This message comes from MS Now. On their new podcast, MS Now presents Clock It. Washington Power Players Simone Sanders Townsend and Eugene Daniels discuss how the latest political news and the catchiest cultural moments converge. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby, and I'm joined today by our senior editor, Leah Dinella. What's good with you, Leah? Hey, Gene. Okay, so what are you bringing us today? Okay, so as you know, earlier this month, President Trump shared a video on Truth Social. And it was a video that essentially repeated a lot of conspiracy theories about election fraud. And then there were parts of it that were also sort of like spoofing the Lion King, depicting Trump as king of the jungle. and toward the end of that video barack and michelle obama show up and they are portrayed as apes yep which by the way anderson cooper helpfully pointed out that the actual movie the lion king does not have any apes as a dad of a three and five year old i happen to spend a lot of time watching the lion king these days a lot of time and just want to point out there's no gorillas or apes and lion king yeah i haven't watched the video but i read about it and i'm like why like this is the dumbest most obvious most basic form of racism we have in this country it's so stupid like what what is the point yes exactly and basically everyone agrees with you like even within the president's own party people were like uh whoa that's really racist let's not do that Right. You know, you got Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina and, you know, notably the only black Republican senator. And he said on X, quote, praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've ever seen out of this White House. End quote. Which, OK, whatever. And other and other folks chimed in, too. You got Pete Rickards of Nebraska, another Republican senator saying, quote, even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake. Remove this and apologize. End quote. Did they remove it and apologize? They did remove it. And eventually even President Trump himself had to like dial it back, sort of. He said that he hadn't seen the end of the video with the Obamas. He said a staffer had posted it and didn't catch that beforehand. But then he said he was not going to apologize for it. Mr. President, a number of Republicans are calling on you to apologize for that post. Is that something you're going to do? No, I didn't make a mistake. The video did get taken down eventually. But before some Republicans joined the criticism of the video, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt responded kind of quickly. And she was basically like, guys, this is just a meme, an Internet meme. Quote, please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public. Ah, that's the Trump administration. I know. This feels like a very sort of Trumpian thing, right? Among him, among his staffers, among his supporters, they share images and say things that are controversial or offensive or just, you know, racist. And then they'd be like, these are just jokes. Relax. I mean, just a few weeks ago, Caroline Levitt said that Trump was just joking when he suggested canceling elections in the fall. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then I also think about last fall when, do you remember that group of young Republicans got called out when their group chat was made public and it was full of racist and sexist jokes and praise of Hitler? And at that time, Vice President J.D. Vance said, I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is caused to ruin their lives. A kid telling these jokes. Remember, these cats were like close to 30. 20s and 30s. Some of them were in their 30s, yeah. Vance was essentially saying that, you know, the victims in the situation were, again, these actual grown adults who were demeaning women and people of color, not the people being demeaned by the jokes in the group chat. Right. And look, Jean, you know this. I love jokes as much as the next guy. I am Joke City Central. That's what you're in my phone as, Joke City Central. That's how people know me. But it felt like there was something important worth unpacking in all of this. So I called up someone whose work has been on my mind for a little while now. His name is Raul Perez, and he's a professor of sociology at the University of La Verne, which is like kind of east of Los Angeles. And he's the author of a book called The Souls of White Jokes, How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. The Souls of White Jokes. I'm sorry. That's a good ass title. It's so good. And Raul named something that has been kind of roiling around in my mind for a while now. which is that racism is about a lot more than bitterness and resentment. We imagine that to be racist must be someone who is kind of filled with animosity and hatred and anger or fear or anxiety of the other. But we often don seriously sort of or if we do it often anecdotal that racism is also fun that racism is a source of fun I sorry Leah You really want to do a Black History Month episode about how racism is fun What are we doing right now Look, Jean, it's taken me years to build up the social capital to do this. Because I think understanding the ways that racism and racist humor are actually like ways that people bond and connect and feel pleasure is really important for people who want to try and dismantle racism. OK, let's get into it. This message comes from the BBC with its new podcast, The Interface. Every Thursday, three leading tech journalists explore how tech is rewiring your week and your world. Listen to The Interface on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Leah, let's just unpack this a little bit. Why does your boy Raul Perez say that racism is a barrel of laughs? Okay, well, he says if you think about it really simply, humor is this basic way that humans connect. It kind of lightens the mood or, you know, it creates a particular context of kind of play and enjoyment. And when it does that, then it can create sort of social cohesion, social bonding, feeling closer, sort of aligned with particular people. So one of the ways that racist humor works is by creating a bond over a sense of superiority. You know, it's like we're making fun of those people and we're better than those people. And that brings us closer to each other. