Raul Perez

Gavin Newsome’s running mate just dropped

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

This is why a straight Bluesky feed is better than any algorithm. Excited to peep this.

🙏

Much appreciated @thrasherxy.bsky.social 🙏

Gracias prof!

Trump shared a racist "joke." That humor is an American tradition : Code Switch When President Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account last week, the blowback was real. But the video is also part of a tradition that has existed in the U.S. since the early 1800s — ...

www.npr.org/2026/02/14/n...

Professor Raúl Perez on Trump's racist jokes... @raulperez.bsky.social

Djdjdjdjdjjd...oh!

Trump shared a racist "joke." That humor is an American tradition : Code Switch When President Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account last week, the blowback was real. But the video is also part of a tradition that has existed in the U.S. since the early 1800s — ...

Our man @raulperez.bsky.social is breaking it DOWN with @geedee215.bsky.social on @npr.org Code Switch about Trump, humor as a social constructor of race, and The Souls of White Jokes www.npr.org/2026/02/14/n...

"The Souls of White Jokes" is a fantastic book! Excited to see this conversation on NPR and reaching a wider audience

Trump shared a racist "joke." That humor is an American tradition : Code Switch When President Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account last week, the blowback was real. But the video is also part of a tradition that has existed in the U.S. since the early 1800s — ...

Spoke with folks at Code Switch to unpack the weaponization of racist humor and the politics of white nationalism, past and present. Hope you check it out.

www.npr.org/2026/02/14/n...

2 decades ago depicting Obama as an ape, even as a “joke” would end your career. Today Trump casually posts imagery of the Obama’s as apes right at the start of Black history month.

I unpack this racist history more closely in my book The Souls of White Jokes: How racist humor fuels white supremacy

FYI, this also happened today while Mamdani and Trump had their heart to heart meeting at the same time

YouTube video by Infinitix These Dogs Can Only Act Tough When They’re Behind This Fence! 😂

Trump and Mamdani today, and basically all of politics

Ok WTF happened between Mamdani and Trump today. This is wild

When Alex Jones is supporting a “gen z protest” in Mexico, the people he’s cheering to be kidnapped/deported here by masked ICE goons, you know this is actually a right-wing coup attempt backed by the right in the US and Mexico. That and Vicente Fox sporting a One Piece T-shirt at the “protest.”

Symposium today on humor and the Right. We will highlight the intersection of humor/comedy/memes etc. with issues of nationalism, race, gender, sexuality, fascism, and more, past and present and around the world. Free event, program and registration info below.

drive.google.com/file/d/17Hmj...

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university.

You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

Indiana Professor Removed From Class Over White Supremacy Lesson

Indiana University, which has now been subordinated to the direct control of the Indiana GOP, announces that criticism of the MAGA movement and doctrines of the GOP is forbidden. An instructor is dismissed for speaking critical words about the MAGA movement.

Cool, so this means that the average first-time home buyer in the US can now expect to pay off their first home by age 90, which is only about 12 years after the average life expectancy of 78 years old in the USA 🇺🇸

Woke 2.0 > Trump 2.0

A brown, Muslim, socialist was just elected as mayor of New York City, the largest and one of the most diverse cities in the US. This was a “woke-lash” to white nationalism and Trump 2.0 Amazing

THE SOULS OF WHITE JOKES HOW RACIST HUMOR FUELS WHITE SUPREMACY RAÚL PÉREZ

CHAPTER 2 AMUSED RACIAL CONTEMPT, OR A THEORY OF WHITE RACIST HUMOR "It is interesting to notice the great pleasure white people in all classes take in ... stereotyped jokes and in indulging in discussions about the Negro and what he does, says and thinks. It is apparently felt as a release.... Dokes give release to troubled people.... The main "function' of the joke is thus to create a collective surreptitious approbation for something which cannot be approved explicitly because of moral inhibitions. To the whites the Negro jokes further serve the function of proving' the inferiority of the Negro." Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma WHAT DOES RACIST HUMOR do in society! Over the last century, many have commented and speculated on the social impact, or lack thereof, of racist joking and humor in society-that it is wrong, inappropriate, of-fensive, innocent, harmless, and so on. Yet, even as esteemed scholars and writers have pointed to the role of racist humor in reinforcing notions of racial inferiority and superiority, few have aimed to develop a fuller theoretical analysis of racist humor or what it does in society. When scholars and writers do consider such humor, it is most often discussed anecdotally or anachronistically. Yet, as the history of blackface minstrelsy un-derscores, racist humor, particularly in the entertainment industry, played a powerful role in reproducing white racist pleasure, white supremacist ideologies, and an affirmation of white identity during the late I9th and

EPILOGUE RACIST HUMOR AND THE CULT (URE) OF WHITENESS "The time may come when [non-whites] and whites can tell jokes about each other in ways which do not reproduce racial categories of the world in which they are told. The time... is certainly not yet arrived." Stuart Hall, Racist Ideologies and the Media" OVER THE LAST TWO CENTURIES in the United States, the practice and politics of amused racial contempt has played a significant role in shaping a racist understanding of society. It has played this role across different eras of racial history—from slavery to post-emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow and from the so-called colorblind and post-racial era that emerged after the civil rights movement of the mid-oth century and into the present day. Amused racial contempt is a significant, and often over-Looked, social and affective mechanism that works to link individual, cul-tural, and structural dimensions of racism and white supremacy. It is used as an affective pedagogical tool that aligns and reproduces the ideologies and cultural emotions of whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness across societal contexts, social settings, classes, and generations. It is used not only by white people but also by non-whites who aspire towards the social power of whiteness and its class privileges.! It is a key feature in the everyday formation of whiteness and racism via a "white racial framing of society. In the current era, racist humor has also served to unite a broad swath of conservatism and white nationalism, in an ostensibly colorblind

TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Terminology ix I The Racial Power of Humor 2 Amused Racial Contempt, or a Theory of White Racist Humor 3 Hiding in Plain Sight: The Violent Racist Humor of the Far Right 4 Blue Humor: The Racist Insults and Injuries of the Police 5 President Chimp: The Politics of Amused Racial Contempt EPILOGUE Racist Humor and the Culture) of Whiteness Acknowledgments Notes 179 Index 207 173 22 50 123 159

#Alt4You
[Originally posted by: @raulperez.bsky.social]

Thank you 🙏

With recent headlines and op-eps stunned by the pervasive usage of racist jokes by young republicans, I think it’s worth mentioning a recent book I wrote that might be useful for better understanding the historical and systemic roots of such humor

Sorry I do not, or not yet. Will ask the publisher

With recent headlines and op-eps stunned by the pervasive usage of racist jokes by young republicans, I think it’s worth mentioning a recent book I wrote that might be useful for better understanding the historical and systemic roots of such humor