How humour sneaks prejudices into our minds
DANGEROUS JOKES How racism and sexism weaponize humor CLAIRE HORISK 232pp. Oxford University Press. £25.99 (US $39.95).
DOGWHISTLES AND FIGLEAVES How manipulative language spreads racism and falsehood JENNIFER MATHER SAUL 240pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $32.99).
IN THE LATE 2000S the political scientist Ismail White ran an experiment. Subjects read a dummy news article reporting on a congressman’s opposition to proposed spending cuts to food stamps and Medicaid – programmes that provide support to low-income Americans – before answering a battery of questions about their preferred social policies. But different subjects read subtly tweaked versions of the article. In one version of the article the congressman stressed that the targeted programmes were crucial safety nets for “working American families”. In a second version, though, he tied the programmes to the interests of “inner-city families”. Subjects answered the post-test questions differently depending on which version of the article they read. White subjects with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to favour welfare cuts in the “inner-city” condition than they were in the “working Americans” condition.
That’s unsurprising. “Inner-city” was at the time of the experiment an implicitly racialized epithet; by using it the fictional congressman covertly linked welfare spending with the interests of Black Americans, thus making racially resentful white readers more hostile to the programmes he sought to defend.
The lesson, one might think, is that defenders of welfare programmes should use race-neutral language, thus skirting the prejudices of the racially aggrieved. But things are not so simple. In a third version of the news article the congressman used neither race-neutral nor implicitly racialized terminology; instead he argued that the cuts would harm “African American families”. One might suspect that this explicitly racialized language would have activated racial resentments even more forcefully than the implicit cue provided by “inner-city”. But it didn’t. Instead, we see the opposite. For white participants in the third condition, racial resentment predicted support for welfare cuts only a little more strongly than in the control condition (where subjects read a dummy news article on an unrelated topic) and far more weakly than in the “inner-city” condition. It seems, then, that covertly racialized language can engage and activate the prejudices of racially resentful white people far more powerfully than its overtly racialized counterparts. That’s puzzling. How can a whisper be louder than a shout?
Similarly curious patterns emerge in other studies. More than twenty years ago Thomas Ford used two different vehicles to expose non-control subjects to sexism.
