Humor, context, and racism!
I have a website. On that website, I write stories that generally have to do with things that have happened in my life that are funny.
Some things just don't translate well to paper or story-form though. There are countless things that happen on a day-to-day basis in my life that are funny, but in a more contextual way.
Situational humor.Like the time a girl at this party I was at that was trying out a new kind of alcoholic drink she hadn't tasted before and said that it "tasted like ass." About a minute later, while still talking about the drink, she remarked that it "kind of had a familiar taste to it." I retorted with "well, you
did say it tasted like ass..."
Contextual humor. It's actually sort of a problem that arises every once in a while when you're considering whether or not to tell a story because some things are either:
(A) Very conditional, in that what makes the story funny isn't something that is universally clear to everyone, has more of a humorous context that might not even have been explicit at the time, and/or is based more on a combination of indirect circumstances.
(B) Require so much backstory that the punchline at the end lets people down -- telling jokes involves a very basic cost/benefit analysis of sorts: If a funny story or anecdote is short, the joke will probably be kinda funny, but nothing amazing. If the story is really long, people expect that it will eventually pay out and be absolutely hilarious. If it isn't, it's as if you are let down. The length of the story sort of implies how funny it's supposedly going to be.
(C) Is only funny to the people that were involved because it isn't necessarily
what happened that's funny, but rather in general all of the things surrounding the situation that made it funny to the people that were there.
It's somewhere in between a regular joke -- universally applicable and funny to everyone -- and an "inside joke" that will never be funny to anyone unless you were there. Other people are easily capable of hearing the story and understanding it, but without actually being in the situation and experiencing all of it, it just isn't as funny.
I was involved in a group project in my College Composition II course during my freshman year in college; the assignment given to us four was to write a 5-8 page rhetorical analysis of three different articles regarding the music industry and certain relations in culture to music.
We got a C on the paper, for various reasons that don't really matter, but towards the end of the semester, the class was given the opportunity to choose one paper to revise, and since I had an A for every other paper, I chose to revise the rhetorical analysis.
Whichever assignment we chose to revise, the grade we get on the revision would completely replace the original grade (which, if our revision was A-worthy, would in effect give me straight A's for all the papers I did for that course).
We were allowed to work as a group again, however, if we chose to revise the group project, so that's what the four of us did, because that C the lowest grade for all of us.
In addition to looking over the paper ourselves and changing things, our professor had written numerous specific critiques on the paper when we originally got our grade for the paper several months ago. Things the teacher says are wrong with the paper is usually a pretty good place to start for a revision.
A lot of these were syntax mistakes, sentence structure, argument obscurity, as well as our evidence and arguments not supporting our thesis, which is the main reason we got a C originally.
One of the things in particular is something that she mentioned to us, but didn't actually reduce our grade because of it, was due to the... specific adjective we used to describe a certain group of people.
Basically, one of the three articles we were looking at in the rhetorical analysis was an article called "Hip-Hop" by Armstrong Williams. In it, he discussed various aspects of black culture; in particular, the way black children react to and sometimes idolize hip-hop artists. He argues that the reverence and adoration of this "thug" or "gangster" lifestyle is sort of a detriment to the growth of society and a kind of roadblock to educational and societal improvement, particularly relating to black culture as a whole in America. That's just
his argument; the assignment isn't really to agree or disagree, but rather to investigate and discuss the way he uses language to persuade people (in other words, we are to to
analyze the
rhetoric he uses).
One of two things just happened to you right now when you read the previous paragraph. Notice that I used the phrase "black people" and "black culture" along with its various equivalents. You either found the terms offensive and a little arrogant or audacious... or you just read right through it unconsciously accepted it in the back of your mind, viewing it as a simple, non-offensive descriptive word without even taking a second thought about it.
Some people prefer the term "African American," while others aren't really all that concerned with what term is being used as long as it isn't obviously and patently offensive. Like "colored," or "negro," which both make you sound like you're from the 1940s, or, of course,
the N-Word, which you can really only say if you
are black. Or if you're a racist.
Well, we came across this very issue while writing the section of the essay dealing with Williams's article. Do we say "black people?" Or should we say "African Americans?" We had a small, 5-10 minute talk among ourselves on it, discussing things like if a black person is from and lives in France, calling them an "African American" makes no sense, because they aren't American. Do you call them African French? African People of Frenchness?
