Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander, r... - The Diigo Meta page

• 18 Sep 08
  

  class religion education book_review

  • White People are in fact "tolerance" highest on the list of virtues prized by White People (as did Brooks for Bobos). Of course, this group shuns the suburbs
  • his exasperation with progressives' "cultural righteousness" and "intolerance and groupthink" -- a set of attitudes that enhances and is enhanced by a profoundly smug and incurious outlook. To be sure, these faults aren't peculiar to the progressive and the hip, but Lander repeatedly and cleverly shows how some of White People's favorite activities (watching political documentaries, "raising awareness," foreign travel), which they complacently embrace as broadening, are in fact lazy and tend to be intellectually and politically stultifying: White People "like feeling smart without doing work -- two hours in a theater is easier than ten hours with a book."
  • Sushi, for instance, is "everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the 'uneducated.'" And whatever its goals, the ACLU is beloved by White People, Lander satirically but not wholly unjustifiably asserts, because it protects them "from having to look at things they don't like. At the top of this list is anything that has to do with Christianity" -- an aversion, Lander discerns, rooted not in religious enmity but in taste (Christianity is "a little trashy"), formed largely by class and education.

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