I do not like to use hateful words, but BuzzFeed does not make a good case for millennials not being fucking imbeciles.
I have eaten soup with a bread spoon.
I love Miley Cyrus covering songs. It's just charming how much she clearly loves such a variety of music and seems really happy to be able to sing the songs she loves.
But have you ever eaten a taco bowl?
I think I missed the SWPL wars here. Or came only for the very end of them.
I've done some of those things, but do you need 50 out of 100 to be truly white? 25? 75?
I mean, who hasn't felt kind of sorry for Lindsay Lohan? Amirite?
Anyway, a bread bowl is just the modern version of the medieval trencher. Except that you don't give them to the poor when you're finished with the food it was holding.
SWPL was great and you all continue to be wrong. I haven't heard of half the things on this list, and answered "yes" to about five of them. Millennial thing?
This one, by contrast, requires you to be generally into some kind of popular music to be valid. I got 8/100, a seriously false negative. (It probably also doesn't work so well for Boomers.)
I liked the time travel fantasy question.
Who spends that much time pondering time travel?
Pfft, like Moby needed more than three seconds to vote "yes, kill Baby Hitler".
If only Taylor Swift were around then to provide a positive example of blondness.
SWPL was a lot easier to say than SWUMCL.
I scored 3 out of 100; probably 60% of them I had no idea what they even meant. Can you only be white in America?
Or can you only be white if you're under 30?
I love guacamole, and I saw Juno. I don't think having had to square dance in phys ed class should count. Or maybe it should? I've laughed out loud to Monty Python and seen more than one Wes Anderson movie. Also, I've seen fire and I've seen rain.
Linking James Taylor with "whiteness" is reverse racism.
I scored higher than chris y -- I got 14 out of 100 -- but yeah, most of these I had never heard of either.
And some of the ones I did understand made me laugh out loud, here in my office. Had your PONY stolen?
I would be as non-white as Minivet if only I hadn't learned to embroider recently, but it was totally worth it. And I'm so, so white.
Also, the fishing one? Black people don't fish? This is news to me.
This should have had a trigger warning -- it made me remember the thing Justin Bieber did that made me cry. Oh, Justin! How could you???
26. You mean that time he got a record contract?
18/100. They totally nailed me on the New Balance (but missed on ~everything else.)
This missed me pretty much completely. I'll buy that it's picking out someone, but I don't clearly recognize the target.
In Louisiana, I'm sure black folks fish. In New York City, no.
I mean, questions literally about sunscreen? That's me. But not the rest of it.
30: That's why they say "Coney Island whites fish."
I think it's pretty broad spectrum. E.g., clearly there's not a big demographic that listens to Taylor Swift AND Elton John AND Tenacious D AND Creed, or who appreciate Monty Python AND Blue Collar Comedy, but each of these is individually pretty white.
Only 15 out of 100.
As for SWPL, although I realize that implying that progressives are humorless is the most oppressive thing in the universe, my response to the dour reaction to the SWPL blog was "Holy crap you people need to lighten up."
30: Black people fish in Ohio. I've seen them.
I got 19 being as liberal as possible, for example answering the tanning questions based on things that happened decades ago. My summer job was driving a boat teaching windsurfing so of course I had to wear a T-shirt when I was on the water 6 hours a day.
Give me whiteness points for the job, not the associated working conditions.
The millenniality also skewed the results for me. I got to 29 by stretching a little -- e.g., I have had passing thoughts that Lindsay Lohan seems to have a fucked up life -- but I'm really a lot whiter than that.
As for SWPL, although I realize that implying that progressives are humorless is the most oppressive thing in the universe, my response to the dour reaction to the SWPL blog was "Holy crap you people need to lighten up."
The dour reaction was because they took what had once been called "yuppies" and renamed then "white people". Which is... a bad thing to do? For a number of reasons?
Comparng this thing to SWPL, which legitimately nailed a particular kind of UMC whote person at a time when few were doing it, is the most embarassing thing Heebie has ever done. The butthurt reactions to SWPL here was the most embarassing thing in the history of Unfogged.
On this quiz, I got 17/100. I guess the quiz is supposed to identify ... 27 year old white women?
Yeah, I had no idea about most of the music, or if I did at least understand it (I've heard Phish!) I certainly didn't meet the criteria. I'm sure I'd miserably fail a similar quiz about how black are you, although to be fair when I was 12, at my Jewish summer camp we were early fans of Dre and Eazy-E.
