that thing white ppl do when they disparage 'white ppl'

i'm gonna go to lunch in hopes that we can un-derail this thread back to its original topic. :-)

so when a white person buys spices at an Asian food market, how white are they being and can we disparage them for it?

yeah handouts would be good, let's do this

btw ty whiney for posting those good arguments for miscegenation

so when a white person buys spices at an Asian food market, how white are they being and can we disparage them for it?

I'd say that's about 40% white, so it only merits a cocked eyebrow and perhaps a gentle elbow nudge to the side.

crutis: well not all no

which ones aren't?

i don't know.

i think the chinese ppl at my asian supermarket really like me and aren't saying mean things to me when i'm there

i mean about me

the asian grocery store is the closest one to my house, <3

is the lavish & intrusive government policy part the designation of widely separated residential and commercial zoning areas? (I honestly don't know how suburbs become established & I want to know what government policies put them in place)

i most commonly use "whiteness" to disparage people who are emotionally or sexually repressed, who aspire to or inhabit a suburban mainstream nuclear-family lifestyle, and who are unaware of their own white privilege. all of things happen to describe my immediate family, who are all white btw.

this seems like an awful choice of words

there are loads of others u cld use to describe that picture without implicating the awful binaries harbl notes

(I honestly don't know how suburbs become established & I want to know what government policies put them in place)

― I went to your blog and I didn't feel anything (Curt1s Stephens), Friday, April 23, 2010 5:20 PM (12 seconds ago)

me too! now that would be a lavish & intrusive government policy worth fussing about

i most commonly use "whiteness" to describe playing music in a rhythmically square fashion, but i think we've had that discussion

(I honestly don't know how suburbs become established & I want to know what government policies put them in place)

FHA loans after WWI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#History

WWII

and then this dude made the magic happen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York

is the lavish & intrusive government policy part the designation of widely separated residential and commercial zoning areas? (I honestly don't know how suburbs become established & I want to know what government policies put them in place)

― I went to your blog and I didn't feel anything (Curt1s Stephens), Friday, April 23, 2010 4:20 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark

as far as i have read, yeah. there are very precise restrictions that make everything huge. big minimum lot sizes, large margins between building and lot-edge, that kind of thing. plus the roads built to get out there, it's all very freeway-dependent.

xps

ie it's illegal to built anything small and walkable in a whole lot of places.

and to build multi-family housing

From the first, the Levitt development was racially segregated; a "restrictive covenant" in the original rental agreement, which migrated to the sales agreement, stipulated that houses could not be rented or sold to any but members of the "Caucasian" race. This covenant conformed to federal requirements that developers using FHA funding had to maintain the "racial homogeneity" of their developments. Only well after the 1954 racial integration decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education, was Levittown racially integrated, and even as late as the 1960 census only a tiny fraction of the community was non-white.

nakh, just being honest about my disparaging usage of "whiteness" and the reasons why i associate certain negative qualities with it. i'm generally aware of the problems those associations generate. but i find it interesting that you take issue with how those associations are unfair to non-whites (by binary association) rather than how it is unfair to whites (by marking repression as an essentially white trait). so i guess we are ok with disparaging white ppl per se?

"so i guess we are ok with disparaging white ppl per se?"

they can take it. see, but if we have learned anything from this thread it is that there are all kinds of different white people to hate.

some are pink. some are yellow. some live in the suburbs. some buy 40% of their spices at asian markets. all kinds!

some are black

some have red hair and bone thugs & harmony songs going through their heads all day long! all kinds!

sorry. N harmony.

granted, i have only skimmed this thread. i think i get the idea though.

how wd you go about disparagaing a conservative upper middle class gujarati family who live with their adult children in a gated surburban minimansion?

(for elmo)

lol @ this business class trollin

i'd simply say "lol gujarati, what's that, an Indian sports car?"

if i was visiting an upper middle class gujutari i probably wouldn't disparage them as i would be their guest

I normally love threads like this but I can't work out what anyone is arguing in this one.

Apparently the zoning/parking thing is related to why it's impossible to set up an arcade now?

but that is a wildly hypothetical question and i don't get what you expect me to say. would i call them "white"? probably not!

Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white

The connotations wearing my nerves thin
Could it be semantics generating the mess we're in?
I understand that language breeds stereotype
But what's the explanation for the malice, for the spite?

Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white

I wasn't brought here, I was born
Circumsized, categorized, allegiance sworn,
Does this mean I have to take such shit
For being fairskinned? No!
I ain't a part of no conspiracy,
I'm just you're average Joe.

Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white

Represents everything I hate,
The soap shoved in your mouth to cleanse the mind
The vast majority of sheep
A buttoned collar, starched and bleached
Constricting veins, the blood flow to the brain slows
They're so fuckin' ordinary white

Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white

We're better off this way
Say what you're gonna say
So go ahead and label me
An asshole cause I can
Accept responsibility, for what I've done
But not for who I am

Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white
Don't call me white, Don't call me white

many xposts: there is a really really great documentary about how the idea of suburbs came about, gonna see if i can remember the name and post it here

This is a pretty good book about the subject.

i think it was The End of Suburbia

the gujarati dude who works at the liquor store down the street always gives me relationship advice when I come in

the korean woman who works at the other liquor store down the street always stares imploringly into my eyes and kind of whispers, "Be careful that you do not drink too much"

Oh hey, I started a thread like this once a long time ago! Sure, I basically agree with the idea that it's a good thing for people to start seeing, like, American "whiteness" as a kind of culture, and not just some invisible default. But at least in my sphere, the way people disparage whiteness bugs me a little, for these reasons and more:

1. it's just viscerally annoying (to me, at least) to watch white people call each other so white, because at some point it's like "OMG YOU'RE BOTH WHITE, GET OVER IT"

2. I don't think it's often not about "white guilt" or "redneck humor," though those things are certainly there; in my area it feels closer to the way middle-class people pick on middle-classness, which is to say that people are basically calling one another boring and normal, and so complicated things about race are getting dragged into a conversation that's really just about suggesting "you're boring and predictable and I'm more interesting than you" -- it's implicating racial stuff just to call someone square, which is risky and can have bad effects

3. it's often based around this really narrow conception of "white" that basically does just mean bourgeois -- educated, affluent, NPR/PBS, whatever -- which (a) is really not an accurate picture of what whiteness might be in this country, and (b) on some level winds up being exclusionary and self-congratulatory, even if you think you're mocking it! especially because some of those qualities are ones that loads and loads of non-white people successfully aspire to, because things like education or safety or money aren't exactly cultural traits, they're pleasant things most people work toward having. I think most of the people who mock whiteness along these lines would have a really hard time talking to a non-white person who just got a scholarship at an Ivy and rolling their eyes about how "white" that was

4. and it does that thing Max quoted me on before, where if "white" means all that stuff, there's a little bit of a shadow where non-white people (and in the U.S. this tends to point to "black") must represent danger, vulgarity, etc. -- and of course even if you think that's a complimentary side to take, it's not exactly helping, you know? I mean, as far as the U.S. goes, I think that if anyone's gonna have any ideas about race/culture categories like "blackness" or "whiteness" or anything else, they should probably be really thoughtful about how they're putting the category together and why, and not just accidentally have them pop up in the course of making fun of your friend for wearing bad pants or something

5. the subtext of all those is that it's mostly talking about class stuff, not race stuff -- race is getting subbed in to mean social class -- and that seems slippery and bad to me. and also like a missed opportunity, because if you seriously wanted to talk about how whiteness works (or American whiteness, anyway), you could be saying all kinds of interesting cultural things that included the vast numbers of lower-middle-class and working-class white people who make up a huge chunk the population and what cultural continuities they do/don't have internally, or with upper-class white people, or whatever

those are some of many issues I have with it, though I agree that it's generally harmless and it doesn't really bug me until someone's being a dick about it (trying to deploy it as a really serious attack/criticism), or incredibly sloppy about it in an area they shouldn't (like talking seriously about race/class), or just doing it so much that it gets plain irritating.

(one other thing that particularly fascinates me is the number of social-class things labeled "white" that are totally full of middle-class east-Asians -- that there's already this huge thing in U.S. racial logic where the bourgeois/"stuff white people like" version of whiteness conveniently embraces all American-raised east Asians)

that covers most of my objections

if disparaging of 'white ppl' is intended to elucidate prejudices of the 'invisible default', it often fails because it dismally conflates class with race

if intended as cultural criticism it seldom amounts to more than narcissism of small differences among a small subset of 'white ppl'

3. it's often based around this really narrow conception of "white" that basically does just mean bourgeois

this is otm and one thing that bothers me a lot is that many problems in the u.s. stem from ignoring or minimizing the problems of poor white ppl, and subsequently blaming stuff on them and making fun of them

After long, hard thought, I have concluded that every racial category is so contaminated with racism that they are universally toxic to any kind of racial discourse. Therefore it is best just to pitch the concept of race overboard and deal as best you can with people, recognizing one's ignorance for what it is.

Btw, it doesn't matter if the speaker or writer is a highly considered intellectual, author, or scientist, or if the assertions are well-meant, or if they are backed by research data. The morass of past racism will distort whatever gets said, or at least a part of it -- unless the only thing that is being asserted is that no categorical claims about race can be possibly be true. Or, if the assertions are heavily qualified enough to pass for true, they will throw no light upon the subject, because the opposite assertion will be equally admissable.

You may differ with me on this. It is simply my own conclusion.

In that race is so tied to ethnicity and cultural identity, throwing out race as a concept like that brings up the specter of a default race/ethnicity/class again - never mind the difficulty of separating those things.

And the discussion, when people have it - let's say when intellectuals, report writers and policy makers have it, and not when ilx has it - becomes an impractical one to have. Like, in pitching the concept of race overboard, do we stop recording race statistics, and then not see the huge, disproportionate numbers of black people who end up in jail? It makes it difficult to see potentially or actually racially motivated legislation; it makes finding correctives difficult if they're ethnically or culturally specific (when ethnicity and culture are tied to race, which in this case they are).

btw was this thread started to disparage that other thread about fist bumping explosions

Fist bumping with explosions makes me giggle. I like all fist bump shenanigans. I'll fist bump if someone wants to, but it's not how I say hello or goodbye to my friends usually.