The thesis of this book is rather straightforward and is pretty much contained in the title. Raúl Pérez believes that humor and laughter have long been regarded as psychologically and socially positive constructions. Humor, it was held, brought people together and enhanced individual and social well-being. The fact of the matter, he claims, is the reverse. Although jokes and humor can align and bind people together, these alignments and bonds can be turned against others. “Racial ridicule and insult, or aggressive humor, can work to split, discipline, dehumanize, and ostracize targeted groups and individuals” (11). The latter statement is unobjectionable. Humor, in certain circumstances, can do such things. All sorts of linguistic expressions and behaviors, however, can serve to exclude, divide, and create situations of oppression. The real question is whether jokes and humor necessarily do such things. What is the nature and quality of the evidence?
Pérez calls the emotion that aligns and binds people together in joking “amused racial contempt.” This is the lens through which he wishes to conduct his analysis (8). However, if this is the starting point for analysis and evaluation, the case would seem to be decided in advance. What possible outcome could there be if the motivating intention of all racial humor is presumed to be rooted in contempt?
Pérez presents three cases to evidence his thesis. The first is the humor and cartoons that appeared in neo-Nazi and white supremacist publications like WAR and Stormfront. WAR was published by the White Aryan Resistance, a group founded by Tom Metzger in Fallbrook, California, in the 1980s. It moved to the Internet in 1995. Anyone who peruses such cartoons (as I did about two decades ago) quickly realizes that their humorous techniques are minimal or absent. The most constant technique is the crude racial caricature of Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and Asians. The accompanying captions are for the most part explicit and serious. These cartoons are more akin to political cartoons in the mainstream media which are not funny but make a serious point by employing caricatures of prominent political figures. All the cartoons that Pérez reproduces are of this type (63-81).
Pérez claims that such humor creates social alignments with the racist cause. He has no evidence for this and is content to quote organization leaders who state they use humor to draw people to the cause (50, 54). It is far more likely that the racist messages promoted by the cartoons are simple, can be immediately grasped, and are already attractive to their audiences. That is, the appreciation of such humor evidences a racist predisposition; the humor does not create it. Some teenagers, perhaps, may have been drawn to the cartoons simply for their openly transgressive character—they are saying things that are not supposed to be said—but hardly for their humor.
Pérez cites my own essay on such cartoons, but he manages, either naively or deliberately, to misrepresent it. I used WAR cartoons to challenge the proposition that humor is used to communicate ideas and sentiments that could not be communicated openly. The answer was clear. The publishers of WAR were more than happy to communicate their racist ideas explicitly in numerous essays. Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and Asians were a blight on the white race. The Mexicans and Asians should be expelled, and the Blacks and Jews should be exterminated. They did not need humor as a cover for the expression of such ideas. (Nevertheless, Pérez maintains that “racist humor became a more essential ingredient … as it was now more necessary to cloak racism, vitriol, hatred, and contempt in fun” [75]). If anything, the articles were even more chilling than the cartoons, because the faulty techniques of humor—e.g., caricature, exaggeration, illogic—tend to undercut the message that is being conveyed. But Pérez chose to characterize this viewpoint as treating the cartoons as “just a joke,” thereby “normalizing and advancing racism” and revealing an ignorance “of the nature of these groups and … a willful denial of the existence of white supremacy as a real social danger” (76-77). I leave it to the readers of this review to dissect the logic of this syllogism.
Pérez’s second body of evidence for his thesis concerns the humor of the police. Police, it has been demonstrated, regularly engage in racial, sexual, and ethnic insult as well as racial, sexual, and ethnic joking. Police have regularly shown themselves to be aggressive and violent in their behavior towards racial and ethnic minorities (and others as well). Pérez’s conclusion is that as law enforcement is a long-standing white institution, and as police have repeatedly engaged in abuse and violence against racial and ethnic minorities, “racist humor in law enforcement has played a significant role in shaping a culture of racism, dehumanization, and racial abuse” (95). Again, the logic is rickety. As a sociologist, Pérez knows that correlation does not constitute cause. Demonstrating cause is a more arduous enterprise. But Pérez seems content to cite instances of police department restrictions on the use of racial epithets and ethnic joking and on instances of law-enforcement violence to support his case. While I have no reason to doubt that there are police who are racist or that police are often prone to use unnecessary or excessive force, the thesis that humor is what fuels the racism and the resort to force is never demonstrated.
In passing, Pérez notes that there was a considerable amount of such joking by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. More than half of that agency, however, is comprised of Latino officers. Rather than seeing this as something of a puzzle that might require some work to unravel, Pérez simply dismisses it by stating that “non-white officers can also embrace a white racial frame” (88). Pérez does not seem to have engaged with police, Border Patrol agents, or anyone else for that matter. The whole question of Black humor about Blacks, Latino humor about Latinos, or Jewish humor about Jews, which might complicate his program, is also conveniently avoided.
Pérez’s third piece of evidence concerns Barak Obama’s presidency. Internet searches for “n***** jokes” spiked during his elections (which again suggests that the jokes are not the impetus for, but a consequence of, racism). Particular attention is given to the depiction of Blacks as animals—usually monkeys and apes—and the depiction of Obama as a monkey or chimpanzee. While such images can be used to symbolize the antipathy of a group for an individual or another group and create a feeling of fellowship among the purveyors of such humor, it is not at all clear that the use of such humor is what engenders or preserves such resentments.
Of course, jokes can produce feelings of solidarity among racists. But so can songs, stories, rituals, and a host of other verbal expressions and behaviors. Folklorists who want to know how one group thinks about another would probably pay more attention to their legends and rumors than to their jokes. Legends and rumors are efforts to establish what is true. Jokes play with concepts and categories that are known to circulate in a culture. They do not necessarily indicate that these concepts and categories are believed. For example, there is a concept that Frenchmen are ardent and sophisticated lovers. There are a number of jokes that trade on the recognition of that particular idea. It does not mean that those who tell or appreciate such jokes believe it to be true.
Ultimately, Pérez’s book relies upon articles and books about race and racism, but his position does not emerge from any wide-ranging experience with jokes or situations of joking. In fact, this book contains very few jokes, and these remain largely unanalyzed. Nor are they ever situated in the social spaces of actual people telling and listening to jokes. Instead, Pérez buttresses his argument by quoting or citing “interdisciplinary theoretical insights” (41) and pointing to instances of racism and violence by groups that circulate overtly racist cartoons. That does not quite cut the mustard. Rather, the proposition that racist humor fuels white supremacy leaves one with the distinct impression that it is really a premise masquerading as a conclusion.
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[Review length: 1363 words • Review posted on March 6, 2023]