It is a known fact that white people consume, on average 25 different teas in a given year.
Back in the old days, white people would go all over the world to get teas from places like India and Sri Lanka. They were pretty into it and all of a sudden white people are into tea. But as we moved forward, white people were like “man, one kind of tea is not enough, we need more.”
And now people are into Green Tea, Chamomile, Chai, White Tea, Red Tea, Jasmine Tea, Oolong Tea, Black Tea, Orange Pekoe, and other specialty blends. They are even opening stores and websites devoted to sending white people all sorts of tea.
If you find yourself in a situation with a white person, acceptable things to say include “I’m really into tea right now,” or “my favorite thing is to get a nice cup of tea and curl up in a chair with a good book.” But do not remind them about the role of colonialism in tea, it will make them feel sad.
Could not be more true. There are at least 20 kinds of tea at my house. I also know several white people who have given tea gift packs too other white people
I pooped my pants
Crap. I’m so whitified.
[...] found myself agreeing with a lot - particularly the stuff about natural ‘medicine’ and tea, and distinctly uncomfortable over the [...]
Orange Pekoe is just a grade of black tea. There is no orange in it. Chai literally means ‘tea’; spiced Indian tea is called ‘masala chai.’
Real tea snobs are like wine-drinkers, they not only know how tea is made white/green/black/oolong, they are familiar with tea-growing regions and may even buy from specific estates. They might also drink teas in the ‘proper’ regional way: drinking green straight on tatami they installed in their home for just this purpose, or taking 30 minutes to make masala chai from whole spices ground with a mortar and pestle.
It’s a lot like drinking soda, except it takes longer and they can feel cultured.
[...] Tea: Back in the old days, white people would go all over the world to get teas from places like India and Sri Lanka… But as we moved forward, white people were like “man, one kind of tea is not enough, we need more.” And now people are into Green Tea, Chamomile, Chai, White Tea, Red Tea, Jasmine Tea, Oolong Tea, Black Tea, Orange Pekoe… do not remind them about the role of colonialism in tea, it will make them feel sad. [Link] [...]
as an indian, i love my tea and do take the full 10 to 15 minutes to grind spices to make my morning tea. and yes, it is called chai. and it is made of the orange pekoe tea leaves.
but the white people who scoff at putting milk and sugar in tea… now they are the real problem.
why i ’scoff at putting milk and sugar in tea’:
i generally dont drink black tea (aka most european & south asian teas), and when you drink asian teas (aka from china or japan) you dont put milk or sugar in the tea, unless you’re a dumb white person, though i guess u could be a dumb person of any color.
I might be white and not know it. I like 39 things on this blog so far…and I just ordered six packs of specialty tea from Amazon.com.
What I really hate are white people who shun coffee, but drink tea by the gallon. I’ll only drink tea if I’m in an ethnic restaurant that doesn’t have any coffee, then later make a trip to a Cuban cafetería to grab a condensed shot of #1 on your list.
stuffblackpeoplelike - eating watermelon! hahaha!!!
stuffarabpeoplelike - pumping oil! hahaha!!!
stuffblackpeoplelike - gang warfare! hahaha!!!
stuffmexicanpeoplelike - eating beans! hahaha!!!
stuffchinesepeoplelike - shooting heroin! hahaha!!!
stuffblackpeoplelike - welfare! hahaha!!!
stuffjewishpeoplelike - keeping money! hahaha!!!
stuffmexicanpeoplelike - wearing sombreros! hahaha!!!
stuffchinesepeoplelike - eating rice! hahaha!!!
stuffarabpeoplelike - kissing goats! hahaha!!!
stuffmexicanpeoplelike - wearing sombreros! hahaha!!!
stuffblackpeoplelike - sniffing glue! hahaha!!!
aren’t i funny and clever!!!
don’t you dare call me a racist!!!
I like eating rice, wearing sombreros and money….The glue have me a headache….
Sugar and milk in tea? Blasphemy!
“Sugar and milk in tea? Blasphemy!”
Not where I come from. Without milk and Sugar it is not Tea. Just ask our Colonial Forefathers ‘Da Brits’.
I’m white and I probably only drink 2 or 3 different kinds. I will flog myself with a teabag for not being cool enough to be accepted into your particular group.
