What’s with white people? If you’d like to know, check out this Salon interview of Christian Lander [1], creator of Stuff White People Like. [2]
Here’s an example of Lander’s sharp sword [3]: “The presence of an improper apostrophe on a menu can ruin an otherwise delicious meal for a white person.” As you can probably already tell, when Lander uses the term “White People,” he’s actually referring to a specific sub-category of “white people,” namely,”left-wing, upper-middle-class.”
At his blog, Lander weighs in on quite a few consumerist tendencies of “white people.” Here’s his riff on bottled water:
It’s all about ranking. It’s essentially a contest. It used to be that bottled water was a status symbol. You drink Evian, or you drink Fiji, or what is the most expensive water.
But advanced-level white people, the higher-ranking white people, realized that they were creating a lot of waste, [4] and so they switched over to the Nalgene bottle. [5] That also reminded them of going camping. So then they could take a stance of superiority over the people who were drinking bottled water. And then, that whole story came out [6] about Nalgenes leaching I don’t know what the exact toxin is [Bisphenol A]. So then super-advanced white people went even further and got those metal Sigg bottles [7], and now you have this really solid hierarchy and ranking of white people of commercial bottled water, Nalgene bottle and either the glass or metal, twist-top bottles.
[This example fits well with many of the consumerist critiques on this site [8]].
Bottom line, if you want to keep up with “White People,” you now know where to go [2].
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