Stuff White People Like

So one time I was at this healing-from-racism conference, and the woman leading it was like, "Emily, I have a vision of you one day doing stand-up comedy about the neurosis of white people and helping us laugh at our selves." Laughter's the best medicine and all that, but I sort of think she was making fun of me? Also, I think she didn't watch much stand-up, or she'd know that they all talk about race.

Anyway, you'll be spared hearing all my, "I'm so white" jokes (like your mama jokes, but less funny and more neurotic), because there's a blog out there, recommended to me by the one, the only, Elizabeth, which does it better than I ever could: Stuff White People Like. If only I had read this blog before I tried to relive Dangerous Minds.

Veronica Mars: Savior of the races?

OK, so I'm previewing TV shows (I love you Netflix!) to see what would be worth buying for the library. I got my first Veronica Mars installment this week, and I expected to be delighted (similiar setting to my beloved OC, but more crime-solving). But I was actually kind of disturbed.

In episode 1, Veronica cuts a black boy down from the flagpole where he's been duct taped by a local motorcycle gang, and the following week (or hour, in my case), she rescues the Latino leader of the biker gang from a chain gang. Or at least from cleaning up trash next to the highway.

And yeah, she's been kicked out of the white, upper class incrowd, but she was kicked out. She didn't, like, realize they were racist, classist meanies and then start sitting at another lunch table. And she totally still wants her ex. And she's dating a guy who owns a yacht.

I asked a teenage friend what she thought, and she said it was going to give white girls the idea that with a tazer and a dog named "backup," they could brave the mean streets of LA. It'd be like those kids who imitate the moves on the WWF and then kill each other in the living room. Scary.

Enough hating

I think the reason How Ya Like Me Now, by Brendan Halpin, sat on the floor of my bedroom for 2 months was because it had a video game console on the front. At least I think that's a game console. Is that what you call that? You can see the problem.

But I'm so glad I finally ran out of books with angry female warriors on the cover, because How Ya Like Me Now was exactly what I needed: a smart book about a white suburban boy getting transplanted to a city, where he attends a business-like charter school with his cousin and avoids phone calls from his oxycotin-addicted Mom.

What's awesome about this book is the way it complicates the urban/suburban dichotomy (hey, remember this?). For example, Eddie is from the suburbs, but he's the one with a drug addict in the family. Alex lives in the city, but his school has better test scores. Plus, there's dialogue like this:

"Yo, Alex, man, we figured your cousin would be white, but Left Eye is literally white! Can't see his face next to a wall!"
"Kid could be completely invisible in a snow storm!" Savona added.
"Homeboy makes Michael Jackson look black!" Kelvin added (30).

I like how Eddie copes with the culture of an urban school, where, as a white person, he's in the minority. Like, instead of trying to crack on people, he affects a super proper way of talking: "I will now discontinue my fronting. I sincerely hope to hit that... as you may or may not be aware, I am the mack" (139).

But this book isn't, like, about race. It's more about the two cousins trying to get girls, finish their marketing project, beat each other at Madden, and keep their parents out of their business--especially Eddie's mom who's getting out of rehab and threatening to "be a family again." Ack! Now here's a book I could hand to any kid without embarassment. Finally!

What we talk about when we talk about race

You can tell a journalist wrote Adam Canfield of the Slash, because it's jam-packed with issues we talked about in J-101, from media consolidation to anonymous sources. It's not a tall tale in the Maniac Magee sense of the word, but it plays like one. The adults are caricatures and the kids operate like they've never heard of "grounded" or "bedtime."

I'm not sure kids really care about that kind of authenticity, though. I mean, don't they all wish they had the mobility, vocabulary, and independence of TV show kids? Hell, I wish I had all that. Anyway, the plot to this story's great, and the dialogue is, dare I say, snappy.

But there's another thing that's a little weird in an is-it-just-me kind of way. The main characters are named Adam and Jennifer, and 1/2 way through the story, the two get on a bus, and Adam realizes he's the only white person on the bus, and I realize that Jennifer is African-American. OK, maybe I'm obtuse, but I think the writer's trying to be tricky.

Then a woman on the bus gives them a speech about the beauty of two different colored children being friends and how that's going to change the world. What I like about the scene is Adam's feelings of disorientation. It's like suddenly he sees his own life from a different perspective--like it suddenly occurs to him that there is a different perspective. But I don't like the way the people on the bus appear for his enlightenment and then disappear again.

