The Pains of being Purely White

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this flickr account. What's notable about it is that instead of using his account to showcase the shitty "art" photos he took with Hipstamatic or an album dedicated to his corgie, Eric Fischer is displaying computer generated ethnicity maps based on 2000 census info of the country's biggest cities. The results are moderately horrifying. Take NYC:

Each dot represents 25 people of a given ethnicity. Red is for Whites (although I believe pink might have been a more apt hue), blue is for Blacks, yellow is for Hispanics and green is for Asians.I think you can tell where fucking Midtown is, right? Over in Brooklyn the mass of blue is Bed-Stuy and southern Bushwick. I live up top where the blue is meeting the yellow. Even when enlarged it's easy to see that, while we are a crazy diverse city, we all kinda keep to ourselves. Still though, we're doing a fuckload better than Detroit:

 

Jesus, Detroit! Looking at that makes you think there's a thirty foot tall electric barbed wire fence made out of Sickle Cell Anemia and topped with burning crosses running all the way down 8 Mile Road! I mean you're making Mobile, Alabama look like a bastion of racial tolerance by comparison.

Admittedly, not by much though...

Then there are cities that can only be described as "Homogeneous Zones". It would seem that El Paso has been reclaimed by Mexico, Honolulu was never America's to begin with and Portland? Oh, my beloved hometown what can I say except:

What a bunch of fucking CRACKERS!

I mean, I always know Portlanders were a little pasty, what with the near total lack of sunshine, but I had no idea that we had all of, what? 50 black folks? The Great White North indeed.
What is it about white folks that just opens us up for ridicule? Is it our inherent lack of rhythm or dance moves? Is it our terrible fashion sense? Is it because we over-saturate the airwaves so much that by default we make up the majority of on-camera boners? I would wager multiple centuries of raping, pillaging, enslaving, massacring and otherwise lording it over the rest of the planet would have something to do with it. It's always more fun to pick on the powerful. That's why stand up comedy routines and satires have a famous person/average shlub ratio of 1,000,000,000,000,000:1. People that laugh at the underprivileged are generally considered to be dicks.
Religion is pretty good cannon fodder no matter who's practicing it, but once you get it all sparkly white, the comedy gold really starts to shine. Check out some gospel music from this Black church choir with the world's most awesome conductor:



Hot shit. Now let's check out the competition. This next video, I'm told, get's "quite rocking" around the 1:06 mark.



I'm pretty sure this is authentic footage of my own personal hell, namely being trapped in a stone box in some undisclosed midwestern location with potentially rapey priests for all of eternity. While there's no shot of the congregation in the first video, I would be willing to place a substantial wager that it outnumbers the two whole families who showed up to that voluntary torture session they're calling Lutheranism. I particularly like how at 1:49 we see the girl on the far left glaze over while her mom talks get's beatific about how "it's the same every week". That face she slowly makes just screams, "I can't even think about church without need a stiff drink".
Then there are Pentacostals, although the less said about those wackjobs, the better.

Style is another good one. Our history is littered with unfortunate choices, from striped bell bottoms to pleated jeans and from sweater vests to argyle socks. Pompadours and mustachios and mullets, oh my! We are unquestionably at our worst when we use our greatest ethnic power, appropriation. First we came for the clothes:

But no one said anything because they assumed we must be joking.

Then we came for the hair:

But no one said anything because they just felt bad for us.

Then we came for the gang signs

And got robbed of our costume jewelry by actual gangsters for acting like a bitch.

 Even on the athletic fields of the world, we just can't help but make ourselves look like walking punch-lines. On the one hand you have every famous modern basketball star, on the other you have cricket. While both where invented by white dudes and both are played by people of all ethnicities, one is very engaged with the style and sensibilities of a modern, young, black fan base while the other is...cricket. Your average basketball player looks like this:

Cricket, on the other hand...well:

Kinda dress like guidos.

OK, OK. While white people are not universally the shnooks I make them out to be, we are an understandably large target for ridicule. We have a history of privilage that makes us fun to mock. Call it the legacy of everything from The Crusades to Manifest Destiny. We have (for the time being) the power to call a lot of the shots on this planet and our complacency in that role has made our culture about as vibrant as cottage cheese. I disconnected from my own culture long ago.Where Williamsburg gives me irratble bowel syndrome, Midtown gives me pants ripping diarrhea, and while I don't go prancing around wearing Coogi sweaters and a do-rag, I have made an attempt to live as far past the ever advancing white line as I can without getting my cracker ass jumped every night for being in the wrong neighborhood. Right now, for example, I live in a vibrant, spirited Puerto Rican community in Bushwick. When the sun is out there are people selling fresh fruit and BBQ pork skewers on the sidewalks. Kids play in open fire hydrants. Little old ladies sit and gossip on their stoops and say hi when you greet them. Hell, even the lady at the bodega knows my name although she prefers to call me, Papi.
Guess what I'm getting at is, if I was born and raised in an environment such as this, I would look at all the white folks who never know their neighbors and live in a cultural waste land of chain restaurants and Wal-Marts and think they were pretty funny too.