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

Only remember Charles Dutton.

Also big ups on your ō.

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.

i'm not about to take a survey but i don't think everyone who uses "white" to disparage white ppl is referring to the same set of connotations. like, i know i'm not blowing anybody's mind with that statement but for me "whiteness" involves my own identity in re: to my family.

fwiw i self apply "white" in a disparaging way sometimes too.

this is v. amerocentric but is this right?

"white ppl" is the racialisation of a set of qualities and privileges by the ppl who have them. they are usually things like that are related to "going to college" or "being financially comfortable" and since this correlates w/ an actual racial inequality wrt these things, and since this is pretty problematic, it is easy to link whiteness itself w/ a set of charactrstcs that justify the inequality by naturalising it. it also, by labeling "white" characteristics as uncool, tries to downplay the desirability of thos adv. as a way of internalising guilty. (?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU9W7Qo1T6M

to be really honest tho i kinda conflate the "whiteness" and "straightness" in this sense but again that's probably just me

kinda assumes non-whites are really exotic non-repressed ppl who always express their emotions and stuff

exotic is not what i meant there oops, but i mean not normal and boring

i think plax would really like this book
http://www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk/img/books/1844671453.jpg

wait i can get paid for being white?

haha, yes, def. wanna read some roediger!

Plax, I think that post above is well-put and insightful.

kinda assumes non-whites are really exotic non-repressed ppl who always express their emotions and stuff

this assumption seems very OTM if most of my interactions with white ppl and how they expect me to be are to be believed

A lot of time the distancing/disparaging of certain privileges is a safe way of perpetuating them by resisting them with empty resistance. (This is a huge neoliberal trope across the board tho, where things like subversion/resistance/etc are ways of promoting neoliberalism. we trade real resistance for humor/bitching/etc. At least, as far as I understand it, this is Zizek's position on contemporary liberalism.)

i realize that harbl but for me, the white = repressed identification has as much to do with coming from a family / community of emotionally closed-off yankee folks -- i'll admit that it characterizes non-whites as "expressive" or whatever but otoh i don't associate expressiveness with any particular ethnicity or race.

well, maybe italians. they're pretty expressive, right?

Ugh Hi Dere that sounds irritating.

Hey where all the white people at?

my big problem with "lol wite ppl are like THIS" is that there's meant to be some sort of guilt attached to it, but there's never a corrective proposed. i like following through on things rhetorically, like "and this is bad because" "and we can rectify this by..." etc. if white bourgeois people are supposed to feel shitty about themselves because they buy premium organic produce while BLACK PEOPLE (tm) only care about what the cheapest food is that they can put on their table, well, what are white bourgeois people supposed to, like, do about it?

i read some stupid libertarian urban planning article about how blacks/latinos/etc don't care about smart growth and that's why places like portland are so white, and i just thought "what's your POINT?"

xp they're supposed to make fun of themselves for being so white about it iirc

(xp) and the tone of the piece was all "haha misguided liberals and their so-called progressive policies, don't they know black people are all moving to houston and atlanta??"

poor people shouldn't be expected to care about smart growth, that's why yuppie planners are paid to care about it on their behalf

haha, as if planners get paid anything

my big problem with "lol wite ppl are like THIS" is that there's meant to be some sort of guilt attached to it, but there's never a corrective proposed. i like following through on things rhetorically, like "and this is bad because" "and we can rectify this by..." etc. if white bourgeois people are supposed to feel shitty about themselves because they buy premium organic produce while BLACK PEOPLE (tm) only care about what the cheapest food is that they can put on their table, well, what are white bourgeois people supposed to, like, do about it?

