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

Turn on your heartlight
(BA BA BAAAA!)
Let it shine wherever you go
(YOU GO! YOU GO! YOU GO! YOU GO!)

list seems to be missing “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes

Weird, I saw that playlist somewhere else recently too.

missing "Torn" "Stay" and "Humpty Dance"

What about the Byrds, "Turnt Turnt Turnt"?

If being turnt for "Don't You Want Me" is wrong I don't wanna be right

or white

i get irrationally embarrassed when people do this in public. tbr i think it's a version of liberal brainworms. ultimately whiteness is an ideology, not a person. though of course some fair-skinned people stump for it hard. and idk, liking some songs is actually not a problem? whereas working in finance or being an 'entrepreneur' or enjoying a high standard of living is... actively stumping for the ideology of whiteness. but that stuff is a lot harder to make fun of then 'sweet caroline' or whatever.

when parsing out whiteness, richness, maleness, etc., i think it's important to know when one is being made fun of while the others are being affirmed in the background because it makes the whole organism more resilient, if that makes any sense.

not everyone is cut out for self-hatred. you have to build toward it

sweeeet ca ro liiiine
hey hey what get laid get fucked

Good wedding playlists itt

it's a ... nice day for a....

map thanks for articulating something I couldn't quite put my finger on

I've never understood why people like Sweet Caroline so much, it's such a blah song to me.

There's a steakhouse near our main office that we always have to go to where there's some kind of schtick around the piano player singing that song and then everyone throwing napkins up in the air or something? I don't remember exactly.

That melody -- "SWEET CAR-O-LINE," it's so ham-fisted. Like actually playing a piano with two big hams.

Hey, Neil Diamond is only as god made him: a man with two giant fists of ham.

thicc hams on a hot august night

Neil Diamond understood his job and delivered the goods, much as Barry Manilow did. They wrote the songs, they wrote the songs.

I have funny associations with Neil Diamond, because: he looks a little like my dad; my dad was once a cantor; in The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond plays a cantor turned pop star; we watched The Jazz Singer in hebrew school, at the synagogue where my dad was a cantor; and my dad's polish immigrant father famously (in my family lore) told him he should become a rock singer and "play the bing bing" instead of becoming a cantor.

I’ve only heard people sing “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway Park.

and don't they do it at Fenway because it was depicted in some crappy movie?

I have some very obvious issues with equating "whiteness" with "wanting/enjoying a high standard of living" or "being an entrenpreneur"

I've never understood why people like Sweet Caroline so much, it's such a blah song to me.

On the contrary, I do understand why people like "Sweet Caroline" so much. It's actively irritating and awful.

I have some very obvious issues with equating "whiteness" with "wanting/enjoying a high standard of living" or "being an entrenpreneur"

― Dana Jel Pey (DJP), Tuesday, April 6, 2021 1:49 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Definitely, although I don't think map meant that exactly? They can speak for themselves but the characterization of cultural touchpoints like popular songs as representative of a whole identity package...I'm struggling to rephrase it but I feel like I know what map is talking about? Liking a banal (or a good, or a bad!) song isn't the problem. The center of the problem lies somewhere in all the intersecting privileges and identities that it connotes.

I have some very obvious issues with equating "whiteness" with "wanting/enjoying a high standard of living" or "being an entrenpreneur"

― Dana Jel Pey (DJP), Tuesday, April 6, 2021 8:49 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is such a can of worms, but I really dislike those "whiteness"/"white culture" graphics/charts that do what you are describing. Whatever the more nuanced intentions (as per what laurel is describing), the effect is still to give whiteness a monopoly on many traits and values that many non-white people may in fact consider positive, and to essentialize non-whiteness and associate it with many traits that, not too long ago, would actually have been considered racist to tie to non-whiteness.

i.e. things like this
https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1610610/smithsonian-aspects-white-culture.webp?w=790&f=ab12077631acab2dac02fd587b3f4f15

I'm guessing map meant that capitalism is ultimately a white supremacist ideology due to its Eurocolonialist roots. I think this is a historically correct assessment but harder to argue the closer we draw to the present moment.

xp 'the effect is still to give whiteness a monopoly on many traits and values that many non-white people may in fact consider positive' – yes, and it is in fact tremendously condescending, even insulting. This kind of ties into what I was saying: there's a tendency to argue that because x comes from y, which is/was bad, then x must also be bad. The pinnacle of essentialism.

Like it was once racist to say "people of color are lazy," and that graphic basically says "Yes, that's true, but what if laziness isn't bad? And if people of color aren't lazy it's because they've internalized white culture due to it being dominant."

People can disparage white people all they like but disparaging Neil Diamond is not on.

OK wow that graphic is a lot to unpack. Initial baseline impression: I probably soft-agree or can see why they're making a case for most of those points taken societally but also I can see that many individual ppl may have or believe in some of those qualities as generally "good" on an individual level.

xxp I think that's a possible initial reading but that the creator is telling us to look deeper--the emphasis on productivity over quality of life, the contempt for those who don't want to make or take more than is needed, a collective valuing of more-ness over sufficiency...those are things that white supremacist patriarchal capitalism encourages us to value, as opposed to cultures we supplanted that valued harmony, sufficiency, collective wellness, cooperation, etc.

I feel like it would be more helpful to describe some of those things as capitalist than "white," i.e. associate them with ideology rather than race.

