great piece, gary! you put your finger on some things that had been irking me about that site, but which i myself hadn't been able to articulate. there's something far too easy about that kind of "self"-critique. perhaps what bugs me most about it, tho, is that even as it deconstructs itself with its own absurd banality and generality, it also seems to uphold racial difference more than subvert it. or at least, i suspect that's what a lot of people who enjoy the site find pleasurable: a flash of (racial?) recognition in shared consumption patterns (which is a lot more about class than race). we interpellate ourselves! (hey whitey! high five! indeed.)

but, likewise, one thing that caught me up while reading your critique was your own use of "race" in a way that seemed more reified than we should really (responsibly) be talking about it at this point. (something i find echoed in, say, gov richardson's endorsment of obama today: "Senator Obama has started a discussion in this country long overdue and rejects the politics of pitting race against race.") when you write, that the site joins others in "play[ing] on some or another aspect of their race for smug fun and profit," you seem to construct a "white race" in opposition to other "races," and that seems like a problem, like something that gets in the way of actually thinking through race as an ideological rather than inherent part of who we are. i don't want to rehash the essentialist, anti-essentialst, anti-anti-essentialist debates of 90s black cult studs here, and I do recognize that race can be as real as it is fictive, but discursively speaking (how else?), i think we would do well to be more careful with how we use the term race. as an abstract, ideologically-infused word that speciously divides people up based on phenotype, yes; as a stable-seeming term for describing different groups of real people, no.

don't mean to sound cranky or naive, but seeing you use the term in the latter manner sorta tripped me up.

I really liked the article, thanks for linking to it. I linked to it also from my blog (directly - hope that is okay. You are on my blogroll also.)

I'm a smidge late, but I'm glad this is out there. My cousin told me about STEBPL, and she seemed tickled. It sounded trite to me. Surfed to the original site, and was similarly unimpressed.

I'm working on getting the chops up to say why, like you and other productive bloggers do. LOL

i hate that because some pretentious person finds it trite, no one else should like it.

ugh. whatevs.