For a long time, the widely-accepted standard for racist jokes has bothered me a bit. The standard is this: that any joke exploiting a given racial or other group is okay to make, so long as it’s made by a member of said group.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I suppose it’s a good way for a minority group to regulate the number of jokes made at its expense. And, moreover, it makes clear that, if you’re not a member of said group and you want to make these jokes, you better have implicit permission.
What bothers me is that somehow it’s okay for someone to say these things, but the sense in which these jokes are “okay” is a sort of limited sense of “okay.” They’re still ugly things; funny, perhaps, but still ugly, and the shiny part of me which prefers beauty and goodness to crude humor wonders if we couldn’t dispense with them altogether. At least this standard helps to prevent them from being made *against* the group, made as an affront, offensively on the offensive. So, maybe that’s all fine and good.
Except that it’s not. I realized something two days ago: by this standard, it would be considered PERFECTLY OKAY for Hitler, who was partly of Jewish descent, to make racist jokes against the Jews.
Are you okay with that? Didn’t think so.
