Racism without Hatred? Racist Humor and the Myth of “Colorblindness”

Abstract

Critical Race scholars contend that the current period of “race relations” is dominated by a “color-blind” racial ideology. Scholars maintain that although individuals continue to hold conventional racial views, today people tend to minimize overt racial discourse and direct racial language in public to avoid the stigma of racism. This essay identifies racist humor as a discourse that challenges such constraints on public racist discourse, often derided as “political correctness,” in ways that reinforce everyday and systemic forms of racism in an ostensibly color-blind society. While humor research generally highlights the “positive” aspects of social humor and celebrates the possibilities of humor to challenge and subvert dominant racial meanings, the “negative” aspects of racist humor are often overlooked, downplayed, or are viewed as extreme and fringe incidents that occur at the periphery of mainstream society. Moreover, race scholars have largely ignored the role of humor as a “serious” site for the reproduction and circulation of racism in society. I contend that in a post-civil-rights and color-blind society, where overt racist discourse became disavowed in public, racist humor allows interlocutors to foster social relations by partaking in the “forbidden fruit” of racist discourse. In this article, I highlight the (re)circulation of racist jokes across three social contexts (in mass market joke books, on the Internet, and in the criminal justice system), to illustrate that racist humor exists not in a bygone past or at the margins of society but is widely practiced and circulated today across various social contexts and institutions in an ostensibly color-blind society.