Raul Perez
@raulperez.bsky.social
4.4K followers 249 following 109 posts
sociologist and author of The Souls of White Jokes (Stanford University Press) www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30308
sociologist and author of The Souls of White Jokes (Stanford University Press) www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30308
![EPILOGUE
RACIST HUMOR AND THE CULT (URE) OF WHITENESS
"The time may come when [non-whites] and whites can tell jokes about each other in ways which do not reproduce racial categories of the world in which they are told. The time... is certainly not yet arrived."
Stuart Hall, Racist Ideologies and the Media"
OVER THE LAST TWO CENTURIES in the United States, the practice and politics of amused racial contempt has played a significant role in shaping a racist understanding of society. It has played this role across different eras of racial history—from slavery to post-emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow and from the so-called colorblind and post-racial era that emerged after the civil rights movement of the mid-oth century and into the present day. Amused racial contempt is a significant, and often over-Looked, social and affective mechanism that works to link individual, cul-tural, and structural dimensions of racism and white supremacy. It is used as an affective pedagogical tool that aligns and reproduces the ideologies and cultural emotions of whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness across societal contexts, social settings, classes, and generations. It is used not only by white people but also by non-whites who aspire towards the social power of whiteness and its class privileges.! It is a key feature in the everyday formation of whiteness and racism via a "white racial framing of society. In the current era, racist humor has also served to unite a broad swath of conservatism and white nationalism, in an ostensibly colorblind](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yupjodsb265htel3yennasoq/bafkreifewxc3sf3nsb6nq2jxo3ykdz3kyfieqnzl3sxc6mlgldltpvtu6i)