Coffee and black tea need sugar to me.
Raw sugar is da best.
But, I like cow milk too
in a tall glass
and strong ginger beer
and birch beer too
tea is OK, but
nothing beats a Coca Cola
made with real cane sugar
I like the way
it dissolves my teeth
removes stains or
cleans the toilet bowl
Now, that’s good stuff.
The worse part is that white people like to OVER steep their tea! Come on man - there is an art to drinking tea.
BTW, I can say this b/c I’m Asian.
Everyone likes drinking tea. wtf.
Too spot on…
So true. I likes a tea sometimes, but loves me coffee more, arrrghhh
I love tea - but that has probably has more to do with my being from England. I reckon this must make me super white and imperialistic.
My family drinks tea religiously. One cup in the morning, one cup after dinner, one cup before bed. During the winter, we’ll have several more cups a day in between. And it’s always Lipton black with milk and two teaspoons of sugar. I’ve also branched out to Earl Grey and Irish Breakfast, but my parents stick to Lipton.
Lipton is horrible! I don’t like Earl Grey ’cause I can’t stand the taste of bergamot. Breakfast tea is good, but my favorite is Jasmine Blossom (green tea.)
i love lipton tea with 2 spoons of sugar , and sometimes im adding condensed milk in tea , we called it milk tea .
i’m from Malaysia and our favorite is “teh tarik”at the mamak stall.
Classic!
Oolong ftw. White people are “into” tea one of two ways: 1. To demonstrate how down they are with Eastern cultures (see also: shops at Teavana). 2. To demonstrate how rarefied and English they are, just havin a cuppa, yeah?
It’s the equivalent of having been to Prague so you come back drinking stupid beer in order to remind everyone you were abroad.
I think white people love fishing. Actually the world over loves fishing, its a lovely activity. What white people really love is catch-and-release fishing. Thats where you spend a fortune on gear, like waders, a fly-rod, and a vest, then only fish topwater cause its harder, and when you finally catch a stocked fish in an overfished strech of private water under the tender tutalage of your personal guide, you gently caress the fish without lifting it from its home, then let it off the barbless hook unharmed. No messy eating of the fish later to add guilt, revulsion, or PCBs to the process.
I’m a serious contender for coolest white person ever. Drinking tea just solidifies it. I buy tea at Tea Source instead of Teavana and in addition to having traditional Western tea accoutrements, I have a Chinese tea set that is very cool because it was brought here in the 70’s, not made for recent export.
Check. I’m white.
(Hats off to whoever figured out how to market green tea to Americans. It tastes like grass, but now it’s everywhere!)
You should use semicolons.
check “The Third Man” by Graham Greene (also a celebrated Orson Welles film - there’s my caucasian film snob coming out again) - it’s a noir crime thriller set in Vienna after WWII, and there’s a young czech actress who is absolutely mystified by her limey fans’ tendency to send her presents consisting of different varieties of tea; she would prefer flowers, of course. So you see, the tea thing is not merely a “white” thing, but it’s actually an “uber white” thing - we anglo saxons can out-white all the rest of you milquetoast, lily livered “white” people any day.
Guilty as charged. I love tea and we have about a dozen different kinds. However, I do have to defend myself and the happy hubby in that coffee is too strong and doesn’t sit well with us. So what to do about the caffeine fix? And hot bevs in the winter?
You can’t lay all this at our door, most cultures love their tea as well, but I guess we are guilty having the extreme number of different kinds. Fun blog. LMAO.
[...] tea [...]
Bonus points if you prepare it by putting whole leaves into a mesh stainless steel ball and dropping it into a cup. Or any non-traditional contraption will do. If you must use tea in individual “flo-thru” bags, they should be those triangular silk bags with whole leaves.
Teas of this variety can be found at usual suspect stores like Williams-Sonoma or Cost Plus World Market. Don’t pay any less than $5.95 a box.
This is so true! I am white but I LOVE tea. Black tea more specifically, not that semi-fermented, overpriced, green stuff.
I drink a lot of beer and something about tea would always help chase my hangover away quicker the next day, after doing some research I found out its not my perception: tea helps prevent some damage to the liver from alcohol, among many other health benefits.