The general answer to this usually involves donating money to something that either gives better food to BLACK PEOPLE (tm), donating money to something that helps BLACK PEOPLE (tm) be more successful so that they have enough cash for luxuries like premium organic produce to be an option, or donating money to something that makes premium organic produce cheaper than its counterparts.

ideally, yes, but i think people just like to take comfort in complaining and then not doing anything.

well yeah, complacent bitching coupled with inaction is part of being an American

where are my fucking french fries

that is what I was thinking before I got lunch

xxxp actually a really good answer to this question would be that grocery ordinance proposed by i think it was the city of los angeles, get bent do you know of it? it was supposed to severely restrict liquor stores/dollar stores and provide incentives to encourage grocery retail (infill) development, but i don't think it ever passed cause everyone was all screamin fascism?

Sometimes the "lol white people" thing can come uncomfortably close to age-old tropes involving romanticization of poverty - that poor people are happier because they are carefree, know how to enjoy life, aren't up-tight and stressed out by our modern middle-class lifestyle, etc. Cf. 18th and 19th century colonial attitudes towards the lazy, carefree native peoples. Obviously there's more than a little condescension in this.

xxxp actually a really good answer to this question would be that grocery ordinance proposed by i think it was the city of los angeles, get bent do you know of it? it was supposed to severely restrict liquor stores/dollar stores and provide incentives to encourage grocery retail (infill) development, but i don't think it ever passed cause everyone was all screamin fascism?

i do remember hearing about it and it's a great idea, but right-wingers and regular shmoes who don't understand how shit works were up in arms -- not sure what ended up happening. it's like that one-year moratorium on new fast-food establishments in south l.a. -- people thought it was just an outright fast-food BAN and all the KFCs and del tacos were gonna close, when it meant that all the existing businesses would get to operate AND other forms of business would have a better shot at developing local properties. and the moratorium was for one fucking year, not forever.

Sometimes the "lol white people" thing can come uncomfortably close to age-old tropes involving romanticization of poverty - that poor people are happier because they are carefree, know how to enjoy life, aren't up-tight and stressed out by our modern middle-class lifestyle, etc. Cf. 18th and 19th century colonial attitudes towards the lazy, carefree native peoples. Obviously there's more than a little condescension in this.

exactly. by painting ourselves ("ourselves" = the age-old "white people as the default masters of the universe") as being super-civilized, what does it paint others as? uneducated? uninformed? impolite? desperate?

i've read some interesting crit that takes a left-libertarian line on why grocery stores are so shitty in urban areas -- it's the gov'ts fault! well not really, it's specific regs about zoning and parking allowances. enforced car-dependence basically; in most cities you can't have a store of x-large size unless you provide y-amount of space in free parking. in a city you can't do that, unless the business clears enough money to pay for the land the lot is on. grocery doesn't have that kind of profitability.

in the burbs you have the land to put down huge parking lots, AND can construct big-box stores large enough to generate enough turnover to make it worthwhile.

so you can blame white ppl, after all, gladly

http://www.urb.com/2010/04/23/coachellas-hottest-not-white-women/

it's like we're holding ourselves up to a mirror and seeing the "underclass" "other" as being a bizarro version of that.

i've read some interesting crit that takes a left-libertarian line on why grocery stores are so shitty in urban areas -- it's the gov'ts fault!

sometimes it is! long-standing laws are very very hard to change. but "the government" is such a red herring -- it's all about the people. we keep those laws upheld because we bitch and moan every time someone tries to change them.

well the suburbs are entirely the creation of lavish and intrusive state policy, but libertarians will defend them unto death because that's where libertarians tend to live. funny.

goole, most cities' development codes allow for the waiver of parking space requirements, additional vegetative screening etc. if the land-use doesn't change when a new business moves in to occupy the former tenant's building. plus there's a lot of progressive "new urbanist" form-based codes (as opposed to conventional zoning & all its trappings) that planners are pressuring their city councils to adopt, as well as just simply allowing a lot more mixed-use development to put grocery & farmers market type zones closer to more densely populated & unwalkable areas.

well the suburbs are entirely the creation of lavish and intrusive state policy

all suburbs are?

so, fascism, basically? handouts, is what your telling me?

xp

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