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Uncle Kimo Doesn't Get it: Reinforcing Racial Apathy with Racist Humor
Author(s) -
Yamashita Liann
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sociological inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.446
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1475-682X
pISSN - 0038-0245
DOI - 10.1111/soin.12338
Subject(s) - racism , sociology , apathy , identity (music) , multiculturalism , gender studies , comedy , ethnic group , social psychology , psychology , aesthetics , anthropology , art , pedagogy , philosophy , cognition , literature , neuroscience
As one of the most racially diverse U.S. states, Hawai'i is a reputed multicultural paradise. Its residents (locals) thus freely engage in racist jokes and stereotypes with one another as an example of their plurality compared to “racist” continental Americans. While previous studies have examined how racist comedy discursively naturalizes discrimination, I argue that these jokes are also connected to racialized emotions that uphold the islands’ unequal social structure. Using 44 interviews with locals who grew up in Hawai'i, I illustrate how racist jokes promote locals’ apathy toward the islands’ racial issues. I first describe how interviewees developed identity boundaries between “multicultural locals” and “racist mainlanders.” Then, I examine how these identity boundaries are tied to emotional scripts prompting respondents to ignore racism in Hawai'i. While many respondents uncritically engaged in racist comedy, a significant number of participants felt marginalized by racist humor. I use their experiences to show how locals must trade their “emotional labor,” laughing along with their peers, in order to maintain their local identities. I conclude by showing how racial apathy is reaffirmed as the affective consequences of racist jokes were trivialized and locals taught to roll with the punch(lines) of ethnic humor.