Black-faced, red faces: the potentials of humour for anti-racist action

ABSTRACT

Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humour's possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action.

KEYWORDS:

• Humour
• anti-racism
• everyday racism
• bystander action
• de-commitment
• speaking out

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The work in recent years on the ‘affective turn’ in social theory in light of Gilles Deleuze's writings on affect are relevant here (see also Hynes 2013; Hynes and Sharpe 2009; Massumi 2002; Sharpe and Gorman-Murray 2013; Thrift 2005).

2. The claim from The View's Joy Behar that the US is a little ‘ahead of the curve’ when it comes to race-relations is so broad-brush as to be completely un-testable. Her statement, ‘We're in post-racial America right now … with post-Obama … with Obama in office … ’ certainly raised a bemused eyebrow and a comment from the panel's, Whoopi Goldberg, (‘Oh is that what this is?’), for being a little prematurely congratulatory (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPNiEKcka_w).

3. The dynamic of the politics of belonging is not exclusive to the relationship between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ for example, but obviously infiltrates these very simplistic categories as well. On this, see for example, Kirk Zwangobani's (2012) study of ‘African-Australians’ and the hostilities expressed by some members of this necessarily problematic umbrella identity toward ‘the Sudanese'.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant [LP110200495].