And what if their ancestors are from somewhere in South Asia, like India? People with dark skin are
hardly all from Africa; it's not as if all African people have always been dark-skinned, nobody else in the world has ever been dark-skinned besides them, and it's solely because of early colonial America's slave trade that they ever left.
Not even close.
What about white people whose ancestors going back a couple hundred years or so have been born and raised in, say, South Africa, and then part of the family moves to the United States and has a generation or two of kids there? These people live in America, and they're from Africa, but since they're white, they would never be called "African American" by anyone.
If anything, it can be argued that "African American" is a little presumptuous and assumes that all black people both live in America and are of specifically African descent. Nobody ever says "African Canadian." Plus, I don't consider the word "black" to be really all that offensive at all. It's just a color.
If you're describing someone's skin color, you might say pale, white, tan, pink, red, black, or brown -- as long as there aren't any actual racist thoughts, harmful stereotypes, or implicated negative connotations attached to these terms, they're basically just being utilized as blank slates, used only as temporal, inessential explanations and superficial, trivial descriptive labels to describe a simple difference in pigment or tone, not meant to imply anything more than what ultimately amounts to just a different level of keratin.
So we used the term "black people" throughout our paper. While grading our essay, our professor, I guess, didn't... particularily think it was the best phrasing to use, and she told us this. It was a little difficult to attempt to defend our usage and explain to her that we
had this huge discussion on it, and in the end chose that phrasing for various reasons (mainly because we as a group agreed in general that the phrase "African American" is pretty vacuous), but when it came down to it -- and she was right in saying this -- honestly, someone reading your paper is only going to see that you say
black instead of
African-American.When you break it down, you have two types of people that will read your paper. The person either:
(A) Is offended by the use of the term
black, or...
(B) Is not offended by the use of the term
black.If you get Person A, you can use either
black or African American and you'll be safe. If you get Person B, they're going to have somewhat of a negative opinion of you for not using something that they consider to be the proper indexation.
Saying
black people will not offend A but will offend B, while
African American won't offend either of them. It just makes better sense to not appear racist. Perceived racism has basically the same effect as actual racism -- people will think you're kind of a prick.
It also makes sense from a position of "maintaining literacy consistency." A paper written in a formal style of writing should never have any slang in it. For example, you shouldn't use the word "like" as an informal conjunction meaning 'as though,' 'as if,' or as a sort of numerical descriptive. Sort of like the word "like" in the sentence you're reading right now.
And let's face it -- the phrase "black people" just sounds a lot more informal than "African American." Even if "African American" is sort of fluffy and vapid, it still sounds better in an academic and/or dignified setting. So we decided to go with her suggestion and individually replace basically all instances of the word
black or
black people and the like to
African American.
In theory, we didn't like it, felt like we were selling out, going against our real opinions just for a better grade, and would rather just say
black people.African American sounds a little overly politically correct to me, and makes it sound like you're
trying to not sound racist, which, if we're too worried about the way we talk about a group of people or a particular race, we're just preserving unneeded negative stereotypes and sustaining harmful prejudices and hurtful misconceptions that there are actual differences between black people and white people, which there really aren't.
But basically... we went with "African American" because we wanted to make every attempt to change our C to an A.
In addition to actually revising the paper, we were given an assignment to write a "cover letter" to staple to the front of the paper with our names, which paper we were revising, and a written-out description of everything we decided to change about the paper and why.
We came to a problem though. How do we
describe this change? What do you say exactly? I just described our thoughts in this article and a word count on that section will reveal that it took me about 1,000 words to explain our reasoning. How do we sum it up in a few sentences without completely defeating the purpose of trying not to sound prejudicial?
It's hard to explain that you stopped using a particular phrase without actually using the phrase in your explanation.
Other group member 1: "Okay, we changed 'black people' to 'African American,' so... what should we write for that?"
Me: "Let's say, like... okay... something like --
As per your suggestion in the margin notes and what we discussed during our group conference with you where we were assigned our grade for the project, we chose to change..."
Other group member 2: "
We ultimately decided to use the phrase 'African American'..."
Me: "...
When referring to..."
Other group member 3: "...When referring to... hmm... how do we describe it?
When referring to..."
Other group member 2: "Okay...
We decided to instead utilize the phrase 'African American' when referring to... when referring to what? How do we say it? We're trying to make it sound professional.
When referring to..."
Me: "..........
black people."
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