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

So - not talking about this article here, talking about the thread subject now:

When people say such and such place/practice/style is "white," does that imply that if somebody is not white and goes there/does that/acts like that regularly, does that mean they are "acting white"?

Logical conclusion right? But I bet that part of the equation isn't going to go down real well - and it shouldn't, either. Might be a problem with this whole line of talk.

Removed from the oh-so-sincere context of working for justice etc, defining certain things as "white" is something that racists have always been happy to do. The difference, that you might think means something, and that I sincerely doubt means enough to justify it, is that now these things are expressed in the context of a critique. Again, what do you say to non-whites who wish to partake of them?

This is not a made-up problem. It's like the shit Jimi Hendrix endured for not wanting to play properly "black" music - shit he endured from blacks and whites, who of course thought of themselves as working for progress. I doubt anybody here is going to defend what happened to Hendrix, getting called "an electric Uncle Tom" by you know who. But if you go around defining things as white, you might want to think about what kind of messages you are sending to everybody. You are not automatically immune from this possibility just because you can see where liberals of the 60s and 70s didn't quite have it down.

I don't expect anybody on this thread to just surrender and give up on the possibly positive value of this whole 'defining whiteness' thing - so how to do this right without just perpetuating exclusion?

i'm leaning in that direction. i still get some enjoyment from his shtick because i have a chip on my shoulder re consumer culture. and so i think you're right that it's not really valuable. xp to mordy

feel like 'whiteness' as a concept is a tricky deal and treated very well in books i haven't read.

Hear hear, I think it has been especially well dealt with in books I haven't read too.

my pov is that while i'm not in a position to tell someone who isn't white how to use the word "white," i think it'd be shitty, excluding and racist for ME to use the word "white" to describe things i thought were lame, conformist, etc. it'd be a weird, self-aggrandizing, racially essentialist action.

xxxp I'm reading Nat Hentoff's 'Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee' (btw super fantastic + i highly recommend if for nothing else than the vertigo of reading a book from 92 that perfectly describes 2015) + he writes about a time he met Mingus and someone came up to Mingus and accused him of not really being black enough to play the blues and then Mingus started playing and blew the room away (iirc i read this section late last night on the plane and may not be remembering correctly). anyway, Hentoff's point was that there will always be ppl saying other ppl aren't X enough, pure enough, etc enough & that those ppl pretty much suck.

With you on your adjectives, da croupier. Okay, Mordy, there will always be those sucky people, but do only sucky people create these distinctions? Because I think maybe otherwise well-meaning people do too.

sometimes well-meaning ppl accidentally become sucky ppl bc humans are flawed creatures

i do think there's a tier where liberally-minded white people want you to know they're aware of the failings of "white" people but then vanily extrapolate that only white people watch dr quinn reruns etc, assumming only white dr quinn watchers who can't handle the truth would be offended, and don't realize they're also telling an asian dr quinn fan that they're white

and i should note that not every asian dr quinn fan necessarily has to be offended, and could well say "oh yeah it's so white" - the point is that it's shitty to be a white person making that leap imo

Dr Quinn was hilarious

I guess I wonder what makes his observation so valuable. The note that ppl of a given time tend to reproduce a particular aesthetic seems banal. Would Carlos of the 17th c be writing about baroque bros?

― Mordy, Thursday, 23 April 2015 17:50 (40 minutes ago) Permalink

i don't think the point is that he's doing something that's completely unprecedented in scope, but it's pretty unprecedented for the current time—no one has really isolated this before in the current moment around these varying signifiers that i've seen

so...why is it 'valuable'? I mean, i don't think anyone is saying he's the new foucault, closer to a lamp post in a hipster studies thread, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting

ha ha, lamp post

no one has really isolated artisanal hipsters before?

several of them locked in basement presently

no one has interrogated the varying impulses behind artisinal etc

actually we have a thread that is kind of devoted to that that i've never read, i imagine you could ask one of the many people who posted in it why the subject interests them

oh we're definitely interrogating them

Mordy otm. This doesn't seem worth talking about.

