Stop. Look around you. You’re reading The Sunday Times. Tick. Are you having a cup of coffee? Tick. Will you be having brunch? Tick. Does your home have stripped-wood floors and modern furniture? Another tick. Do you drink wine, attend film festivals, run marathons, give your children doublebarrelled surnames, use reusable shopping bags, apologise a lot and believe that most of the world’s ills would be solved if only others were a bit more like you? Will you go out for a walk today? If you have answered “yes” to more than half of the above questions, you are “white”. Regardless of your actual skin colour.
Or so says Christian Lander, a 31-year-old Canadian PhD dropout whose droll observations on his website Stuff White People Like, has attracted more than 60m hits since it began in January 2008. Now 150 of his musings have been collected into a book of the same name, subtitled The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.
I meet Lander in Islington, north London, the natural stomping ground of the enlightened and aspirational middle classes and those who live by gently satirising their foibles. It’s heaving with Stuff White People Like. There is an organic bakery, a branch of Carluccio’s, a Banksy artwork and a season of Werner Herzog films at the (independent) cinema.
After greeting Lander I feel obliged to whip out a photo of myself having completed the London marathon. It’s as if I need to unburden my profoundly middle-class soul before this man who has already so expertly defined it. He comments approvingly and notices I am sporting a scarf, another signifier (in at No 101). Because it is October I am not wearing a vintage T-shirt (No 84). Never mind — at least I have given birth to all my four children naturally (No 107), have saddled them with double-barrelled surnames (No 22) and yearn for them to be bilingual (No 78). “Do you know, I sometimes insist on conducting breakfast in French,” I say breathlessly.
“Good,” says Lander, as if I am in therapy (another big WP thing). “Are any of your children on a Gifted and Talented programme?” I nod happily. Lander seems satisfied. He scans the menu and cheers up even more. “This place is good. There is a gluten-free option here. And over there a woman is drinking leaf tea and reading a very thick novel. ‘White’ people are the only people who go out to read books.”
Lander, a red-headed slip of a lad with an improbable beard (No 95) who has earned a fortune not only from his book advance (rumoured to be about $300,000), but also from banner adverts on the website, admits many of his fans really wanted him not to be white.
“They hoped I would be Asian-American or, even better, black because that would have been much more controversial. Because this book gets into the whole notion of white assimilation which is the dream of, say, third-generation American immigrants.”
In other words this list is not about race, but about class? Right. “Liking the things that white people like will give you a reputation of being white, because the American uppermiddle class is overwhelmingly white and these middle-class things are therefore branded as things for WP and advertised as such.”
Are they? I think of friends and neighbours. “Sure. Think of Apple computers. Or Benetton clothes. Benetton doesn’t even use white models, but precisely because of that it appeals to the white middle class.” What makes Benetton advertisements hit the WP spot is their authenticity. Middle-class liberals crave authenticity. This is why we love being served in Carluccio’s by real Italian waiters.
There are plenty of other sorts of restaurants in Islington. I refer here to the numerous fried chicken outlets and greasy spoon cafes just off the main high street. They are also full of white people. “Yes,” says Lander, heavily. “Those are the wrong kind of White Person.” According to Lander you can tell in an instant who is of which kind. The wrong kind is basically less well off and prefers a different range of icons. Think high-fructose corn syrup and take it from there.
Even though Lander would love to stay and deconstruct the myriad versions of stuffed olive displayed in a line of rustic bowls in the restaurant window, I need to show him how perfectly the rest of London N1 fits his mould. He has never visited London before but he’s like a small child playing I Spy.
After a minute we have clocked about 12 fixed-gear bikes. Well, Lander has. “Fixed-gear bikes meet a lot of requirements for WP acceptance,” he sighs with satisfaction. All WP Americans, he says, long to be Europeans: “The reason why WP in the US are so desirous of recognition and acceptance by Europeans is that here they see you can be rich and left-wing at the same time. That is very exciting for them.”
We move off down Upper Street, a road packed with expensive boutiques and bristling with estate agents. “This is good,” he says, stumbling over a woman pushing a Bugaboo buggy. “Small children, expensive buggies and real estate. All the signs of gentrification.”
“Ah!” he cries, approaching the local cinema. “A German film festival. We all love film festivals!” A muscular man with an equally muscular-looking dog shambles past. “That is the wrong kind of WP,” whispers Lander. “That dog still has its nuts on. So it’s a fighting dog. No, don’t point at him, that’s dangerous!” Oh, sorry, sorry. “I get very uncomfortable around the wrong kind of WP. I am afraid they all might beat me up.”
