Symposium on 'The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy'

Join Dr Raúl Pérez (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of La Verne) as he discusses his latest book The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy.

Discussant Dr Rohini Rai (Lecturer in Sociology of Race, Brunel University London).

Chaired by Dr Simon Weaver (Founding CCSR Member)

Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended. Laughter is often seen as a way to ease tension in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes, Raúl Pérez confronts this unsettling question, arguing that doing so is crucial to understanding the persistence of racism and white supremacy in American society. Drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay “The Souls of White Folk” (1920), Pérez synthesizes scholarship on race, humor, and emotions to uncover how humor can function as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, a thing of the past, or “just a joke,” Pérez illustrates how the current widespread use of racist humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology, solidarity, and inequality today.

Raúl Pérez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of La Verne, and previously an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Denver. His scholarship has been awarded and supported by the American Sociological Association, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, the Working Class Studies Association, and the American Humor Studies Association. His research has been published in scholarly journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, Discourse and Society, Ethnicities, and Sociological Perspectives. His first book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy, published by Stanford University Press in 2022, was a Finalist for the 2022 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and he received the 2023 Mary Douglas Book Prize from the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Culture. His work has also been featured in various media, such as The Washington Post, TIME, and NBC.

To register your place at the Symposium please email comedy.studies@brunel.ac.uk with your name and email address.