something about white people

So apparently what I like to do now during lunch is eat at my desk and read the news instead of going down to the cafeteria and attempting to socialize with anyone with a personality grade above "arrogant, self-loving bitch." Thanks, grad school, for lowering my standards and paving the way to mealtimes full of awkward conversation!

Here's what I got today. So I have my own opinions about Christian Lander's book ("Stuff White People Like," which includes Asian girls as #11 on the list...which is awesome, because I literally cannot tell you enough about how much I love being objectified, even if it's tough-in-cheek), and his CNN article How We Became White provoked some thought. In it, he mentions being a white immigrant from Canada, and neatly checking off the "White" box in the US Census. There's no differentiation between White Americans and White immigrants--I guess white people are all assumed to be the same, which is to say, awesomely American and privileged and so forth. Which is, arguably, just as discriminatory as Seth Green's recent joke on SNL that the Asian American version of Snookie would be a violin-wielding and be-spectacled academic nightmare. (Although, to be honest, I was torn between laughing and shaking my head, because the kids in the Asian Student Council at W&M were probably some of the most outrageous and dramatic people I've ever met.)

It is interesting that Lander calls it "that wonderful privilege" to check the White box on the census. I mean, I get his argument, that a 1st generation Canadian-American would probably not be subjected to the same kinds of discrimination as 5th-generation Latino-Americans. Probably true. But do most White people see that privilege? Or really, is it a kind of curse for so many different kinds of people to be homogenized and stereotyped under one label?