Laughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime among Blacks

Abstract

For centuries Africans were captured and brought to America in bondage and forced to forge a new culture. The development of a Black culture gave rise to humor as a coping mechanism against the oppressive state they found themselves in. For centuries, humor became a way to protest their conditions by creating various humorous styles that infused social political commentary on oppression as a sign of defiance, while also providing hope for the hopeless. This commentary seeks to introduce leisure scholars to how Black Twitter (Sharma, 2013) users’ expressions of humor during the COVID-19 pandemic serve as a form of resistance to injustices and inequalities, while simultaneously adopting coping strategies to reclaim power and control in order to speak their truth all while cultivating individual and collective identity in/through leisure.

Keywords:

• Black power
• Black Twitter
• COVID-19
• humor
• social media

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