In fact I blame SWPL for all the idiots on social media now who go "Fuck, I hate white dudes" despite being in fact white dudes themselves, and then saying "Uh you don't have to be a white man to be a white dude, white dudes are anyone who unthinkingly defends the power structure, blah blah blah". Words have no meaning!
Last night I had dinner at Margaritaville with a colleague who had never heard of Jimmy Buffet. I'm not sure if its because my colleague is not white, or if its because he's a millennial. This calls for further research.
Being white means never having to say you're sorry, but saying it all the time anyway.
my pony was stolen. more accurately, I went outside to see her being led into a horse trailer by a kid I didn't know. when I said "that's my pony!" he was like "it's my pony now!" because my parents had sold her without warning me.
Claiming that I'm butthurt and need to lighten up about SWPL is like claiming I'm butthurt and need to lighten up about Garfield or Full House. It's not that I got my feelings hurt.
Many of the pop musicians here I know primarily for work-related reasons, maybe the whitest thing of all.
Last night I had dinner at Margaritaville with a colleague who had never heard of Jimmy Buffet.
I don't think I'd have heard of him if not for two particular podcasts making fun of him.
If you'd ever lived in Ohio, you would have heard people talking about going to Buckeye Lake to hear Jimmy Buffet. Because apparently in Ohio you need an occasion to act like a drunken fool. They called themselves "Dittoheads" or something.
47 & etc.: The dour reactions I'm thinking of occurred elsewhere. If there were dour reactions at Unfogged, I must have missed them.
You should really lighten up about Full House, though.
work-related reasons, maybe the whitest thing of all
True, "having a job" is stereotypically white.
At least twelve of these items transcend "whiteness." (Some of them are stereotypically Canadian things, which is not *quite* the same. AndyYou'd have to be a stone not to be moved by the Miley Cyrus cover of Jolene, for instance.) Those also just happen to be twelve of the thirteen items that apply to me.
"Whose Line Is It Anyway" is pretty stereotypically white though, Wayne Brady notwithstanding. I'll give 'em that one.
The quiz as a whole is either terrible, or a glimpse into a terrifying world full of people who really do have conversations specifically not about "12 Years a Slave" using only quotes from "Talladega Nights."
Whiteness is hard to define because it only exists only in opposition to other human groups. Whiteness is the absence of good.
I'm sure black folks fish. In New York City, no.
I met one! This guy was crabbing (!) on the piers near the Harlem Fairway. He was super-enthusiastic about the $100 reel he was about to pick up on layaway from this guy down on Bleeker.
Every time I have been sailing has been like a terrible dream--if you're sailing, it means you're trapped on a sailboat with the sort of people who go sailing. I've faked headaches and excused myself to go take a rage-nap on at least three sailboats. I don't know how white this particular thing makes me, but I am pretty white.
Black folks fish A LOT in New York City though. Have you ever been on the East River promenade above 96th street? Very intense black fishing scene.
Black folks fish A LOT in New York City though. Have you ever been on the East River promenade above 96th street? Very intense black fishing scene.
I don't really find fishing that enjoyable. I think shooting a shotgun into the water to get a fish would be more entertaining. Plus, if the whole "evolution" thing is right, we would be creating fish that stay deep enough of the water that I don't have to look at them.
Huh. I got 11/100. I guess I'm (hushed tones) the wrong kind of white person.
Black folks fish a lot in Chicago too. Immigrants fish everywhere I've ever lived. That one was baffling.
64 A white person must have made the quiz is why. Making stupid quizzes about whiteness must be swipple.
I got 4 out of 100, which suggests that only people who watch American television can be white
This is mostly a pop culture quiz. Which, okay, I'm sure there is a white pop culture and a black pop culture, but if you don't care much about either this quiz will be irrelevant. Way less funny and more anodyne than SWPL.
"Whose Line Is It Anyway" is pretty stereotypically white though, Wayne Brady notwithstanding.
What's Aisha Tyler, chopped liver?
I have been mixing up the names of black dudes who play pool at the bar I go to. It is pretty god damn mortifying I must say.
I am even facebook friends with one of them. He just posted how much he likes this one Pavement song so you can take that shit right off the whiteness list.
45. Oh my God. That is too sad to pass without comment.
68: I guess maybe I need to watch the show again!
66: Caucasian Americans invented whiteness.
55 Bleecker, please.
How embarrassing. A whiter person (I got 14 IIRC) would never make that mistake.