Lander’s book could be titled Stuff Nice Liberal Middle-Class People Like. But as he points out, giving it a racial epithet made it far more provocative: “It’s about class as much as it is about race. When I was at college in Toronto, if you liked anything on this list you would be accused of being white. Even if you weren’t. It is about wealth and the class that does these things.” Just like The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook all those years ago, Lander’s book is a satire of the chattering classes in list form, gently ticking off the ubiquitous lifestyle, architecture and dinner parties of the middle classes and mocking them.
What will make the book sell is his observation that from Sydney to San Francisco via Shoreditch, liberal middle-class people are all channelling the same type of habit, from advocating free healthcare to having children in their late thirties and drinking red wine. You too? You see how clever this is.
The original blog proved it had hit the spot thanks to its astonishing “pass it on” factor. Middle-class liberals across the world saw themselves in it and sent their friends the postings. As Lander disingenuously says: “I just hold up a mirror.”
We walk past another Italian restaurant advertising its home-made ravioli on a blackboard outside. Why do we invest so much meaning in rustic Italian food — is it because the worship of oil-soaked focaccia has replaced the bread and the wine? Lander thinks so. Going to church, or indeed any authorised religion, has no place in his list. Yoga is more important. Or following some brand of “spirituality” which does not involve Jesus, such as kabbalah or Scientology. Belief in a religion that your parents don’t belong to is No 2 on Lander’s list.
Interestingly, pure capitalism is a notable absentee. Why is this? Because we are already too wealthy, thinks Lander: “This is why so many of us want to work in not-for-profit organisations. Money has already been taken care of — in terms of the essentials — education, housing, food. So we swap financial capital for cultural capital — you know, giving back and being a good person.”
It is no longer enough to have pots of cash. Lottery winners can be in that position. So it’s a bit vulgar, actually. No, to be in this tribe you need to have all the cultural collateral you can get, alongside the dough. “Making money is fine but what the middle-class person is going to get respected and envied for is not money,” muses Lander. “It’s intelligence, travel, connections and so on.”
Although, because of who we are, we can’t quite help making money. Body Shop, Burt’s Bees, Innocent smoothies; these are WP companies that all started out ethical and then sort of became distracted by turning rather a neat profit. “These people were supposed to be helping different ethical standards, but in the end they become super-wealthy. And sell out. It’s the relentless pursuit of money in the relentless pursuit of a lower carbon footprint,” says Lander, grinning.
The notion of acting with integrity is also pretty high up the list. This can sometimes mean that global politics, if directed by a WP government, can get rather tricky. Wanting to improve the lot of the world is a WP ambition, but only as long as it goes along with our idea of what is right. “It’s about having an enormous ego, as well as wanting to do good,” says Lander drily.
So global democracy and the ability to own a laptop are seen as the answer to everything, even if you have to use force and invade non-democratic, non-broadband countries to get your way. That the United Nations mission in Afghanistan apparently requires all paperwork to be done on recycled paper reveals just how muddled good middle-class liberal thinking can get if released onto a world stage.
However, Lander and I are not on a world stage. We are going walkabout in Islington. “Another thrift store,” says Lander, as we pass the Sue Ryder shop. “That’s important.”
Charity shops are vital to the middle-class love of vintage. Vintage answers our need to appear independent, unique and cool. Even if everyone else is doing it too. The fact that it is also benefiting charity is a handy by-product. WP love being seen to help others. It goes with wanting world democracy and laptops for everyone. Altruism is a key trait as long as it is not anonymous. We love doing marathons but we also want everyone to know that we did it for charity.
“It’s all about self-congratulation,” says Lander. “Your coffee cup will have a nice big thing on it showing you are drinking freetrade or organic. So people will know you are one of the good guys.”
Barack Obama is one of the good guys. He is also a key WP. “Yep, Obama is the first white president. He has an organic vegetable garden in the White House. He was raised overseas by a graduate student mother.” Whereas Bill Clinton? “He was the first black president. He grew up legitimately poor and raised himself up from nothing.”
The time, it seems, was right for Lander’s observations. “The blog started at the end of the Bush presidency,” he says. “And the liberal left felt like an oppressed minority. All these liberals saw the blog, wrote to me and said, ‘We thought it was going to be about stereotypes like golf and nannies’ and then said they were horrified because everything they liked was on the list.”
WP might love doing things for charity but, for all that, we are not a lovable tribe. “White people get very frustrated with real estate,” says Lander, who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jess.
