Whiter Shades of Pale (17 page)

Planning on participating in Native American dance ceremony later this year.

There are a number of industries that survive solely upon white guilt: Penguin Classics, the SPCA, free-range chicken farms, and the entire rubber bracelet market. Yet all of these pale in comparison to classical music, which has used white guilt to exist for more than a century beyond its relevance.

Though white people do not actually listen to classical music, they like to believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it. You can witness this firsthand by going to any classical performance at your local symphony, where you will see literally dozens of white couples who have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hours reading every word in the program.

After leaving the concert hall, white people will immediately begin telling everyone they know about how much they loved the performance and how they plan to “go more often.” This is because white people see little to no value in enjoying classical music without recognition from other white people. This can be seen firsthand by looking at the plaques and bricks around all opera houses: they are covered in white person names.

If a white person starts talking to you about classical music, it’s essential that you tread very lightly. This is because white people are all petrified
that they will be exposed as someone who has only a moderate understanding of classical music. When a white person encounters another white person who actually enjoys classical music (exceptionally rare), it is often considered to be one of the most traumatic experiences they can go through.

Even the possibility of this conversation happening is enough to scare white people into attending up to (but no more than) two performances in any given classical season. Therefore it is essential that even if you possess a massive amount of knowledge about classical music, you do not share it with a white person regardless of how much they profess to love it. It’s a recipe for disaster and shame.

As a defense mechanism against the possibility of being called out for a lack of familiarity with the early works of Antonin Dvorak, white people have started to list more contemporary composers as their favorites. Of course, the easiest way for them to do this is to choose composers with music that appears in independent films. Knowing these composers is almost a golden ticket to making white people think you are smart, but not
too
smart.

The first, of course, is Philip Glass. Not only does he have one of the best last names a white person can have, he also writes music used in smart documentaries, thus combining two things white people are passionate about in a single artist.

The second, and slightly more obscure, is Erik Satie. A composer at the end of the nineteenth century, Satie has risen to prominence among white people because his music has been sampled by popular musicians and featured in a number of independent films. Dropping this name at a dinner party will show that you are modern and postmodern at the same
time. It is also a good idea to tell white people that your tastes in general are “modern and postmodern at the same time.” Don’t worry, you won’t have to explain it.

Note: Under no circumstances should you ever list John Williams or Danny Elfman as your favorite composer.

For many people, the most difficult part of travel is all the logistics: booking rooms, transfers, figuring out where to eat and what to see. It can be a bit overwhelming. But for white people, the biggest challenges of traveling come not during the trip, but after. For you see, after a white person has returned from a trip abroad, they must then set about on a task more challenging than any journey: they must find ways to get other people to ask them about their trip.

It’s not easy. White people will put up photos, wear local clothing from their trip, and do whatever they can to induce someone to ask them about their recent travel. It would be so much easier if they could just bring the subject up themselves, but if a white person attempts to steer a conversation toward their journeys too often, they will seem pretentious. While this is accurate, being thought of as pretentious by people who are already pretentious is pretty awful. It’s like a group of very smelly people giving you a stick of deodorant for your birthday.

So to combat this problem, white people have plunged headfirst into world music. If they play it loud enough at work or at a dinner party, people are almost guaranteed to say, “Who is this?” To which the white person
can say, “You know, when I was in Bolivia, I really got into this flute music. I got this CD from a group of musicians on the streets of La Paz.”

Another benefit that white people can glean from world music is that it gives them a new country to care about politically. Knowing that their world music has a political angle will force white people to do research into what has spurred on this furious bongo solo.

Becoming a successful artist often takes years of training and study, something that white people are fully capable of doing. It also requires a degree of ability and talent, which is something that white people are capable of believing that they possess innately, even though that probably isn’t true. But that doesn’t stop them in their need to be seen as creative. What they need is some sort of system whereby they do not need any actual talent but can still create something that is considered to be artistic.

Photography!

For a photograph to be considered art, a white person need only take a blurry picture of a skyline, blow it up, then mount it to their wall. If they take the same photo with a vintage camera, specifically a Leica, then it is groundbreaking.

This need to create art by simply pushing a button has spawned one of the most popular iPhone applications in history: Hipstamatic. It gives white people all the effect of shooting something with a vintage camera without all the mess of developing film or actually having to own a vintage camera. Now a white person can take a picture of their friend looking
out the window of a bus or a train and it doesn’t look pretentious. Well, it still looks pretentious but at least it looks vintage pretentious, which is often known in white circles as “the good kind.”

In addition to this artistic photography, white people have also started to take pictures of their food before they eat it. Some white people do this as a spiritual tribute to the food they are about to eat, but most white people do it so that they can post to Facebook or Twitter and prove to their friends that they ate from a cool food truck before it became too popular.

Another possible reason why white people over thirty take so many pictures of their food is that once white people cross the thirty-year mark, they replace their passionate knowledge of indie bands with an equally passionate and judgmental attitude toward restaurants. So instead of sharing photos of themselves at a Bon Iver concert, they much prefer to look at plates featuring foie gras.

Regardless of the reason behind the photography, white people will keep doing it till their dying breath. Some will try to get a small amount of Internet fame by taking a picture of themselves or their child every day for a few years, while others will simply continue with food photography. It should be noted that the most advanced of these white photographers will often brag that their Creative Commons–licensed photographs have been featured on a site that ends in
-ist
.

Do not bother asking if they were paid for their photos. The answer is always “No … not yet.”

It’s not exactly a secret that white people are strongly antiwar. They have been against all forms of armed conflict since the end of World War II. Since then, just take a look at any antiwar protest and you are virtually guaranteed to see a throng of white people with elaborate and clever signs stating their displeasure with the current government and its war.

For the most part, when white people are discussing war they are speaking to other white people who already agree with them. So rather than having to engage in a debate about the need for armed conflict, they can simply pat themselves on the back for being opposed to the war and then throw out some information about Halliburton or Kellogg Brown & Root. These are known as “serious talks” and when they are finished everyone feels good about themselves and their beliefs.

But from time to time white people find themselves in one of the most awkward situations they will ever face: criticizing the war in front of someone who has a child in the military.

This often comes about when white people make the assumption that everyone around them is exactly the same as them. Additionally, most white people operate under the assumption that the last white person to serve in the military was John Kerry.

Faced with the twin problems of having directly insulted someone’s child and potentially being forced to admit they were wrong, white people needed a solution. That solution was to say that they support the troops and not the war.

Technically this is an entirely new insult that implies that the troops are dying for nothing. It provides enough cover for white people to assume that they are still liked by the military person that they just insulted. Whether it’s actually true is completely irrelevant.

But before you let your anger build up toward these white people, remember that this really isn’t their fault. When white people say they support the troops and not the war, they are actually saying that they support spending time and money training the troops for combat, but that they also support never actually using them in real-life conflict. To you it might seem silly to spend all this energy learning skills that you’ll never use, but the truth is that white people have been supporting a system like this for years. It’s known as a liberal arts education.