Feel free to peruse the above list of topics from stuffwhitepeople.com. Feeling a little hurt? I hope not. If so, you're missing the point young hipster.
I never said any of those things were wrong (95% apply to me), the whole site was forwarded to me by Tim Walker at the Independent last year when he was doing a profile on the new young liberal male who supposedly values a lifestyle over money and has a specifically evolved set of supposed 'individual' traits. He realised like these guys, like everyone walking around East London and matching parts of new york, San Francisco, Seattle and protesting their 'originality' a bit too much; that they had in fact very uniform traits/styles. I'm there: If you'd read half way down the list you'd have seen that white people claiming to like plays:
"It is not known if white people actually enjoy plays or if they are just victims of massive peer pressure from the 45% of white people who have acted in a play at some point in their life."
and 'old skool' hip hop:
"Apparently, once a music has lost its relevance with its intended audience, it becomes MORE relevant to white people. They will quickly tell you about how they don’t listen to “Commercial Hip Hop” (aka music that black people actually enjoy), and that they much prefer “Classic Hip Hop.”
...Is in all in there too. It makes me laugh because most of this gentle ribbing highlights how often when conscientious people, perhaps a little like us are thinking/trying to stress their originality over others, they are actually doing the exact reverse. And in some areas, like extreme liberal guilt prompting absurdly shallow protestations of interest in other cultures, impressing music taste on others, going to cultural events you don't REALLY like and being convinced to pay 50% mark ups on food produced by same corporations because it makes us feel better about ourselves (i.e. superior to those paying for non-organic options) - ripe for parody.
That said, I don't think most of it is cynical, rather if anything its pointing out cynicism. It's not as if there isn't something self congratulatory and comforting about these observations in themselves. The guy who's writing it isn't some right wing stiff but rather a complete liberal, apologizing, terrified 'white folk' like us. Lets be honest, we all know that we have no good reason to buy Apple-Mac products over less expensive PC products but we're happy to do so! When whole of Shoreditch is teetering on self parody, how can it not be a good thing to step back and laugh at this stuff we pressure/cocoon ourselves with. I'm off to awkwardly sit and laugh at the "Royal Tenenbaums" with my platonic female friend now....
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