Two recently published books suggest that white males are starting to reflect on their identity. (Getty Images)I have a Caucasian male acquaintance with whom I enjoy a friendly rapport. We don’t agree on everything, mind you, but there’s a lightheartedness and a respect to our interactions. Philosophy, world events and personal politics are all fair game, and the banter is interesting and thought-provoking and rarely gets too heated.

So I must say that I was taken aback a few years ago when, during one exchange, he made a statement that continues to strike me as ludicrous. “You know,” he said, earnestly, “I’m glad I’m a white guy. I don’t have to think about my identity.”

There are a few ways that a person of colour with a women’s studies degree could approach that statement. There’s anger: Of course white men don’t have to think about their identity. The world revolves around their identity and the rest of us have to deal with it. There’s hilarity: You don’t think about your identity? Like, ever? And, if you’re a bit of a softie like me, there’s sympathy: Perhaps white guys wouldn’t make so many heinous mistakes (like naming sports teams after people whose land they stole) if they just sat on the couch now and then and thought about who they are.

(Random House Canada) If my acquaintance changes his mind, he'll find he's not alone in wrestling with his identity. Two recent books have chosen to probe what it means to be Caucasian: Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like and Stephen Hunt’s The White Guy: A Field Guide. You’re likely familiar with the former, as it was a pretty rampant internet meme this year: It’s a numbered list of activities, objects and preferences that Lander and his cohorts see as humorous markers of whiteness (such as expensive sandwiches, documentaries and eating outside).

Each book suggests that its white male author is waking up to the historical context of being white and male, and trying to work out the baggage of his historical dominance. Since the current cultural mood is satirical, neither book adopts a serious tone: Lander and Hunt take their journeys through whiteness with tongues lodged in cheek.

While the irony is initially amusing, the end result is that neither book digs deeply or truly enough into either author’s psyche to be meaningful.

Lander, a Los Angeles-dwelling Toronto expat, started the Stuff White People Like blog on Jan. 18, 2008 with the entry Coffee : “Yes, it’s true that Asians like iced coffee and people of all races enjoy it. But I promise you that the first person at your school to drink coffee was a white person.” The site soon began attracting serious traffic; by March, some posts were getting more than 1,000 comments.

Certain entries did make me laugh, such as No. 11, Asian Girls : “Ninety-five per cent of white males have, at one point in their lives, experienced yellow fever.” A riot, since every woman of colour has encountered a white man whose interest obviously runs only skin deep. White people have been treating the rest of us like the anthropological Other for centuries, and it was refreshingly funny to see that turned around. Random House apparently felt the same way and Lander quickly had himself a book deal.

Stephen Hunt might be a bit peeved about all of this, since he’s been honing his own White Guy act for years. The White Guy: A Field Guide — as Hunt tells us repeatedly through the course of its 13 chapters — started as a standup comedy routine. It then became a TV show pilot that was bought by Quincy Jones for $35,000 US but never panned out.

Author Christian Lander lives the white-guy stereotype. (Jess Lander/Random House Canada) Hunt’s book is more personal than Lander’s, documenting his whiteness through his childhood and adolescence in Winnipeg, various career moves and eventual marriage to a U.S.-born actress. He talks about having an identity crisis in his 20s when a successful lawyer girlfriend out-earned him, and pinpoints his increasing interest in his lawn as a true sign of his aging white man-ness. This personal information would make the book more meaty if it weren’t for a stream-of-consciousness writing style that leads to annoying repetition and far too many silly, glib statements.

Generally, Hunt and Lander come to many of the same conclusions: White people like dogs, downloading music, spending money on status symbols and taking holidays in which they have to exert themselves in the outdoors. This last preference stems from the fact that their lives are generally easy, as they run everything and make a lot of money doing so. Their ancestors were also busy running everything, which is why they didn’t have time to develop a sense of fashion or ability to dance. To redress this imbalance, today’s white person spends a lot of energy trying to be cool, which involves a devotion to obscure art and movies and experimenting with ethnic food.

What changes have white guys experienced in recent years to prompt these self-revelations?

It could be that on a middle-class cultural level – in North America at least – the white male is seeing his dominance challenged by educated, sophisticated women and people of colour. The entertainment industry is definitely showing the shift: There’s Oprah, of course, but the Forbes list of powerful celebrities is cluttered with black and Latino athletes, musicians and movie stars. Will Smith is a bigger box office draw than his BFF Tom Cruise, and Canada's Sandra Oh has a leading role on one of network television's biggest shows, after years of marginalization in Hollywood because she wasn't white.

On a domestic level, 30 per cent of Canadian wives and 40 per cent of married women in the U.S. and the U.K. now earn more than their husbands. According to the New York Times Magazine (entry No. 46 in Lander’s book), educated (white, according to the photos) women continue to delay having families, and they’re increasingly doing it on their own, or with gay male friends. Oh, and since both Stuff White People Like and The White Guy refer almost entirely to straight people, I’ll mention gay marriage as another dent in the armour of what women’s studies majors once called The Patriarchy.

(Douglas & McIntyre) The middle-class white guy grew up absorbing messages and symbols that promised him The Patriarchy would one day take him under its stern but successful wing. But he's seen that security eroded in the last decade or so. It’s the kind of thing that prompts serious soul-searching, perhaps even a collective identity crisis. Hunt repeatedly mentions his African-American wife, Melanee, as a trigger for his self-reflection. The whole opposites-attract thing can be really hot, but also really complicated, integrating cultures and respecting differences and all. Sometimes, introspection is kick-started by love.

I know that both of these books were meant to be humorous, but I soon became irritated with both Hunt and Lander’s knee-jerk stereotypes — of white people. Both of them are referring specifically to straight, university-educated, middle- or upper-middle-class white people who live in large urban centres. By ignoring poor and working-class white people, gay white people, rural white people and so on, these authors are performing the same frustrating pseudo-anthropology that they’re attempting to mock, applying the same technique of sweeping generalizations to themselves that they’ve been slapping on the rest of us.

The White Guy is just as much a myth as the Angry Black Man or the Subservient Asian Woman. Instead of pontificating in that oh-so-white-guy way, maybe it’s time for Hunt and Lander to sit quietly on the couch for a bit and think about their own, one-of-a-kind identities.

Stuff White People Like and The White Guy: A Field Guide are in stores now.

Denise Balkissoon is a writer based in Toronto.