How White Are You?

If you've never visited the website "stuffwhitepeoplelike.com", you really should. Regardless of what color your skin is, this list of things that white people like is a must read for anyone who enjoys humor. The essential gist of it is this: the author compiles a list (currently at 132) of stuff white people like, ranging from farmers markets and microbreweries to the idea of soccer and hating their parents. It's hilarious.

Why isn't "Cheese" on the list?

Anyway, my room mate and I have a running joke about how he is paradoxically one of the whitest people I know, while at the same time having an affinity for things typically enjoyed in black culture. He customarily rags on me for not being able to identify some hip hop lyrics that he randomly spouts, or for not being particularly good at basketball. Anyways, I decided to print out a checklist of the items on the list, and see which of us was the whitest. I then invented a scale to judge how "white" you were based on your overall score.

My room mate and I both filled out the checklist separately, and then checked our results. Now, I had bet him that he was whiter than I was, simply because I hadn't even heard of some items on the list, much less liked them.

Anyway, once the results were all tallied up, I was correct. I was less "white" than my room mate. Our respective scores of 56 (me) and 73 (him) placed us both firmly in the "Culturally acceptable level of whiteness" category. However, he was dangerously close to the thresh hold of "Probably acting white right now". Honestly I wonder if there's a chance that he didn't check a few boxes just to be sure he didn't make it over the edge.

"Fluent in Java Script as well as Klingon"

After we settled this little debate, naturally we decided to share the quiz to see how white our friends were. If you want to take the test, you can just contact me and I'll send an email your way.

Once we sent out the quiz to some mutual friends, we sat back and awaited the results. The first, and best response, was from a mutual friend of ours from our undergrad years. The subject of his return email was "Heaven help me, I'm so white". His score was a 94, which placed him nearly in the "The whitest person in the room right now" category. He was, however, acting white right that moment. He was drinking coffee, listening to classical music and writing a paper on free trade while using wireless internet.

If only he was writing poetry about his troubled childhood.

This topic will eventually branch off into separate blog topics on related items, like hipsters (one of my five irrational hatreds) and being white in everyday situations.