74 Now let me hear you say "Houston"
76 Reminds me that last week at that conference in Dubrovnik I got into it with a native Oregonian about how to correctly pronounce "Oregon".
They called themselves "Dittoheads" or something.
Parotheads, I think.
The list made me feel old. I am aware of most of the pop culture references, but don't feel any connection to most of them. Though, come to think of it, that's how I felt when I was younger, so perhaps age isn't the issue.
Dave Chappelle tried to warn us about calling "Whose Line..." white, but did we listen?
If they didn't want it to be pronounced like "polygon" they shouldn't have spelled it that way.
Who else here was a fan of SWPL? Tigre, ogged, AcademicLurker...?
77: The nice thing about pronouncing local things in Dubrovnik is that every letter has one sound and you pronounce every letter, so once you've got all your Cs down you're basically golden.
27/100, but I think a lot of it is a combination of my age, and having in-laws from the rural Midwest.
And I will hear no denigration of Jimmy Buffett or Parrotheads. You will never find a friendlier, more generous crowd of drunk people.
If they didn't want it to be pronounced like "polygon" they shouldn't have spelled it that way.
So there's more than two sides to this story?
Here in Arkansas, black people fish. So do Asian people and Latino people. Native Americans too.
Even the professors fish!
Though not me. I got enough of that as a kid.
I used to tell my dad that my friends and I were going fishing. One day as I was leaving he told me about a friend of his who complained that fishing was great until some fool brought out the fishing poles. This was my dad's way of saying that he knew we were going to sit by the river and drink beer.
The "fishing is for white people" thing is cringeworthy and embarrassing. Fishing does skew pretty male, though, so maybe the author unthinkingly added it for gender balance.
81: Not so much a fan (although I did think some of the entries were funny) as bemused by the intensity of the reactions to it. I felt the same way when the entire progressive internet was caterwauling about the stupid ice bucket for ALS research fundraiser.
I guess I'm just puzzled by the things that will cause people to cry "ZOMG! Problematic!!" en mass.
56
The only thing wrong with going sailing is that inevitably the person whose boat it is will ask if you want to try steering it and you feel compelled to say "uh, sure." That violates the whole point of the trip, which is: "Be lazy out on the water."
Sailing takes me away to where I'm going.
Am I white or am I white?
Sailing is definitely where I fooled around in closest proximity to my parents.
God, peep, don't make us have the thing about whether Jews can be white again.
Make Jews White Again!
96: If you saw me dance, you wouldn't question my whiteness.
I bet among millenials, fishing skews white. And this quiz skews young (aside from the Mitt Romney question).
100: Why on earth would that be true?
Because it's a rural/urban thing, and at this moment, rural=red state=white hick, urban=blue state=not a white hick. So fishing is going to get lumped in with hunting and squirreling and rolling coal and so on.
Squirreling?
I had a friend who liked to hunt and then skin squirrels, but he was (a) a student at extremely fancy private high school (b) not white.
You run over squirrel with your modded pickup then smoke it in the exhaust stack.
I think we may eventually have to face the horrible truth that not all people conform to racial stereotypes.
"Squirreling" doesn't mean hunting for squirrels. It means evading something by being sneaky or hunting for foxes using a line baited with a squirrel.
I have literally never heard of the hunt foxes with a line baited with squirrel use of "squirreling" before today.
107: Clearly, you need to spend more time with the landed gentry.
Now I'm worried that Moby may not have been serious. Why would he play such a mean trick?
Fishing demographics links here and here. Not sure it seems disproportionately white; not sure the surveys capture all fishing or focus more narrowly on "recreation" rather than a thing you do a few times a week in your city's river or lake during the off-hours.
If it were instead titled "How basic are you?" would we be inclined to quibble with any of the question choices? I'm pretty sure that's what it really means.
There are still a few old black guys in my neighborhood who keep a fishing boat, complete with trailer, in their driveway. I'd be willing to bet that 95% of the residents of the city of LA with a driveway fishing boat are non-white. It feels like something from another time, like weirdly specific to the world between 1950-1980.
Not that that isn't recreation, but... I'm not sure what word would distinguish everyday fishing-for-food (by no means only a city thing) from going on a fishing vacation to a specific vacationy lake and so on.
112: Do the white people not fish, or do they keep the boat at the vacation home?
Are there any skiing questions on the quiz I feel like there should have been. And I can't ski and have no desire to learn. Because I'm an ally.
I mean I went on school Ski Trips in high school but those were 100% hand jobs 0% skiing. Like, almost officially.
