Yesterday on Google Talk:

Friend: does this article annoy you?

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_white_stuff

i can’t help but feel like she’s conflating class and race too much.

Me: [reads article]
the article annoys me because it names my blog but doesn’t link it.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Haters. Do you hear that, American Prospect? You are a bunch of haters.

Anyway, here is the paragraph that mentions us in passing:

But if you are a person of color who likes a lot of the same stuff white people like, does that make you white? A sell-out to your own culture? Are you not a “real” person of color?

It is perhaps for this reason that Stuff White People Like has spawned a number of unaffiliated spin-off sites such as Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Lesbians Like, and Stuff Asian People Like. (I even considered starting a blog called Stuff Feminist People Like.) Part of the motivation for these sites could be that people of color are tired of being labeled a “sell out” to their ethnic group for participating in mainstream white culture.

I don’t know what motivated the people who started Stuff Educated Black People Like and Stuff Asian People Like, but the motivation to start Stuff Lesbians Like had nothing to do with the fact that I am a person of color. It had everything to do with the fact that I find a large portion of (mostly urban and affluent) lesbian culture to be comic gold.

In some of the entries in Stuff Lesbians Like, class is an undercurrent, but race hasn’t really been covered. Race is an issue in all communities, but it is less of an issue in the lesbian community than, say, in the gay male community. [source | source | source | source] (Come on, guys! What’s the deal? What is wrong with you people?!)

Class and education level is more of an issue in the lesbian community. That and all that pseudointellectual navel-gazing about gender, the so-called dominant (heterosexual) culture, and labels. (And the amount of such navel gazing is directly proportional to class and education level.) Anyway, other entries are meant to poke fun at lesbian-specific annoying behavior, such as being mean to bisexual women and the penchant to wade into drama for the sake of drama, and finally, some entries are just meant to be silly, like the ones about singing 80s songs, being boring while in a relationship, and funny hair.

On that note, I will leave you with what I deem to be the most lesbian-ish paragraph in the American Prospect article that mentioned us in passing. Rule: The greater amount of gratuitous pomo buzzwords in a paragraph, the more lesbian-ish the paragraph.

Some people will protest that Stuff White People Like is just a humor blog, and it need not be taken so seriously. But that’s the point. When you’re part of the dominant culture, you don’t have to be self-aware about the assumptions in your own product. You don’t have to examine how you overlap with, and set yourself apart from, other cultures. Meanwhile, the vast majority of owners of pop-culture outlets are white and wealthy, as are the people producing the content. So though it may be just a start-up humor blog, Stuff White People Like has an impact on the dominant narrative on race and class.

So lesbian it hurts.