Fsuper Funny Jokes That May Be Racist

Once upon a time, making racist jokes was not something that caused controversy. It was an everyday occurrence; you could hear them in every pub and comedy order, on every dark of the week. It was just as common to speak with a funny accent when you met someone with brown skin. Sometimes the "joke" wasn't even uttered; a few bananas spoke volumes.

There were people such as Bernard Manning who were famous for their racist jokes. And a little later, there was Jim Davidson. But then came a grouping of "culling" comedians who ended all that. At that place was Lenny Henry, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson, Ben Elton, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie … and Rowan Atkinson.

These new comedians shoved the one-time boys into the margins, by saying that it isn't funny to demean, belittle, humiliate and dehumanise people simply for being who they are.

For a whole generation of us who came of historic period in the 1980s, these alternative comedians were a cool jiff of fresh air, a collective satirical voice that rose upwardly to roar correct back at the dinosaurs. They fought confronting the mainstream, and eventually became the mainstream. For a time, it looked like they had won: they had made information technology socially unacceptable – and seriously unfunny – to crack racist jokes. Until now.

Rowan Atkinson recently wrote to The Times, manifestly in support of Boris Johnson's recent "joke" virtually women wearing the burqa resembling "letter of the alphabet boxes". He argued that:

Sir, As a lifelong beneficiary of the liberty to make jokes about organized religion, I practise think that Boris Johnson'due south joke about wearers of the burka resembling letterboxes is a pretty expert one. An nigh perfect visual simile and a joke that, whether Mr Johnson apologises for information technology or non, will stay in the public consciousness for some future. All jokes nigh faith crusade offence, so it'southward pointless apologising for them. Yous should actually only apologise for a bad joke. On that ground, no amends is required.

Don't dehumanise

It doesn't affair if racism is articulated in ways that are funny or unfunny. It's still racist to dehumanise people, whether the joke is good or bad. Boris Johnson's "joke" clearly dehumanises: in information technology, women who wear niqabs (not burqas – Boris knows so little about this he can't tell the difference) are no longer human, they are walking post boxes. That is the reason why Johnson'southward joke is racist – not considering information technology'southward not funny (or even if it is).

You can make a perfectly good criticism of niqab or burqa-wearing without dehumanising the women who wear them (and by extension the other members of their faith), merely equally it is perfectly legitimate to make a instance confronting migration and refugees without speaking of migrants and refugees every bit "cockroaches", "swarming" into Europe, as Katie Hopkins did. The racist chip, in both cases, is not the criticism – information technology is the employ of a dehumanising metaphor.

This is equally applicable to faith every bit it is to race, for it flattens the uniqueness of a man into a singular quality – whether that'southward considering of the colour of their skin or the religious beliefs they hold.

And in any case, you can't reduce the complex politics of social injustice to the technicalities of a well-wrought phrase or witticism. Injustice is always bound up with social power, with the question of who has authority to speak - and who doesn't. For this reason, the same joke made by a female Muslim comedian criticising patriarchy within Muslim communities will non necessarily be racist, as it is when wielded by a white, upper-class, wealthy and privileged member of the British establishment.

Values worth upholding

Of grade, all the brouhaha on Twitter now is about whether Rowan Atkinson is a racist or not, but I can't aid feeling that this is missing the indicate. The real problem is the way that comments like Atkinson's arguably are helping to make information technology acceptable to make racist jokes again.

This matters. Claiming that information technology'southward okay to brand racist or Islamophobic jokes because, really, the joke was quite good, offers a technical alibi that masks complicity with racism. And this complicity normalises racism inside the social textile of everyday life.

The invocation of "free speech communication" in Johnson's defence is a bogus nonsense. If you value sure values that disharmonize with freedom, it is perfectly legitimate to curtail freedom to protect such values. Anti-terrorism laws, which constrain or moderate "radical" or "extremist" spoken language through increased surveillance, are ane case. This is not controversial, neither in liberal nor conservative traditions.

A tiresome mantra

The whole "gratuitous speech under threat by political definiteness" mantra is tedious because it cannot ever retrieve beyond its own nose. Freedom is not the only value worth upholding; there are others, such every bit the equal moral worth and dignity of every man existence, regardless of their race, gender, sexuality, religious behavior and so on (which is why dehumanisation is so pregnant here).

There seem to be elements of the anti-PC brigade that don't even want to call back about this. But mayhap that's because they are not that concerned with free speech anyway. The whole tirade against "political correctness" is, for some, a euphemistic way to suggest that, really, it should exist okay to be openly racist over again. It speaks to a covert – now increasingly overt – desire to put certain people back in their place. "Free spoken language" is a useful instrument, a tool to accomplish this goal.

As this frightening rollback to the 1970s and beyond continues to gather step, all sorts of nasty ideas are crawling out of dark corners, drawn by the stench of a polluted social environment in which it is apparently acceptable to exist racist again. Now there's some other thought emerging: that racism or Islamophobia is okay as long as information technology is delivered in a funny way. For those of us who used to look up to him, it is sad to think that someone like Rowan Atkinson seemingly is justifying this view – whether wittingly or non.

sonthavivelball.blogspot.com

Source: https://theconversation.com/racist-jokes-return-but-freedom-of-speech-punchline-falls-flat-101613