111 is entirely correct. "Basic" is the racial epithet for (youngish) white people.
113.2 - Dunno The only white angelenos I know who are into fishing are into either (a) fly fishing, which, I theoretically am as well but never do and you can only do hundreds of miles away (b) bow-and-arrow fishing where you literally stand around a pond or ocean or something and shoot fish with a bow and arrow. I'm not totally sure how that fish with arrows thing works, but my brother-in-law is into it.
"How was the skiing on your high school ski trips?" is like a perfect one-question Turing Test.
There was a skiing question! "Have you gone on a weekend ski vacation?" I skied in the Sierra on New Year's Day this year -- some of the purest joy I've felt as an adult -- and then flipped my shit when I went again sometime in February and could barely get down the hill for muscle-shuddering fear. I think enough of the powder had turned icy after six weeks that it flipped the switch from "you are truly alive" to "you are about to die," but maybe it was random?
I rarely do it for all the obvious reasons, but the good trips have been actually blissful.
Obviously this thread will get hijacked by personal disclaimers.
I haven't read the thread (personal disclaimer?!) but obviously such disclaiming is the acme of whiteness.
114.1: There was a question about skiing!
114.2: Was it on the permission slip your parents had to sign?
The acme of the acme would be, "I'm not racist, but..."
118 cool I got to "have you ever decided to go sailing and then gone sailing" question and it was too hard for me to think of an authentic answer so I gave up. I'm white AND basic though.
I'm not totally sure how that fish with arrows thing works, but my brother-in-law is into it.
I did it once. The arrow you shoot has fishing line trailing from it and there's a way to reel in the fish. So, it's basically like other types of fishing but with less "catch and release'>
122: Yeah, I've been on a sailboat a few times in my life. I don't think it counts, because I was just a passenger.
I'm just not sure that any of the times I went sailing were after I DECIDED to go sailing.
I mean I was on the boat so I guess I must have, but that doesn't seem like something I'd decide to do.
But does 115 mean that "whiteness" is also feminine for young people? Honestly, I can't think of all that many genderless stereotypes of any race, which is a little uncanny. And I can't think of many stereotypes in general, aside from the long-running ones I've seen explicitly "mentioned" more than "used"; I probably tend to block them out. I do think intense vocal insecurity and requests for reassurance are much more common among white women than among women of color. I'd guess that women of other races have never been provided the basic social support to express self-doubts in public the way white women can (but am I wrong?). It's not a good trait, but it's an index of some level of privilege: you have a reasonable expectation of being reassured. When I think of it as a disingenuous, maladaptive behavior it's often in those terms.
Most of the fishing done around here (Arkansas) is fishing for food, except for some sport bass fishing. Even then I *think* they eat the fish.
But certainly the daily fishers I see fishing in the local lakes and creeks and rivers, that's food-fishing. Though I'm sure they're also having a good time.
I'd guess that women of other races have never been provided the basic social support to express self-doubts in public the way white women can (but am I wrong?).
basic basic?
127 is full of lots of interesting things to think about. I'm not sure which I agree with yet.
I guess the quiz is supposed to identify ... 27 year old white women?
AKA Buzzfeed's target audience. Not a lot of overlap with the Unfogged demographic.
I'm not sure what word would distinguish everyday fishing-for-food (by no means only a city thing) from going on a fishing vacation to a specific vacationy lake and so on.
"Subsistence" versus "sport." In Alaska this is an important legal distinction.
And a distinction with very strong racial associations too.
Right... somehow I was reluctant to label the city fishing I've seen as "subsistence," even though it didn't look very sporty to me, because WTF do I know. But I wasn't reluctant to awkwardly circumlocute the term either! I'd guess that permits apply in places like Alaska, but I don't know if tracking that captures all meaningful fishing activity for demographic purposes.
All six black Alaskans are sport fishermen, is why.*
*this is deliberately designed to produce an over-earnest response from Teo.
Right... somehow I was reluctant to label the city fishing I've seen as "subsistence," even though it didn't look very sporty to me, because WTF do I know.
"Personal use" is another category used in Alaska that might apply better to that case.
Definitely not taking the bait (so to speak) on 136.
And all six use the western entrance to Yellowstone.
Now I've read the thread but I'm pretty sure I'm not better off for having done so.
I've faked headaches and excused myself to go take a rage-nap
This may not be unique to whiteness, but it's been inherent to it on both sides of my family. I used to embroider when I was too young to excuse myself, it gets you out of most eye-contact.
