Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!ncsuvx!mcnc!ecsvax!skyler
From: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Racist Jokes
Message-ID: <5884@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 20 Nov 88 21:32:05 GMT
Reply-To: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts)
Distribution: na
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 61


I have long been deeply troubled by racist jokes.  I think it started
when _All in the Family_ was on.  Obviously, you were supposed to laugh
at Archie's ignorance, but I knew people who loved the show because they
loved to hear the things that Archie said--they identified with him.

My father loves racist jokes.  He justifies it by saying that he's racist
about everybody.  I don't know how much a justification that is (and I've
never heard him tell a racist joke about the Welsh) but I do know that he
has an exemplary record for hiring women and minorities, never blinked about
his daughter marrying/dating any particular race, and he even married an
Irish Catholic.  One of my sisters loves racist jokes.  She is racist.  All
of her friends are as WASP as she can find.  In other words, her racism
is real, insidious, and disgusting.  I don't know if my father is racist
or not, but I know that he is less racist than my sister and that it is
less destructive.  And I do know that you can't tell the difference by the jokes
they tell.

Humor is used in many different ways.  Sometimes, it expresses hatred or
contempt. Sometimes, it reinforces negative stereotypes.  Sometimes, it is
used to make some people feel uncomfortable, alien, or powerless.  Sometimes, it
is used to release tension about difficult issues.  But, I would argue,
the same joke could be used in different ways.  

In a sense, it's as though Brad has a group with a whole lot of clubs in
it.  Some people are going to pick up one or two clubs and try to hit someone
else with them.  Some people are going to use them to defend themselves.
Some people are going to look carefully at those clubs and learn a lot about
our culture.  

I happen to think that rape jokes are NOT FUNNY.  I feel the same way about
Ethiopian starvation jokes, dead baby jokes, and Holocaust jokes.  But I
can't pretend that those jokes don't exist, and I must admit that we can
learn a lot from those jokes.  (There have, for example, been some really
fascinating studies of rape jokes which came up with very persuasive
conclusions.)  It seems to me that rather than trying to intimidate Brad
into restricting jokes to ones which cannot offend anyone (and, by the way,
I couldn't come up with a single one) the people who are offended should
try to discuss it (in rec.humor-d) and should tell lots of jokes about
racists.  

A friend of mine was the only woman at a meeting.  Before the meeting
started, some men started telling rape jokes, bimbo-woman jokes, and
various other things which were almost certainly expressing their discomfort
about having a woman there and, perhaps, attempting to intimidate her.  She
simply dropped into conversation a recent study she had read about rape jokes
and about how sometimes men try to use them to make women feel uncomfortable.
The men fell over themselves saying they didn't think that was true, they could
never imagine doing that, some of their best friends were women, and so on.
It was the end of the jokes, and (perhaps) the beginning of some of those
men being slightly more aware of "women's issues."  Had she kept her head
buried in the sand about rape jokes, she wouldn't have known what to do.  Had
she ranted and raved at them, they would have decided she was on the rag.
But, what she did was effective, gave them a way out, and, I think, showed
a pretty good sense of humor.

-- 
====================================================================
-Trish 					 "No one ever told us
					  we had to study our lives..."
skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu                                    -A. Rich