Some context: I’m not black and don’t live in the black experience.
I found this video essay involving modern blackfacing and minstrel shows called The Evolution of the Culture Vulture interesting. Some white guy i know started saying the n word ending with an “a” as a joke when almost 30 years old. I only see him once every several years and idk if I should send him this video. We dont talk in between those years. He’s mostly associated with my boyfriend, and they can go over a year without talking. If I end up doing that I would say “Even though I think its not okay you’re specifically doing an exact thing in this video, I still appreciate your intent and your great quality of trying to create good vibes however you can. This does not mean at all that I’d disown you as a friend. Its just to say take a step back and examine what youre doing when you…” Idk i can’t think of how to discuss this with him so here I am.
He’s a busy guy, he may never watch the video. I have social anxiety too so I may never send anything. I just want to know how to carry out a convo about this and still want advice anyways. That shit really bothered me and I couldn’t place why until seeing the video.
One neutral way I address problematic jokes from coworkers is that the core of good comedy is punching up. Punching down or sideways is a lazy joke. Part of your audience will be excluded from the group that gets to find it funny because the last person who said that word might have screamed it at them. The rest don’t directly relate to it unless they’re trashy bigots who also punch down on that group, and now you’re just lumped in with them by everyone else who feel uncomfortable. Everyone you’re telling that joke to can relate to it if it’s attacking something more powerful than them. You’re heightening the emotional investment in it which makes it funnier, and subverting expectations in the punchline actually feels subversive instead of just defending unfunny institutions like a villain’s henchman saying “yeah boss”. The whole role and value of the comedian is using your joker’s privilege to say something insightful that your audience hasn’t already heard from their brainpoisoned grandparents or the most obnoxious media outlets.
They can’t dismiss that as “the woke coworker got soymad” if you point out it’s why Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Blazing Saddles are good comedies even if they’re dealing with problematic topics. The Nazis and racists aren’t funny because we can see that it’s a very racist place and they’re just restating what we already know. The funny moments come from plopping one non-racist in the racist place and telling an underdog story where Goliath’s strength can’t stop a well-aimed rock.
What might you say to this guy? He’s genuinely very funny otherwise while I’m not as funny. I’m worried that in his eyes, all the cheery reactions to his racist joke will outshine anything I have to say. I’m still kinda speechless about it. He’d have to watch the video I think.
Watching the video would be a good idea too so he understands the specific history of why that’s bad. If he was my coworker I’d say something like "Those racist jokes are going to get you in trouble at some point. When a white guy says it that’s like 2005-era 4chan edgelord stuff which felt dated then. You’re punching down on a group that’s weaker than you using a word that white guys made to say they aren’t even the same species as you. If a black person uses it in a joke they’re reclaiming power by subverting the original meaning. If Django Unchained was from the white perspective and whiteness won in the end, it wouldn’t be funny. Nobody would have laughed if the KKK charged the dentist’s wagon and their masks fit perfectly and they looked super competent. That scene worked because they kept hyping themselves up as the master race and were undermined by their own hubris. That film is only funny because it has back-to-back scenes where the slaver dissect’s a slave’s skull to demonstrate white supremacy before the slave kills everyone in the house and blows it up. If a white person in that film uses the n-word, it’s an ugly word that dehumanises the person saying it as much as it does the group they’re attacking who can’t fight back. It’s to show they’re illiterate bumpkins who have no other identity other than pretending they’re French aristocrats who can’t speak French. We expect them to say it and you don’t learn anything new from hearing it, just ‘yep racism exists.’ When Django uses it, he’s punching up and taking away its power by saying it doesn’t scare him.
Good comedy that actually feels relevant doesn’t just bully people. It bullies the people who make all of our lives worse instead of the normal people in your audience. We see Django endure racism because it heightens your emotional investment that the final shootout pays off. You expect the powerful thing to win because it’s powerful, but everyone wants to root for the underdog and them winning subverts the expectation of the audience. The racism only becomes ironic and funny when it’s immediately disproven by a smarter ex-slave with a gun. There are ways to handle a topic like racism in ways that don’t exclude part of your audience and make most of the rest uncomfortable, but that’s acknowledging you live in a really racist society and pointing out the absurdity of that with some better idea than what people are used to. People don’t expect a white guy to punch up at the things telling him he’s special while dehumanising him in the ways everyone else has experienced. They can’t tell if he’s actually joking when he’s just saying what white guys have been shouting for four hundred years, so that joke is always going to fall flat unless he’s telling it to someone who isn’t joking when they say it. You have good comedic instincts and they’re sabotaged by old jokes which don’t make the comedian the relatable clown. Here’s a great video about how that genre has been around for a century and ended up making everyone doing it look bad even in their era."
How about: “The N word is not for white people to feel like they’re winning at things(including humor and making people laugh.) It’s for black people to reclaim power over something they’ve been dehumanized with for hundreds of years. It’s not for you to reclaim. Although many non-black comedians like to do it and many people find them funny, there’s great reason why you still shouldn’t say the N word. Even if it makes some people feel nice, it has a sinister side despite any good intentions. The video explains a common uncomfortableness I personally couldn’t quite understand until I watched it.”
Seperate text: “Even though I think its not okay you’re specifically doing an exact thing in this video, I still appreciate your intent and your great quality of trying to create good vibes however you can. This does not mean at all that I’d disown you as a friend. Its just to say take a step back and examine what youre doing”
Humor is not my strength, so maybe being straightforward and gentle at once would be good enough. That’s the most I can put in my own words for now. I’m overwhelmed by the length of your examples but I could understand it much better than your last comment. I’ve said it before, my reading comprehension isn’t the best. But thank you so much for using examples.
That works well too.