I do think the rage-nap response is heritable.
Not a lot of overlap with the Unfogged demographic.
Probably true, but I wish to point out to any 27-year-old women who might be reading this thread that I, an attractive, clever, cultured, stably employed young man, am presently in want of a girlfriend.
Odd quiz. I have sailed, hacked, and square-danced and it still thought I wasn't white.
If you want 27-year-old women to pay attention to you, try walking with a small boy dressed like Harry Potter.
Sometimes I figure that unfogged is simply an elaborate catfish routine where all the commenters are actually products of a Steve Buscemi look-alike.
144: but given 141, how could you stand any 27-year-old woman who had made it to comment 144?
145: Because you never had your pony stolen, is why.
148: naturally she would have seen my name in the sidebar and had her curiosity aroused.
Odd quiz. I have sailed, hacked, and square-danced and it still thought I wasn't white.
Well, being white is an insult. It means you're basic. I wonder where they put the cut-off.
The quiz is to determine whether you're basic?
- Have you eaten baking soda?
- Have you eaten lye?
Scores between 0 and 14.
Despite a logstanding love of reggae, I have never given serious thought to Jamaican canned cheese.
Until today that is.
You know what's really swipple?
154. Exactly what I was thinking. The fuck?
I can't remember who here I was arguing about jury nullification with or when, but it's a terrible idea and, whoever you are, I was right. That is the most important thing to come out of the acquittal.
I can't remember who here I was arguing about jury nullification with or when, but it's a terrible idea and, whoever you are, I was right.
Probably Trapnel. He's definitely argued in favor of it here.
I am so mad about this. I can't even read beyond the headline.
Did the article say it was "jury nullification"?
159: What, you think maybe there was for realsies some reasonable doubt about whether or not these people conspired to prevent federal employees from discharging their duties through force, intimidation, or threats? That they carried firearms in a federal facility?
158: if you didn't read beyond the headline, you missed the one good part, where their jackass lawyer managed to get himself tased by the marshals in the courtroom. (Apparently he got in the judge's face demanding that she show him a document giving her the authority to continue detaining Bundy pending his Nevada trial.)
At least the Bundys themselves are still facing trial in Nevada for the earlier standoff. They're probably a lot more dangerous than the rest of the dumbasses who were with them in Oregon.
154 Holy shit. How do you lose a case like that?
160.last that marshal better be drinking for free this weekend or there really is no justice in the US of A.
Bet the defendants who pled guilty feel pretty silly right now.
This is like the first unsettling indication that all the polls are wrong and Trump will win.
Does the charge the feds were trying to prove have some very complicated legal hoops to jump through or something? The trial seems to have lasted almost as long as the standoff.
Oh jeez I got a 15 on this (i.e. by their ratings: Not White) and I am pretty white. My musical tastes are white and a half.
I'm glad SWPL isn't quite a thing anymore. It was a slightly funny concept that spun out into a lot of boring self-recrimination and bank-shot self-celebration.
I always post twice in a row but anyway I feel like this is a quiz about a really narrow segment of whiteness. The stuff here skews young and...I don't want to say "mainstream" in the way that implies my tastes are delightfully recherche, but I just...don't listen to much radio pop, for example, which meant I answered no to a ton of these.
I'm looking back through these (because it is so important and serious) and lots of them are about other things. I'm not primarily a dog person. I don't like sports or think a lot about my tan. I did, ok, have a daydream about being on The Real World a looooong time ago and yes I have envied Lauren Conrad during the dark period when I watched too much The Hills both because she will never have a sad thought because she doesn't have thoughts and because she seems to have a nice lifestyle.
The stuff here skews young and...I don't want to say "mainstream" in the way that implies my tastes are delightfully recherche, but I just...
I think the word you're looking for is "basic."
As come up at the other place, I'm very very not-white according to that. Which I think -- since I'm Whitey McWhite -- means I'm none of the following: American, middle-class, between the age of 20 and 35.
I think the word you're looking for is "BuzzFeed reader"
Oh jeez I got a 15 on this (i.e. by their ratings: Not White) and I am pretty white.
Same. I also got 15; I also think I'm pretty white. I think I got 4 or 5 points for being pasty-faced, prone to freckles, and unable to tan.
160. I'm just curious if someone used the phrase, because it's a giant hot-button cause among certain nutso right-wingers, kind of like the Income Tax being illegal or becoming a "sovereign citizen."