and study abroad (I never partook, and in fact have only been to three foreign countries in my life).

I found I was on a decreasingly white roll now. I would add only 12 more manifestations of whiteness to my score the rest of the way. Yes, I have bad memories of high school. My humor is nothing if not self-deprecating. Lynn and I loved Portland, Oregon when we vacationed there. I’ve always dug glasses, and The Simpsons still makes me laugh. But, “music piracy”? Not only do I not knowingly own any pirated music, but I’m so technologically primitive (unlike most white people, I might add) that I wouldn’t even know how to pirate anything. Graduate school? Never went, no interest. Noam Chomsky? I’ve heard of him but haven’t a clue what he’s about. Che Guevera? I mock the trendy white suburbanites who wear those T-shirts. Tibet? Same thing, except bumper stickers. Rock climbing? Please! It would strike me as idiotic and dangerous even if I had two hands.

Another way in which I fancy myself far from typically white—or 21st-century American, for that matter—is that I hate the phone and think most forms of social media are self-absorbed and stupid. So, I don’t have a portable device with a calculator on it, or the means to text somebody and ask him or her to calculate my white percentage. Fortunately, the book told me that a score of 30 out of 150 would make me only 20% white. (OK, come to think of it, 30 of 150 is the same as 1 of 5, so, yes, 20%. I get that.) My total score was 32, so, well, I’m at a shade over 20%, as I stated at the outset of this post.

Again, I know this doesn’t mean that I’m one of a kind or anything, as much as I’d like to think of myself as some proud outsider who refuses to yield to convention. To the contrary, I’m conventional in a million different ways, by a million different yardsticks. Still, I’m breathing a sigh of relief at this moment. Because when it comes to whiteness at its most laughable, I clearly could be a whole lot worse.