Hah. I suppose, to be clear, I should say up front that I’m not white, but I’m not culturally very Korean, either. One of my friends came to stay this weekend, and he made some remark about us being white people, which didn’t seemed unapt. I did notice it, though. I think it had something to do with books.

There’s this sort of massively coded conception of literacy and affluence, like white folks should be ashamed of having a high level of literacy and some spending money. Those things are white person things. So in a self-deprecating turn, liking David Foster Wallace gets reconstituted as a white person thing. You should realize how another white person, Nietzsche, set out this act as kind of a dick move. It strikes me as being a form of ressentiment, right? Do you know what I mean?

Like, the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down was supposed to be slightly justifiably angry about being white? Or when the TV talks about ‘reverse discrimination’? Or even being self-deprecating about how Infinite Jest is a white person thing? That’s the bubbling up of inferiority—perhaps well deserved!—turning into a weird sort of auto-ressentiment. The problem is, as a personal political act, its almost also the opposite of ressentiment. Or, well, it’s being the master and the slave, simultaneously. It’s particularly unfair in the way the winner gets to be systemically unfair. It’s closing the loop, completing the circle, excluding the other. It’s becoming one’s own god and devil. I mean, it is, if you’ll allow me to say, the most characteristically white person thing I can think of doing.

I don’t, like, particularly care who likes what or for what reasons. But this manner of self-deprecation, which is intrinsically wrapped up with race, is pernicious. I mean, there are clearly things that can be well-described as “white person things”, “yellow person things”, “brown person things”, and so on, I suppose. As a merely descriptive label, that seems like one way to do it. (Whether you’d want to do it like that, well, I wouldn’t, personally, is one thing I’ll say.) But I’m remarking about specifically white-and-self-deprecating ways of claiming cultural ownership. It’s unseemly.

Again, to be clear, I don’t care who likes what. If you like or don’t like DFW. If you’re white and love him. Black and love him. And so on. I’m also not saying that it might not be inaccurate that his readership is 90% best described as “white”. I’m saying that calling something specifically a “white person thing” as a point of self-depracating pride is a somewhat complex act of double-speak magic.