Tea is so much better for your than coffee and the buzz, although it takes longer to get to, is awesome. Its really like an antidepressant I’d imagine. Sure you’ll have to pee a lot to get to this buzzed state but when you do you’ll feel “high on life”.
Iced-tea with lemon is “da bomb”.
My British father hates tea (blasphemy I know!), while my African mother and all my siblings LOVE tea.
..as I slowly sip my Chai…
Liar!! Racist!!!
…mmmmm… multicultural beverage… I’m so enlightened
@21 Pina
In response. You nailed me; but, seriously, once you’ve to Prague, how on Earth can you be expected to drink a Coors Light?
While at work listening to NPR on my computer and reading this blog, I overheard a lesbian-looking (no makeup, bad haircut, thick rimmed glasses, baggy dress and married…. maybe this should be a white person thing too) saying to someone, “I just put on a pot of Pomegranate Tea!”
The timing was too perfect!
RE: “no makeup, bad haircut, thick rimmed glasses, baggy dress and married…. ”
Ah, I can almost smell the patchouli now!
(Sounds like Becky Fischer in “Jesus Camp”
colonialism does make me feel sad. please don’t bring it up. *sigh* back to my soy chai latte.
Darn, all this tea stuff is making me crave a cuppa - off to get one!
guilt as charged…..actually had friends (one white and one Korean) over last night and had quite a few different teas to offer them.
I’m black and love tea….it’s a running joke in my family about how “white” I am!
Someone on here mentioned iced tea. Erm, hello?!
Iced tea ought to be classified as anti-tea. I think the only place you can buy it is the USA.
If you were to ask for iced tea in most places in England, you’d be either laughed at or sectioned in a psychiatric unit, due to your obvious mental health problems.
England drinks a lot of tea, but usually of the black variety. I suppose that is down to our colonial past, and the number of tea plantations we erected in India and Sri Lanka. Hundreds of years ago (in 1658, to be precise) London was opening it’s first tea houses. Originally, the vast bulk of tea was imported from China, but as the East India Company’s tea nursery in Assam grew more plants, imports changed. By 1888 British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.
In 1851, when virtually all tea in Britain had come from China, annual consumption per head was less than 2lbs. Bt 1901, fuelled by cheaper imports from India and Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), another British colony, this had rocketed to over 6lbs per head. Tea had become firmly established as part of the British way of life.
What you might be able to start to understand from this is that more than one type of tea is not a middle-class nonsense - if you really are a tea drinker, you’ll know your Assam from your Darjeeling from your Ceylon from your blends (such as Earl Grey, my favourite).
You can only get iced tea in America because it ORIGINATED in America. At the turn of the last century. Some dude at the World Fair was trying to sell tea in the summertime, and nobody would buy it because it was very hot out. So he got desperate and dumped it over ice. Voila, people bought it.
I prefer to think of it as a ‘uniquely American’ beverage rather than ’some horrible bastardization of proper tea’. Although the damn Northerners up here don’t know how to make proper iced tea; it is not sweet enough.
Tea is the greatest drink on earth: left to mash until you can stand your spoon in it, a splash of milk, then you have Nirvana in a mug.
And if you’re lucky it’ll be Yorkshire Tea: like tea used to be
Reight, I’m off to set t’ferret down t’rabbit oil.
English_Tea,
This is where you proved your whiteness moreso than me if there are varying degrees of it. Like I said I drink tea for it’s homepathic remedies. So whether it is considered uncouth in certain circles if it is iced or not is not of concern to me. I enjoy cold beverages and iced tea is fantastic*.
*But not that sweet-tea shit. Leave it to the south to take a very healthy product and F it all up by adding too much sugar or frying it. I’d bet they would deep fry tea too if they could.
Actually sweet tea “made with too much sugar” is not proper sweet tea. The tea is usually made sweet during the boiling/steeping process. “Sweet tea” that is just normally brewed tea with more sugar added after it is chilled tastes wrong to most Southerners accustomed to the beverage.
English_Tea,
This is where you proved your whiteness moreso than me if there are varying degrees of it. Like I said I drink tea for it’s homeopathic remedies. So whether it is considered uncouth in certain circles if it is iced or not is not of concern to me. I enjoy cold beverages and iced tea is fantastic*.
