Being white, not all it’s cracked up to be

Alex Sorondo/Asst. Opinion Editor

I would like to imagine that I’m not the sort of person to get into arguments over the Internet, at least not with people I’ve never met. But apparently I am. It happened again, most recently, on tumblr.com, a blogging and networking website where users share multimedia content.

I posted a link to a May 24 article on flavorwire.com titled “10 Epidemically Overrated Books” (which lists, among others, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and Twilight). Somebody reposted the list of books, amending it slightly, adding a few titles while taking others away, and criticizing each one for its glorification of “white people problems.”

Such issues are generally referred to in jest, and tend to be synonymous with “first world problems,” a self-deprecating refrain for when we’re mildly inconvenienced by a luxury (one submission on first-world-problems.com reads, “The pressure to have an opinion about the Avengers movie is like a physical weight on my back.”).

This guy on tumblr, however, was sincere in calling To Kill a Mockingbird “comfort food for white people,” and dismissing the complete works of the later David Foster Wallace as “even more white people problems.”

This guy is white, by the way.

The fact that he leveled these attacks prompts me to wonder if many people have come to take the “white person problem” joke too seriously.

There’s a particular sort of socialite that I’m sure you’ve encountered before, as they pop up pretty often on college campuses. Ferociously opinionated, these people, while not particularly well-read or up-to-date on the news, consider themselves great intellects, authorities on all things cultural, political, and moral. They see themselves as progressive and enlightened and they fight for every liberal cause.

Their vocabulary, however, tends to be pretty weak. Their ideas never strengthen or change because they preach only to the people who won’t challenge them. Their arguments are generic and timeless because their ideas can’t keep up with the news.

In their efforts to sound smart, enlightened, and progressive they demonstrate this paradox of radical political correctness (PC), in which they regurgitate kosher social ideas but do so with furious vehemence, a dash of profanity, and a few more insults. To criticize somebody’s subtle intolerance of gay marriage, for example, but to identify that person, cunningly, as a four-letter word.

It’s now popular among this particular crowd to point out and critique “white person” characteristics – of which, although I’m Hispanic, I seem to possess a great deal.

We now call “white” what was once called “preppy.” This is generally friendly and acceptable, more teasing than insulting, and it implies no definitive insult. To tell somebody they look “preppy” is to simply identify a look. Maybe it has some unsavory connotations, but nothing denotative.

As economic distinctions are now drawn with increasing clarity and emphasis in the wake of the Occupy movement, someone being “white” is still, as ever, associated with preppiness. Preppiness, however, is associated with wealth. Being “white” is therefore associated, now, with wealth (at least more so than before). With so much emphasis on the notion of a greedy upper-1 percent, I can think of no time in my life when the rich were more demonized and reviled by mass culture.

Therefore, if the country is currently facing a uniquely widespread resentment of the rich, while simultaneously turning the phrase “white” into a synonym for wealth and affluence, then the popular conception of a “white” person will be demonized with that of the “rich” person.

You get me?

By demeaning the “whiteness” of certain novels and certain writers, this guy on tumblr is suggesting that there are spiritual, emotional and psychological plights that are indigenous to “white” people, and that the exploration of those issues through art is not only superficial but of no relevance to the rest of humanity.

It might sound, ironically, PC in that he is attacking, ostensibly, elitism and greed and every other unsavory characteristic we associate with the wealthy; however, this suggestion that there is such a thing as a “white person” novel also suggests that I, as a Hispanic reader, lack the capacity to empathize with another ethnicity, ostensibly because it’s more prosperous than mine.

I don’t suspect this guy really considered every angle of what he was saying. It’s an easy mistake to make with passing remarks. But it seems to me a demonstration of two things: first, the inevitable danger of addressing, with hostility, anything pertaining to race.

Secondly, the cancerous quality of political correctness. It gets into everything: it pervades our speech, our social manner, and ultimately clouds our thoughts — the danger of this being that political correctness is, most often, the preference of politeness over truth. And when we try to speak in such a way that is at once PC, smart, radical, fashionable and correct, there’s an inevitable muddying.

And you end up sounding like an idiot.