Lately I've read a few books that touch on white privilege (A Summer of Kings, Ethan Suspended) and they come dangerously close to celebrating the innocence of white kids, like, awwww, isn't it cute they don't know anything about racism? But it isn't cute, and they do know stuff. They just also know that they aren't supposed to talk about it. And until we get white kids talking about race, we're not going to be able to change what they think they know.

Soundtrack for crusading white girls

Any white girl from the granola suburbs of New Hampshire who says she doesn't hear the Coolio track from "Dangerous Minds" playing in her head when she walks through the doors of that urban high school (built in the early-Golden Era "Comprehensive" style) is lying. You can say: "I don't subscribe to those stereotypes. They just get delivered to my mailbox with the junk mail and the notices that more sex offenders are moving into my neighborhood." But you're the target market. I'm the target market. I'm "that girl."

So when I walked through the aforementioned doors, I was engrossed with worry that stereotypes of "inner city school kids" would affect my perception of the students. But it didn't even occur to me that stereotypes would also affect the kids' perception of me. Turns out stereotypes are more progressively equal-opportunity than most federal jobs.

It started the moment I introduced myself as "Miss Brown," and a kindergartener said adorably, "You're not Miss Brown. You're miss white." Soon the kids were following me around going, "cool!" "totally!" "OK!" "whatever!" "awesome!" They were calling me Cinderella and singing the Barbie song. And I, who had always considered myself a serious, articulate brunette, found myself asking friends, "Does my hair look blonde to you?" "Do I sound like an airhead on my voicemail?"

Of course the stereotype of the white blonde bimbo hasn't had a debilitating affect on my perception of myself, my job opportunities, etc. I'm not claiming to be the victim here. But the experience taught me how far I have to go in terms of shaking off whiteness. Because I was thinking people of color were the only ones who get stereotyped. Oooops.

Flashback to the first time I watched the Original Kings of Comedy, and I had to watch it with subtitles. And I heard the comedians doing impressions of white people, and I suddenly realized that being white was its own thing, with its own way of walking, talking, dressing, thinking. It wasn't monolithic, but it was whiteness, it wasn't just normalcy. But apparently that's a lesson that Bernie Mac and the "inner city school kids" will have to teach me over and over and over.

So I don't have a solution to these problems yet, but what I do have a is a playlist for white student teachers in the city so they don't have to hum Gangsta's Paradise anymore. Deconstruct them for yourselves. Decoder ring not included.

• De La Soul: Ghetto Thang: "Lies are pointed strong into your skull/Deep within your brain against the wall/To hide or just erase the glowing note/Of how to use the ghetto as a scapegoat."
• Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: The Message: Listen to his son explain why he wants to drop out and tell me where the quotation marks are supposed to go.
• Kanye West: We Don't Care: Kanye, on disproportionality: "We scream, rock, blows, weed park/so now we smart/We aint retards the way teachers thought/Hold up hold fast we make mo'cash/Now tell my momma i belong in the slow class."
• Gil Scott-Heron: Message to the Messengers: OK, so he's talking to rappers, here, but the advice is good for you, too: "Be sure you know the real deal about past situations,/and ain't just repeatin' what you heard on the local t.v. stations."
• Lauryn Hill: Every Ghetto, Every City: Most of this song was Greek to me when it first came out, but I remember being like, "Yeah! I write my friends' names on my jeans with a marker, too!" -- Even though I didn't.
• The Coup: I Ain't The Nigga: It's amazing all the alternatives they come up with: jigger, ninja, Niagra Falls ... Just in case you were getting desensitized.
• Public Enemy: Don't Believe the Hype: Title speaks for itself.
• Nas: One Love: Nas is having a Hamlet moment. Listening to this track is like reading his notebook, unedited, without the self-aggrandizing Zorro-esque flourishes.
• Wycelf: Year of the Dragon (Street Jeopardy): This one has it all: braces, fat laces, yellow cheese buses, and after school shootings. Like One Love, it's a made-for-TV-movie of a song that I can't resist, but the real message is that in a violent culture no one is safe--whether they're inside or outside of the "wrong neighborhood."
• Jeru the Damaja: You Can't Stop the Prophet: OK, so not only is this about a superhero who fights ignorance, but it mentions the library.

I'm tempted to add Ludacris's What's Your Fantasy, for the sake of my college friend who put it on every single mix CD she made (in case of a Ludacris emergency). This means that on one trip to Boston (was that the one when I crashed her car?), I listened to the song 11 times. So I can tell you that it actually does reference education and libraries.