“They think they deserve everything and when they can’t afford a nice house, because they chose to work in not-for-profit, it’s not their fault. There is a sense of entitlement but no one wants to talk about it.”
I suggest the past week has perhaps not been a great one to flag up whiteness, thanks to the presence of Nick Griffin on Question Time. “The BNP attracts the wrong kind of white person,” says Lander immediately.
We arrive at a local landmark, namely Banksy’s portrait of three children saluting a Tesco carrier bag. Lander stands joyfully beneath it and poses for our photographer. Several people start watching, probably because they think this slight, red-haired Canadian is Banksy.
He is quite sure his target audience, “a class full of guilt and money”, is in no way about to be displaced from the top of the pile. It’s what he feels has given him the right to poke fun at them. “It’s okay to make fun of them because they are in first place,” is his explanation.
What about those people who say China is going to be the next world power? “Well, China is to America as America was to Britain at the turn of the last century. Everyone said that Britain’s power was waning. But look at you here. You are doing all right. There is still money here,” he says, taking in the flash bicycles, the chichi delis, the independent boutiques, bespoke shoe shops and lingerie stores that scream the ready presence of cash.
“White people have been in charge for many, many thousands of years. They still are. And what they give up in terms of numbers they won’t in power and money.”
Why have things been this way for the liberal elite? “I don’t know — bad weather?” And with that flick of self-deprecating humour (No 103, “White people prefer when people make jokes about themselves in an attempt to appear outwardly inferior”), we are once more back in the world of Lander’s uncannily perceptive list.
Tell-tale signs of the tribe
Kitchen gadgets
White people are under a lot of pressure to like cooking. Everything in their culture tells them that they need to have a nice kitchen and that they need to cook with organic, fresh ingredients to make delicious, complicated food.
If you go into a white person’s kitchen you will frequently find a waffle maker, a rice cooker, a steamer, a food processor and a blender. They also have hand-powered devices like flour sifters, ravioli crimpers, pizza cutters, potato ricers and a sushi mat.
But in order for them truly to enter whitedom they need to own the holy grail of white kitchens — the kitchen aid mixer. They will match this mixer to their kitchen’s colour scheme and it will make up the focal point. Much like many religious artefacts, it will remain untouched for months and even years, sitting on the counter to be admired as a testament to their lifestyle.
Kitchen gadgets serve as one of the main reasons why white people get married. Look at their wedding list. If you buy one of these gadgets for a white person, your card should refer to them using it to make beautiful food that you hope to eat one day. This kind of stuff goes over like gangbusters.
Yoga
Although its roots are in India, the global tree of yoga has most of its branches in rich white neighbourhoods. Yoga has been so thoroughly embraced by white people because it requires large amounts of money and time, two things that white people have a lot of. It has become like a religion that prizes flexibility and expensive clothes. Also, deep down, white people feel that their participation makes up for years of colonial rule in India.
Moleskine notebooks
Since all white people consider themselves to be “creative”, they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts. One of the more popular products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.
This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days. Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked: typewriters, journals, suicide and trains are just a few examples.
Much like almost everything else that white people like, these notebooks provide no additional functionality over regular equivalents that cost almost nothing. Thankfully, since white people keep only their most original and creative ideas in the Moleskine, many of them will be required to purchase only one per lifetime.
Camping
If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water or a car, you would probably describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worst case scenario like after a plane crash or something”. White people refer to it as “camping”.
When white people begin talking to you about camping, they will do their best to tell you it’s very easy and it allows them to escape the pressures and troubles of the urban lifestyle for a more natural, simplified, relaxing time. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In theory, camping should be a very inexpensive activity since you are sleeping on the ground. But as with everything in white culture, the more simple it appears the more expensive it actually is.
Camping is a multi-day, multi-step, potentially lethal activity that will cost you a large amount of both time and money. Unless you are in some sort of position where you absolutely need the friendship of a white person, you should avoid camping at all costs.
Ultimately the best way to escape a camping trip with white people is to say that you have allergies. Since white people and their children are allergic to almost everything, they will understand and ask no further questions. You should not say something like “looking at history, the instances of my people encountering white people in the woods have not worked out very well for us”.
Plays
While white people certainly love the cinema, they are required to balance this with an interest in theatre. It is not known if white people actually enjoy plays or if they are just victims of massive peer pressure from the 75% of white people who have acted in a play at some point in their life.
Extracted from Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander, published by Hardie Grant at £7.99
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