I'd like to take a moment to talk about race (=racist) jokes because I told an inappropriate one the other day. What happened was, I was walking down the street with a new friend of mine and it began to drizzle. I repeated a joke that I saw on Family Guy a long time ago - it involves a weatherman who embodies a stereotype of militant Blackness and gives the forecast, "It's gon' rain." Offended, my friend told me not to repeat these kinds of "jokes" in front of him again. Mortified that my careless remark hurt my friend's feelings (and made me look like an ass), I tried to interrogate why I thought the racist line from Family Guy was funny in the first place.
Racism is hard to think about, especially when I personally am the perpetrator. It is difficult for me to confront the idea that my words can, in however small a way, contribute to racial oppression. It is deeply uncomfortable for me to think of myself as being capable of marginalizing someone else. That's a heavy, squeamish concept to have resting on my heart. Of course, this discomfort pales in comparison to the suffering of people who are the recipients of racial oppression.
The reason I thought it was okay to repeat the joke, I think, is because I tend to assume my social interactions are basically free of the racism prevalent elsewhere. What I mean is, I assume that my friends and I are on some level "post-race," giving me license to joke about the issue. This way of thinking is insensitive to the actual experiences of my friends who are racially oppressed.
Another thing is, I felt comfortable saying the joke because it's a "mild" form of racism. The fact that it wasn't overtly malicious made it seem more okay. Our society is "actually" "post-race," so it's okay for me to make flip comments without considering my words more carefully. Later, I realized that the joke is not innocent nor free of prejudice. That making fun of the anger many Black people feel as a result of being racially oppressed makes it seem like that anger isn't legitimate.
Family Guy is a TV show that makes it its business to parody everything. I haven't watched it in a long time but I remember race, rape, gay, and pedophile jokes all being on the table. There's something exciting about how the show crosses accepted boundaries of decorum. But at the same time, these kinds of jokes are often hurtful when used in everyday conversation. Duh. I've felt this way about rape and gay jokes for a long time - particularly when they're coming from someone who hasn't experienced these things.
I don't know why it took me until now to think about race in a similar way. So my new rule of thumb is this: not to make fun of something unless I've embodied it myself. I'll stick to the identity categories I know, which include but are not limited to being a homo, being a slutty homo, and being into daddies.
Thinking about racist jokes has made something else clear to me that I've known intuitively for a long time: as a White gay man who grew up in the 90s, Blackness, Black culture, and Black friends have been vitally important to me and my ability to cope with oppression as a sexual minority. I'm not saying that being marginalized sexually is the same thing as being marginalized racially. It's not. But I have drawn and continue to draw an enormous strength from Black artists in popular culture, particularly female ones.
When I was in middle school, I was part of a very particular cultural moment in the 90s that gave rise to an unprecedented number of very popular Black musicians. Listening to Destiny's Child's "So Good," Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)," or TLC's "Waterfalls," made me feel a certain way that I didn't feel listening to other kinds of music. I perceived not only these women's words but also the way in which they sang them as assertive, unashamed, and strong. What I was hearing was "the great muscle of the unconstricted throat," as Adrienne Rich calls it, that gets exercised when a person has to draw on inner resources to transcend durable social prejudices. I needed that muscle too.
On the one hand, it is a huge problem that White people like me who grew up in the suburbs have commodified Black music. We listen to Black artists sing about their experiences of oppression and step out of our middle class bubbles for a moment so that we can feel something. But that empathy is too often false because it's temporary: when the song is over, we step right back in the bubble. On the other hand, Black women have given me an incredible gift. Implicitly, they told me not to pay too much attention to the constant messaging I receive in my world making me feel inferior for having strange sexual desires.
I still feel this way, of course. That's why I've been playing "So Good" on repeat while writing this blog post in my underwear for the last hour. Time to get a new song before the neighbors complain.
