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

all walks are educational if you are doing it right

I did order a copy of The Mirror & The Light today.

What about that thing white ppl do -- I just was in a long conversation with a fellow white person who was doing this, that's why it's on my mind -- when they complain about the town/state/school of their childhood being "so white"?

I can imagine a perfectly reputable version of this practice where said white person would be making the point "all-white or almost all-white spaces are almost always the result of deliberate exclusionary practices, and as an adult, I see that enjoyed access to those spaces that was denied to others and that's not fair" but it usually doesn't come off like this, and it didn't in this case, the tone was much more "life was so bland and tiresome among all those whites," as if the reason you don't want to be in an all-white space is because it lacks the spicy SNAP people of color provide.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/15HiKjAnUuAymWdqejOTcP

i love to make fun of wite people

we fucking suck and deserve so much worse

Weird, I saw that playlist somewhere else recently too. They got the wrong Bon Jovi song at the end though. Shot Through the Heart was an album track on the self-titled debut. Whoever made this list probably meant to put on You Give Love a Bad Name off of Slippery When Wet, which starts off with the lyric "Shot through the heart and you're to blame".

Ok, wait. They did get You Give Love a Bad Name on there too. Who the fuck likes Shot Through the Heart?

Was it in a video game or something?

TIL that Bon Jovi already had a song called “Shot Through The Heart” before they made YGLABN.

true story: I spent my entire life until my mid 20s having never heard Sweet Caroline with a crowd. not really sure I’d even heard the entire song before

i’m standing around at a music festival and the house music starts playing it as the tent gets crowded, and it becomes a singalong. i’m mystified!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPkNBo4_rpM

ruuuuuuuuun

So good!

White people are also really scary, don't know if anyone itt mentioned it but they/we are

I'm a ghooooost

I'm willing to bet that there's a non-negligible number of white people who would shoot someone without hesitation for claiming that there are no 'ba ba ba's in the original recording of 'Sweet Caroline'

I'm not sure I've ever heard 'Sweet Caroline'.

Also I'm pretty sure only 2-3 of those songs would make me mildly turnt provided I had like 8-9 pints in me.

Ok I just looked up 'Sweet Caroline' and I think I've come across the chorus before but it may just be a case of faux déjà vu.

pom, have u heard 'Heartlight', if so then 'Sweet Caroline' is basically just 'Heartlight' except not about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Sampling 'Heartlight' as we speak – I had not heard it, no. In fact I couldn't name a single Neil Diamond song until a few minutes ago.

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."