The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy by Raúl Pérez
Many of the core arguments in this book can also be applied to other derogatory “jokes,” and I’m putting the word “jokes” in quotes because, personally, I have the radical idea that jokes are actually supposed to be funny. That is to say, a lot of the core arguments in this book can be applied to transphobic jokes, misogynist jokes, homophobic jokes, etc. Pérez is focusing on racist jokes specifically in this text, and with that, I need to give you gigantic content warnings for racism and violence, including police violence. This book has examples of not only incredibly racist jokes but also some stomach-turning examples of racist comics and images that have either been printed in white supremacist media or found their way through some politicians’ or law enforcement’s emails.
The bulk of the book is specific to anti-Black jokes, but there are also many examples of jokes about other races and ethnicities, so be warned. Reading it meant that there were so many examples of hate speech going into my brain, and my brain doesn’t really differentiate between hate speech as an example and actual hate speech. All this to say: this book was a really hard read. It is also an incredibly important read. The author is an Associate Professor of Sociology, and this is a fairly academic book, so it’s a heavy read in a couple of different ways.
Humor has been proven as something that can bring people together, but racist humor not only brings racist people together but also ostracizes the groups of people the humor is dumping on. Humor has been used as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence time and time again. Pérez lays bare how fascist media uses humor to draw more people into their beliefs. He also covers racist humor in law enforcement and how attempts at mitigating that have failed. The third arena the author unpacks is racist jokes in politics. “Depravity” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
This is such an important book not only as a window into one of the ways that white supremacy works but also as an opening for people who continue to consume racist, transphobic, homophobic, all-around lazy, and elementary comedy to really examine how white supremacy is showing up in their lives.