From what I can tell, OkTrends is a website run by the people in charge of OkCupid. On OkTrends, these people post the results of research performed on various OkCupid user profiles in order to, say, give advice on how to take a personal picture, or how to write a first message to another user you find interesting. I don't care about most of this, since I'm not involved in the online dating scene (LOSERS), but one entry I was linked to, and one entry I find absolutely fascinating, is this one, entitled The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'.
In this study, 526,000 OkCupid profiles were selected at random and grouped by race. After grouping, the profiles were analyzed for particular keywords or phrases most specific to that race. In their words:
For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.
It's an exercise in determining what interests or descriptions or what have you are most racially distinct. Racial groups included were white, black, Latino, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Pacific islander. I won't keep you any longer. The best result, and the only result worth discussing on a baseball blog:
Single white dudes like the Red Sox. Single white chicks fuckin love the Red Sox. And remember, this isn't like "oh white people like the Red Sox, but black people and Indian people and Asian people like the Red Sox too." No, this is "liking the Red Sox might be the lonely white person's single most racially distinguishing characteristic." At least based on the OkCupid sample size, which is pretty big.
Maybe it isn't totally right to break this down by gender. After all, we can't tell from this whether single white ladies like the Red Sox, or if they're playing it up to appeal to single white dudes who like the Red Sox. What matters most is that single white people can't seem to help talking about the Red Sox. They either really like the Red Sox, or they want to get the attention of a mate by saying they really like the Red Sox.
Note that the only other specific baseball team mentioned was the Yankees, who show up about halfway down for white chicks and Latinas. That's significant on its own, but it's not nearly as significant as the whole Red Sox thing.
There are a lot of ways you could go with this, but I prefer to let it stand as is. In closing, remember: as much as you might associate liking Tom Clancy and Phish and whatever Jodi Picoult is as being classically single and white, there may be nothing whiter, and nothing more lonely, than rooting for the Red Sox.