Over time, my feelings about ‘jokes that mock a group with privilege’ are shifting.
Stuff in favor:
- The most common opposition to these jokes (”That’s heterophobia! racism against white people!”) are obvious bullshit. Systems of oppression are systems of power and they do not work both ways. White supremacy gives white people systematic power over people of color, a joke doesn’t tip those enormous scales. Mocking white people isn’t ‘reverse racism’. That’s crap.
- Jokes that expose a microaggression or other form of harmful oppressive behavior can be very productive. A good jokes can speak truth to power.
- Also, people are allowed a bit of fun, ya know?
But there is stuff against:
- If you look closer it becomes very clear that a lot of jokes that
mock a group with privilege
actually target another axis of oppression. ‘straight people jokes’
often mock highly sexist behavior while including the woman who is the victim of that behavior in the joke, blaming her straightness instead of the sexism.
‘white girl jokes’ are often just sexism and ‘white people jokes’ are often just classism.
‘sexist men’ jokes are often sexist themselves (mocking men for failing to meet standards of masculinity) and full of ableism, like the ‘parents basement’ trope. We’re a lot more likely to engage in oppressive acts then we realize.
- A lot of the jokes in question create a feeling of superiority in the oppressed over the privileged. In itself that doesn’t seem like a problem, but we’re all smart enough to apply that along other axis as well. In practice, it makes us less likely to acknowledge our own privilege. If we’re constantly mocking how pathetic straight people are, how likely are we to be able to admit and address our own white privilege? We raise emotional barriers for ourselves when we make ‘privileged’ into a category worthy of mockery. This actually makes us less likely to face our own privilege and become a better person.
- We are powerful together and weak when we are divided. If we strive to create broad fronts of solidarity against all forms of oppression, then at some point we are going to have to work with people who experience a form of oppression that we do not experience and have a form of privilege that we do not have. Not all of those people will have processed 100% of their sense of guilt about their privilege. Not all of those people will gracefully accept that privilege comes with mockery. Even if these jokes didn’t often have an another oppressive aspect in them (which they often do), this would still be a source of conflict.
Let’s be honest: a lot of us know exactly how to push the buttons of someone with privilege. It’s a skill we learned when we were attacked. But when we use the same tactics in our spaces of solidarity, the result is that a lot of people will leave before they can learn. So we can either demand that we only ever work with people who have nothing left to learn and are never hurt by these jokes, or we can tone it down a bit.
So to round up:
I’m not saying: ‘don’t do jokes that mock people with privilege’. They have a purpose. I am saying: we should probably be a bit more critical of these jokes.
We should be ready to be called on the ableism in our ‘men’ joke, including being called on it by men, and the sexism in our ‘straight people’ joke, including being called on it by straight people, etc.
We should also realize that a dismissal of criticism based on a block of empathy (’lol, male fragility’) is only productive if you strive to never form any alliances with groups that face other forms of oppression, or if you only ever want to work with the wokest best elite of that group.
If we wanna create broader movements, we’re going to have to spend more time creating ways to work together on different forms of oppression while acknowledging different forms or privilege, and less time loudly declaring our superiority and making public displays about how little we care about the feelings of people who have any sort of privilege that we don’t.
