Have it your way, ban humour. Tends to be based on well know stereo-types. I got called a fucking limey at school in Canada, bloody hell that was hurtful because it was a reference to such modern events.
But fucking Brexiteer and Tory cunt is absolutely fine. Don’t dare joke about somebody’s sexuality or ethnicity/nationality though. Of course we can have jokes about the propensity of an American to be concealing a gun but never ever mention that an X might be holding a bomb. It’s the double standards that get me.
In the words of Jimmy Car. “An Islamic friend of mine knows the Koran backwards. That’s a surprisingly smart, well informed and inoffensive joke. What do you think I am, stupid?”
That isn’t to say that all POC would find the term offensive, though.
If someone calls me something offensive, it says a lot more about them that it does about me. And, as someone who grew up in the days of the National Front and skinheads, I think I might be qualified to talk about this.
Someone said ‘Curry Muncher’ isn’t offensive. I said it is. You said I couldn’t say this as a white person. I don’t need to - lots of people of colour did find it really offensive.
on some levels its actually worse, to belittle someones political choice.
being a victim of racial stereotyping in a (shit) joke doesnt really mean anything, you cant change your birth and you are (more than likely) surrounded by a community of similar who can give you support.
attacking a political stance and trying making someone ashamed and change his/her mind by way of publically shaming them is bullying and nothing short of an attack on democracy.
Precisely, which is why using the bar of whether the target was offended is such an unhelpful one. This framework puts far more of the onus on targets to be strong enough to let us have our “jokes”, and not enough on people to just not be dicks.
As for the joke defense, the fundamental thing about a joke is humour. Comedians get away treading in this ground (sometimes) because when they do it they have something to actually say. This form of joke has nothing to say other that pointing to someone who is not from what you perceive the norm to be and treating that as funny or worthy of comment.
I had a lad, no older than 17-18 ask me if i was racist yesterday.
All because i didnt let him stroke the dog. This was after he’d initially asked, i’d said no, he asked why, i told him, before he walked towards the dog, pulled the dog back and told him to move on, he started swearing etc; before he asked if i was racist.
Told him to fuck off and walked away as wife had come out of tesco and he was going back to the pub. He gave me plenty of verbals. I was expecting him to say something racist to me, which may have escalated matters significantly, instead i went home and had a beer and spent the evening pissed off.
Is a man who spends his life with a chicken on his head funny? That differs from the norm.
Now define norm and reference that to so many of these newfangled social situations. After all these years of human evolution, we have a pretty good handle of what is normal. A man and a woman get together and kids happen. How are you then going to judge what divergence for the norm is worthy of humour and what’s off limits?
Should have called the police. Sorry, I had the wrong end of the stick there. My point about one way should have read then that it’s very rarely a person with darker skin being called racist. Seemingly it was here.
