The White Guy: A Field Guide

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Do British White Guys wear the best suits on earth or do they just have the best posture? What is it with White Guys and their obsessions with lawns? Who is the whitest White Guy in the history of television—Archie Bunker, Joe Friday, or Homer Simpson? These and a thousand other white-hot questions like this are asked and answered by playwright, entertainment reporter, and dancing robot in a Rob Zombie video Stephen Hunt. Hunt was born White in a White-dominated city (Winnipeg) and didn’t feel too bad about it until he went to university and discovered White Guys “were the problem with everything.” Then he happened to marry an African American woman and discovered “we often experience two completely different versions of reality, often at the exact same moment, side by side on the couch watching the very same Friends rerun.”

This prompted Hunt to contemplate his Whiteness instead of just taking it for granted as he had for most of his life. His conclusions became The White Guy, a one-man play that explored White Guyness in seven acts. The play was considered witty and important enough for the rights to be bought by Quincy Jones, the same non-white guy who produced both actor Will Smith’s Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Michael Jackson’s video for “Thriller.” After success at the box office, Hunt decided to expand his play into a book, and the result is this witty and often acerbic look at White Guys and what they say, think, and do.

Chapters include “Clothes or Plumage,” “Cuisine of the White Male,” “Mood-Altering Substances,” “Habitat or Home and Hearth,” “Spiritual Beliefs or Things That Matter Most,” “Emotional Life,” “Mating Habits,” “White Guy Culture,” “The Pursuit of Excellence versus the New Mediocrity,” “The White Guy in Human History,” “Political Systems or Notes on Our Three-Thousand Year Winning Streak,” “White Guys Around the World,” “Twenty-First Century White Guy,” and “Optional Ending for People Who Don’t Have Time to Read the Whole Book.”

Besides traditional chapters, Hunt employs humorous footnotes, top 10 lists, and other literary devices to get his hilarious and often thought-provoking points across. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that Hunt manages to keep his skewers sharp from first to last page and he manages to jab them in without being preachy, accusatory, or cruel. Most White Guys would be astonished to learn how funny they actually are. Fortunately, one of our own is tipping us off before the rest of the world notices.