Stuff White People Like

A friend sent me a link. Thank you, friend.

Stuff White People Like is a blog, and it has initiated heated debate on within its own comments and discussion on other sites, like Feministe and the LA Times. I love this.

A huge lesson I attempt to teach my students (who will someday be teachers) is that everywhere around us, there are these messages and ideas. And, though we may want to brush them off as "oh, just Disney cartoons" or "it's too uncomfortable for me to broach in a classroom," we really need to educate ourselves and become critical participants in our society in order to be good teachers. So, how does a blog like this fit into multicultural teacher education with a focus on social justice and transformation? Good question. And, a good answer is that this blog and all of the comments, debate, anger, hilarity--all of it--speak to our macro-culture. We get insights into what people think it means to be white, to be racist, to be middle class.

Then, we need to be critical, to wade through the emotions, the "evidence," our personal biases, and our own ignorance of experience and come to some conclusions. How does this fit into how we think and how we teach?

As a teacher of college students, it gives me a view into the possibilities of how people think and what they say when they are anonymous online. It provides a insight into people's language, how they define and use words like "racist". And, all of this informs my teaching and my own learning.