culture

A particularly striking iteration of this phenomenon is a widely shared 2021 musical comedy sketch by the comedian Bo Burnham, entitled “A White Woman’s Instagram.” The skit pokes fun at a certain kind of female Instagram user who likes to post lots of photos of herself and various visually pleasing things — avocados, coffee tables, “A dreamcatcher bought from Urban Outfitters / A vintage neon sign” — along with corny inspirational quotes. It’s a relatively gentle send-up: a poignant segment in the middle of the song makes reference to the anniversary of the death of a parent, hinting disarmingly that the therapeutic benefits of social media use might outweigh the cringe factor. But it’s unclear why Burnham, who is white, feels the need to emphasize that the type of woman he is satirizing is white. Many non-white women also post similar content, so what function does the “white” serve here? It appears to be a sort of built-in insurance policy: perhaps anxious that his caricature of vapid, preening online narcissism might be perceived as sexist by the liberals who comprise his target audience, Burnham immunizes himself against this charge by maintaining that he is on about white women specifically, which implies he is in fact performing some kind of racial satire.

To the extent that one can even parse the satirical point being made here, it seems to go something like this: white people, because they are more coddled and complacent than non-white people, are more prone to indulging in vain, shallow and frivolous pursuits, which deserve to be mocked as manifestations of their racial privilege. But the behavior being cited as inherently white – purely by virtue of being banal and stereotypical – is actually fairly universal, which prompts the question: why link it to whiteness at all? [ . . . ]

What’s the motivating impulse here? It’s probably a mix of things. On the one hand, there’s a well-intentioned desire on the part of the speaker to differentiate themselves from the kind of white person who isn’t sufficiently aware of, or sensitive to, structural racial inequalities — to signal, essentially, that they’re one of the good guys, and that their awareness of the bigger picture is informing their thinking at all times. But this bleeds into another, rather less admirable motivation: a domineering compulsion to lay claim to the moral high-ground at all costs, even if it means resorting to the manifestly ludicrous strategy of belittling your target on the grounds that they are the same race as you.

Houman Barekat on white people accusing each other of whiteness.

But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” [ . . . ]

For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact IS the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the West coast and brought Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier, the fact that for continued life the violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give him this right–if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is given some thing he has a right to be given.

Judith Jarvis Thomson on violinists.

(Now also in convenient video form! Albeit with a mild content warning for, aside from the obvious, a video made by someone pre-transition.)

(Second aside: Thomson’s article, from 1971, is not actually unambiguously pro-choice in the modern sense. And yet . . .)

In the midst of various socioeconomic crises of climate, housing, and bills, working-class people are often moralized to about what they should and shouldn’t consume: buy organic, ditch plastic, stop flying, go vegan, cancel Netflix to buy a house, buy less stuff! At the same, billionaires travel in private jets and carbon-intensive superyachts. The highly publicized polluting conspicuous consumption of the elite is a perverse joke to most of us. With our purchasing power diminished and culture eroded, this is clearly not a state of affairs many people are willing to abide.

On consumption.