*But not that sweet-tea shit. Leave it to the south to take a very healthy product and F it all up by adding too much sugar or frying it. I’d bet they would deep fry tea too if they could.
Also don’t remind them that the purchase of any Lipton tea ends up propagating the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil in Sri Lanka, they don’t want to think about that.
Yeah cause those Two Billion people that make up India and China absolutely hate tea.
I find it alarming that there are people agreeing with these outrageous generalizations. Are there really that many uninformed American morons out there?
you better believe it…..
Tea is my favorite gift and I have 9437593475 kinds in my office desk!
I really enjoyed this post, until the last sentence, which made me feel sad.
sorry joannawashere, but coffee is horrible!
I usually have my Bodum strainer and no less than 2 bags of looseleaf at my desk at work. Currently drinking Silver Needle Jasmine.
White people also like referencing others - especially celebs - who drink tea, for two reasons. 1) to name-drop, and 2) to let listeners know they are in the know about the significance of tea, and its superiority to other hot sipping beverages. I met a C-list actor once who needed me to know Liam Neeson was a casual acqaunitance of his. When we crackers were talking about tea after dinner, he slides into the conversation, “blah blah blah… herbal tea is wonderful… Oh sure, absolutely - Liam and Natasha drink tea…Absolutely they do…” I use that phrase all the time now about Liam and Natasha. It’s great.
Damn. I’m brown and I LOVE tea. I but it from WHOLE FOODS (where I also buy my organic tomatoes for $6 a pound) and also at Harney and Sons. Does this make me a ding dong?
Dude, everyone but maybe the blacks loves tea. When you go to a “white” restaurant you don’t get tea, but if you go to a Chinese restaurant, tea is already on the table. So who loves tea again?
Maybe if you’d said ICED tea you could have had a point.
Why do people leave really serious comments on this site? I thought it was supposed to be funny.. and everyone is crapping their pants over stupid things.
I’m asian, but… I’m a stereotypical white according to everything on this website. Ahh.
“It is a known fact that white people consume, on average 25 different teas in a given year.”
76% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
you know who else likes tea? non- whites!!! holy crap!!!
the more of these I read, the dumber and dumber they, and I, get. this person has way too much time on there hands, and I’m ashamed i even spent time reading this garbage
Asians love green tea, black people love koolaid, hispanics love goya, live with it. British love Earl Gray. My whiteness loves rasberry, stawberry, lemon, and sometimes I’ll drink green tea. But mainly drink tea when Im sick, cause it helps… Its cheaper than robitusin.
This list seems more like its all stuff that other races specifically don’t like…thats kinda garbage
http://www.garbarrassing.com
for funny stuff that everyone likes…
Moby likes tea, lots of different kinds of tea
and
OMG he’s white too!
I wonder if he likes Mos Def.
[...] horror that I must be a “whitened” Asian - guilty of quite a few things on that list. (tea, yoga, traveling, indie music, Juno, Arts degrees, t-shirts, living by the water, etc.) Not good! [...]
I’m sorry Joanna, but coffee tastes like ass and tea is a tolerable way to take in caffeine.
If you hate me, thats fine. I hate people with coffee breath.
I hate tea so much! i must not be white
I like the very British way of making tea, with it brewing so long that the teaspoon stands up in it, then a dash of milk and two sugars.
But I also like all those fancy green-chai-white-everything else kinds.
As a kid I always preferred water to the teas offered at Chinese restaurants, especially when the food is soooo spicey! Now that I’m older…. I interned at this major company once. They offered a large selection of teas. I tried them all… I didn’t like any of them… they put too much stuff in them! Some don’t actually have tea leaves in them!! I stuck to green tea for a while… good for you…energy, that sort of thing. A while ago I sat down with my parents at a Chinese restaurant…and had the tea. I actually liked the taste and sort of missed it. I asked what it was… Oolong. I drink a cup every morning. I prefer it to coffee… too strong, have to take it with cream and sugar. Tastes great with oily salty foods.
Milk tea with tapioca balls!! with chocolate too! White folks anyone??? Tapioca Express kicks Starbuck’s butt!