I mean not only is that unfair to people of color who have those values, but there's also a bit of a noble savage vibe to the implications about "non-white culture."

Also, absolute bottom line, that kind of advice is meant for WHITE PEOPLE. We're the ones who need to inspect ourselves and consider why we might unthinkingly cast things as morally good or bad, to interrogate what we were taught was natural/immutable, etc. Marginalized and especially Black and indigenous people are not implicated in critiques of whiteness.

It's zero-sum game thinking, which is a blight upon contemporary discourse. Reassessing things that have been devalued/deprecated/demonized by the powers-that-be is a necessary step in the right direction, but these things a) are not automatically good by dint of having been deemed lesser by an oppressively hegemonic system; b) may in some cases be complements or, better yet, the conceptual equals of their purported antithesis. The inversion of values is not enough if it merely upholds binarism – you need to take it a step further (this is basically Deconstruction 101).

xps

In terms of exotification of non-white cultures or whatever, yes that happens and that's why white ppl need to look to POC leadership broadly to define what THEY value and what parts of other heritages they want to foreground and reframe in a way that's liberated from white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (god bless bell hooks). The ground is laid by Black and POC leadership and that's where white ppl (who want to do and be better) need to look to that leadership and make ourselves accountable to it, whatever that means for each of us.

Like, first impressions, if I went into a space/gathering of white people and they busted out that graphic with no explanation, I would def have questions. But otoh I've seen basically the same content drawn up by Black organizers as teaching material for white ppl to stop pushing a white-privileged worldview onto everyone else and every situation.

I think that's a possible initial reading but that the creator is telling us to look deeper--the emphasis on productivity over quality of life, the contempt for those who don't want to make or take more than is needed, a collective valuing of more-ness over sufficiency...those are things that white supremacist patriarchal capitalism encourages us to value, as opposed to cultures we supplanted that valued harmony, sufficiency, collective wellness, cooperation, etc.

Would you say that the standard of living in a culture that privileges harmony, sufficiency, collective wellness, and cooperation is high or low?

I have no idea but that's not for me to define, is my point.

i'm aware that i'm playing out of bounds a little bit here re: whiteness and i hope you'll forgive me--i'm not trying to hurt anyone, but these thoughts aren't fully formed or calibrated and there are some rough edges. and i know that i stump for whiteness to a degree in my day-to-day, definitely in ways i'm not even aware of. i'm not trying to make this a post-race thing, that would be really stupid. i just think that the racial dynamic of whiteness is intimately tied with the will to dominate other people based on some biological fundamentalism--like that's the point of it--and that biological fundamenatalism can be re-stated or re-aligned in different ways, it can be realigned to a category of "laziness" that applies across racial identity groups for instance--whatever the current formation of the will to dominate others requires, although of course certain ones like blackness in america have a long and extremely brutal history.

there are shades of "i have the right to survive and thrive" and "i deserve to live a highly exploitative lifestyle just because of who i am" in everything we do to get along in the world. the difference between those two things is becoming increasingly obfuscated. i mean "wanting/enjoying a high standard of living" or "being an entrepreneur" is 1) something that sounds like what everyone should have access to in order to be their best selves but is also 2) always going to be on the backs of others to some degree? it's not a hard and fast thing, always with inflections and contexts, but somewhere on the scale of jesus christ to elon musk i think we sort of have to own how much our position in the world comes at the expense of others imo.

but in any case it strikes me that white people disparaging white-people-culture is one of the whitest things imaginable--it's showy and hypocritical, it scores you little points in the cultural capital column, and it does absolutely nothing to alleviate any real disparity that whiteness creates, in fact i think it just reinforces the effects of whiteness. i do think a lot of people mean well when they do this and they are probably working against whiteness in other, more real ways, but it always makes me feel embarrassed for them. am i working against whiteness in real, meaningful ways? i like to think so but then i'm increasingly aware of my limitations and the extremely white culture i have to be a part of every day.

yeah I think I agree with your point about the "white people making fun of white people" thing, in fact it kind of jibes with what I'm saying - there's almost a humblebrag or an implicit self-congratulation to a lot of the "lol white people" jokes that could be read to imply a superior culture with a few funny shortcomings.

I do feel "my whiteness" when I respond to "Carry On My Wayward Son" ... though it was a recurring theme song in CW tv show "Supernatural" so maybe it has become "less white"? Also, how can this white ppl playlist exist with Creedence. Carry On is a "deep cut" compared to a half dozen CCR songs ... and why the perennial "Friends in Low Places" is also absent ... I think this list was probably compiled by a younger person (I don't recognize 1/3 of the songs because I'm old), and maybe that Garth Brooks song isn't as prevalent among the youngs?

booming post, map

*exist without Creedence

though it was a recurring theme song in CW tv show "Supernatural" so maybe it has become "less white"

I've seen Supernatural. I am having difficulty imagining anything less white than Supernatural. (And Kansas had John Brown on the cover of their debut album, so their politics are...murky.)

Sorry — anything more white than Supernatural.

one thing I've learned is that whenever white people try to clown something for being very white, that thing will end up having huge non-white fanbases

see: Phil Collins

Supernatural has an insane tumblr/twitter/meme following that crosses racial barriers iirc

Yeah, that's a good example. Also Celine Dion, the Smiths, Country music (huge in Nigeria! Or used to be, anyway)...any schmaltzy 70's act you could mention is bound to have a strong following in South East Asia.

xpost