After all, some people in that organization were Asian. Some were women. Two years later, when I happened to encounter that friend again, I was reminded of the text messages. That night, sitting with a few close friends, I pulled out my phone and scrolled back to I began to read them out loud.
By the time I was halfway through the messages, I was horrified. My friends were disgusted. I kept going. The final message left me with a sick feeling in my stomach. How could this have happened? I tried to picture the night from the point of view of someone in the organization, to explain these racialized, vulgar sexual text messages, sent by a crowd of people to someone they barely knew. I told myself again that it was just a joke.
A game. They were probably drunk. That had to be what inspired the content of the messages. But a grosser, scarier suspicion kept pushing into the forefront of my mind: The only thing they knew about me was that I was an Asian woman.
And that was what inspired the content of the messages. Most of all, I felt guilty and anxious. Over the next few days, questions raced through my mind: How could I have ever thought these were funny? What had I done to make others think this was okay? Should I do something about this now? Am I overreacting? Why dig this up after two years? The emancipation of black slaves and successive waves of immigration from around the world have brought minority groups into conflict with a dominant culture whose whiteness came to be defined by differences.
Othering humor still lingers today; just last year, a series of scandals surfaced involving old photos of politicians including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam wearing blackface, seemingly as a joke. But the general reception toward ugly, racist humor is changing, sure enough. And, as Jeet Heer pointed out in his response to The Problem with Apu for the New Republic, caricatures of other minority groups have historically faced concerted pushback as those groups gained cultural and political power.
Irish immigrants gave way to the American-born Irish, who had less tolerance for ethnic jokes and felt empowered to speak up. As those migrants settled in cities and became politically active, they too began to challenge how they were represented in pop culture. Asian Americans have approached a similar turning point only in recent years.
Though I might more readily identify as desi, or South Asian, I recognize the utility of banding together as Asian Americans in contexts like this, as well as the limitations. Asian American representation in comedy and pop culture, and our power as both consumers and voters, has grown significantly, even in the past few years alone.
The commercial success of Crazy Rich Asians in has proven the box-office appeal of Asian American actors and stories; its romantic lead, Henry Golding, has even moved into headlining mainstream rom-coms like Last Christmas. Ali Wong has released two smash Netflix specials and a movie, and comedian Hasan Minhaj has his own show, Patriot Act , and dedicated a recent episode to the rising significance of the Asian American electorate in Andrew Yang, a Democratic presidential candidate, remains in the race, polling at 3 percent.
In other words, Yang is likely reinforcing the stereotypes he plays into rather than indicating their limitations. But the idea of a model minority suggests its opposite, and stereotypes like those he embraces do ideological work to perpetuate a system of racism that places black people at the bottom. Being the target of model minority stereotypes is conflicting. It would be no great surprise if her doctor really were from Bombay.
Maybe her recollection of him has since improved, or maybe she thought the bit might be funnier if he sounded Indian. If it had been one of my parents she were up there imitating, I would have been furious. So when I visited my family over the holidays, I described the moment in her set and asked how it might have made them feel. An occasional glimpse of an engineer or taxi driver with a thick accent, played by a brown actor on TV or voiced by a white comedian behind the mic, may have felt like enough, a novel thrill.
So, should I just lighten up? Austin argued that for some kinds of speech the norms include what we might call a responsibility to the facts. But not all speech is responsible to the facts. For example, telling a bedtime story is not responsible to the facts, nor is naming a dog you save from an animal shelter. Jane Austen sees that joking speech is not responsible to the facts. Thus it can be acceptable to express something you believe to be false in a joke. But seriously saying something you believe to be false is largely condemned.
We call that lying, and it is permissible only in special circumstances, such as when assuring a new parent that his slightly squished newborn is beautiful.
The main norm covering joking, however, is that the joke be funny. There are other norms covering jokes as well, of course—e. But because jokes do not have a responsibility to the facts, it can be socially acceptable to say something jokingly that would be hurtful if said seriously; if Mr.
Woodhouse will not be hurt. Since jokes have no responsibility to the facts, people sometimes use jokes to express something that it would be unacceptable to express seriously. We can use humor to express a painful or uncomfortable truth, and indeed doing so is sometimes recommended for defusing tense conversations. But people can also exploit the disconnect between jokes and the facts to express pernicious untruths, such as harmful stereotypes about race and gender.
This, arguably, is what Barr and Imus did. They expressed racist untruths; and when they were upbraided, they claimed they were using a kind of speech that is not responsible to the facts, pointing towards the conclusion that since they did not mean it seriously, they did not mean it all. However, to joke about a racial stereotype may be worse than saying it outright.
In one study , the social psychologist Thomas E. Ford asked subjects to read either sexist statements or sexist jokes, and then to evaluate a situation in which a young woman at work is patronized by her male supervisor.
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