I've seen message boards posts & self-aware jokes about conversationally, but not really articulated to a considered point the way it is here

i have a friend that does it in conversation almost every night and it gets really tedious really fast. i think carles is good at making people feel cool being included in it. but embracing that too much would diminish the coolness (see carles.buzz most recent post).

yes it can veer close to a wake up sheeple thing and I'm sure for some its about feeling smarter than the rest of the room but...you could say that as easily about philosophy in general

d-40 needs all the opportunities he can get to feel smarter than the rest of the room

(just jokes no need to argue that i'm wrong)

i meant, 'but you could say that about ilx in general'

smartest-person-in-the-room wave

woooooooooo

woooooooOOOoooooooooo

xxxxxxxxxxxx (fell into salad bar)

to a degree i guess i like thinking about market niches, something appealing in the sheer ridiculousness of it, gives my mind something to do that's like knitting. and to think you could profit from it with some kind of social capital is a bonus.

but at the end of the day it's not all that fun.

this guy gets a lot of credit for "noticing things, kind of"

yeah totally

it's his pioneering writing/image style. before he started writing, it was considered a mistake to use the same image multiple times in the same post. but now that wall has been broken

what an exciting new world we live in!

I dont know about whiteness but Carles doesn't use the word 'white' at all in that piece so I don't know why we are even talking about that. If you want to talk global appropriation it is not something limited to white patriarchal culture but one could say the abuses of capitalist imperialism et al greatly benefits that specific power structure so it's a good idea to be critical of it. But that isn't being addressed in this piece, it is more a compendium of trends and cultural artifacts.

let's see what he's seeing here: design aesthetic, clothing, a style, kitchen design, "experiences," post-pinterest, meaning in food, #nofilter, bakeries, brunch

huh *steeples fingers* interesting

what about part 2?

I feel like ‘most girls who aren’t mainstream skanks’ or weirdos are relatively Contemporary Conformist. When contructing a ‘self’ only using the medium of retail fashion, they can’t help but always be contemporarily conforming. (But this applies 2 bros too, I guess). What is it that women want? Do they want a ContempConformie guy to ‘impress’ their parents [via ‘mate who can provide’]?
Do they want ‘more than just a mainstreamer in a polo shirt’ but not a ‘low-life Tumblr culture loser’?
Are ‘cool girls’ who can ‘contribute’ to discussions at Contemporary Conformist establishments just a new iteration of ‘basic bitches’ who think they are different from ‘basic bitches’ that they shared in a listicle, but also embrace how sometimes they like being a lil bit basic, yall! ?

maybe work out your shit in private dude

it is almost like judging books by their covers doesn't provide the insight that ive always assumed...

he certainly has a knack for completely obliterating any sense of authorial point of view thru unhinged use of scare quoting

my favorite kind

It makes me want to read some Andy Warhol.

i feel like every person in this thread has engaged with dumber arguments on ilx

"I dont know about whiteness but Carles doesn't use the word 'white' at all in that piece so I don't know why we are even talking about that."

Nobody said HE did; thread topic is about white stuff; at least two diff discussions going on here.

so is the social capital something you get from reading carles? is he not just transmitting his audience's anxieties about whether their choices are real choices back to them

idk, i mean its not adorno, but it's also accessible

http://www.troll.me/images/ancient-aliens-guy/white-people.jpg

http://www.troll.me/images/ancient-aliens-guy/white-people.jpg

i love and admire affluent white ppl

didnt read that carles thing but feel like 'contempo conformo' could be called something better... or just call these ppl yuppies like everyone else already does who h8s these ppl (i.e. me and my friends)

yuppies are diff tho

u don't have to be a yuppie to live a CC lifestyle

sounds more like young bobos so I guess carles is young david brooks

I just went out and tried to describe how people are living, using a method that might best be described as comic sociology. The idea is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude. Often I make fun of the social manners of my class (I sometimes think I've made a whole career out of self-loathing)

carles is like tao lin for me- I find his appeal incomprehensible and it makes me feel like I belong in a different generation