(Cleverly) Collapsing Categories

When I told a friend that I was writing a paper on WASP culture, she told me I had to check out the website "Stuff White People Like." I wasn't sure what to expect when I went to the site; how on earth do you lump an entire race together and discover common interests? Well, it turns out that by "white," the site really means middle to upper class, liberal whites. Since I fall into that category, maybe that's why I find it so funny. Number 81 on the list, Graduate School, really hit home:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

Presumably the "hardworking white Americans" that Hillary Clinton recently said were supporting her wouldn't see themselves on this site. Funny as the site is, I think it reflects a tendency in America to talk about class by talking about race. The Newshour had a great discussion about the media's treatment of race during the presidential campaign; the commentators all agreed that the media was vastly oversimplifying some complicated categories.

We hear a lot more about the black/white divide in this election than old/young, urban/rural, or even class divides. And when we talk about people in the lower income brackets, they are the "working class," a term which connotes whites. But Stuff White People Like tries to understand how its audience views this class in the post Knowing what's best for poor people:

Deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Is this attitude that much better than a Republican girl's comment on this post that "we don’t want to give away our hard-earned money and/or inherited money to the unemployed population who are too lazy to work or too stupid to quit having kids they can’t afford"? There's obviously a class divide here on both sides of the aisle, and I hope we don't have to wait for a Rev. Wright to start discussing it.