Title: Racial humor: not a laughing matter – The Aragon Outlook
Headings: Racial humor: not a laughing matter
Racial humor: not a laughing matter
Posted by Jack Herrera

Content: The teenager is offended, but the rest of his friends just laugh. Not wanting to be seen as the odd-man out in the group, the teenager forces a laugh and doesn’t say anything to challenge the stereotype. This is oppression. The social politics of a racist joke told in a group setting renders one voiceless to hateful remarks made about their ethnicity. While some may say that opposing racist jokes is over-sensitive, racism, in any form, cannot be taken casually. Stereotyping is arguably the most dangerous phenomenon of the human condition. When left unchecked, it festers like a wound, and spreads like an infection. An example of a generalization overcoming society is the Japanese internment camps in the US during WWII. No one was willing to respect each Japanese person as an individual, and they were grouped together as a threat to the nation. This led to one of the most embarrassing blights in the nation’s history.