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how bonding works in a lot of spaces, right? We talk a lot about how fandoms are actually often anti-fandoms. Like if you rock with Nicki Minaj, you have to necessarily hate Cardi, right? If you're an Eagles fan like me, we got to hate the Dallas Cowboys. Or if you work at a job and y'all all hate your boss, like that shared contempt for your boss brings y'all closer together. Yeah. And then you get to like, you know, throw a bunch of racial slurs at them. I mean, maybe you do that. No. OK. But yeah, I mean, obviously that's not part of like the normal fandoms. But to understand where the racism comes in, I think it's helpful to go back in time a little because maybe it's like a little bit less fraught than talking about our current moment. Okay. So, Jean, you and I have talked in the past about one of our favorite things, blackface. Oh, we talk about it all the time. You know what I'm saying? Every day. Have we checked in on my blackface today? It's like this racist phenomenon has followed us over the course of the time we've been doing this podcast, Leah. Like, it won't go away. Remember back in 2019 when it felt like every couple of days there was a new controversy around some politician who was like, whoops, I corked up. I did blackface. Luxury fashion brand Gucci stopped selling a sweater after criticism that it resembled blackface. Katy Perry's shoes yanked off shelves after she says she was saddened when they were compared to blackface. Overnight, Virginia's Democratic governor apologized for this yearbook photo. That was one of the days. Oh, my God. And, you know, hearing that, like, I think we all now kind of understand the ways that blackface is offensive and inappropriate and racist. Do we? Not everyone did. But anyway, Raul Perez told me that in the 1800s, blackface minstrelsy was actually the most popular form of entertainment in the country. And he said it was serving this very critical social role, which was to unite different groups of people who had basically nothing in common. and organize them around this shared identity, which was whiteness. But that whiteness then had to be sort of taught. It had to be learned. It had to be absorbed. And one of the key ways in which it was being absorbed at the time was through the enjoyment of seeing Black people being rendered buffoons on a comic stage for a national audience. And it wasn't like a one-time thing. every theater throughout the country was performing these kinds of performances. And it's a form of entertainment that would last and become very prominent and prevalent in the United States over the course of the next century. Leah, remember we did the episode about how a lot of the visual language in American cartoons come out of Blackface, Mr. C? Yes, the white gloves. The white gloves. Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny and those people wearing white gloves was a direct reference to Blackface, Volvue entertainers. And because that stuff is all going away, that connection to most of us is disappeared. But it was all directly a reference to this blackface stuff that everybody at the time just understood. Yeah. So blackface was this like big cultural thing, but it was also a very important political organizing tool. Right. Because, you know, in those days you had huge class divides among white people. There were like white people who were landowners and plantation owners versus poor white people who couldn't even vote. You had people who spoke different languages, who had immigrated at different times, who were coming from totally different countries, and their interests were often not aligned at all. And so one of the ways then that blackface minstrelsy was operating in this time was to try to create this sense of white culture white identity white nationhood you know in a context where the United States is a young and emerging and developing country Raul said that initial burst in popularity also largely coincided with Andrew Jackson's presidency, by the way. Of course it did. Andrew Jackson was obviously a genocidal maniac. He was responsible for the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of indigenous people across the United States and what would become the United States. Andrew Jackson, part of his kind of like official policy of the formation of the United States in the early 1800s was to explicitly develop the United States as a white nation, as a white man's democracy. In order to do that, we need to sort of bring in the support of white working class folks who are already at odds with white planters and white landlords and white employers because of their class sort of position and differentiation and, you know, access to wealth and political power. So then how do you have white people buy in into this new project of white America, white United States? They have to feel like they're a part of it. Raul said the title of his book is referencing this essay by W.E.B. Du Bois called The Souls of White Folk. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no. Not to be confused with Du Bois' more famous work, The Souls of Black Folk. Right. The Souls of White Folk argues that, you know, white identity, as we were just saying, didn't just come out of nowhere. It was socially and politically constructed. That something had to happen within the society to convince all these various kinds of peoples from European backgrounds and different languages and cultures, etc., to feel like they're the same, that they're on the same team. Okay, so Leah, blackface was this giant practice idiom? I don't know what you call it. From the past, the very recent past. And it still bleeds into the present day in all these ways. So what does this kind of racist humor as glue, what does that look like today? Well, Raul said, like, today's version of this basically exists online, right? In racist memes and videos and jokes and subcultures. And he said these cultures really started to gain prominence when Donald Trump was first running for president. You know, Trump himself was using his particular brand of insult humor to set him apart from other candidates. So he was famous for the nicknames like Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe Biden, Rhonda Sanctimonious, Pocahontas, Little Marco, Crazy Kamala, Cocaine Mitch, Governor Newsom, Shifty Schiff, Marjorie Trader Greene. Sorry, we get it. But then alongside that, there was this like internet culture. You also had a sort of conscious effort among emerging and younger white nationalists who understood the kind of power of humor to draw in younger supporters and potentially voters into the camp. So using meme culture, the image of the Pepe the Frog figure, which became very central to the political formation for young peoples at the time, became very sort of central to Trump's sort of rise in popularity, particularly among young voters. Okay, yeah, so like the Peppy the Frog stuff, right? And he would have like the MAGA hat on and like all that stuff was like, it was in the sort of like cauldron, the weird edgelord cauldron of like 4chan. But it spilled out into like just regular Twitter, but you know, pre-Elon Twitter, right? Like there was just like stuff you saw everywhere. People were sort of playing at this racist stuff. Yeah, but I mean it became like familiar in the way that like the sort of vernacular of blackface became familiar. You just like start to recognize it. And looking at the 1800s and today, some of the basic premises are the same, right? Like when people tell racist jokes, especially people with big platforms, they're sort of implicitly teaching people about racial hierarchies, right? Like you're demonstrating who can be dehumanized and who is a hero, who's the butt of a joke. Raul brought up memes that the Trump administration shared in 2025 about Alligator Alcatraz, you know, the immigrant detention center in South Florida. And the joke was that, you know, if migrants try to escape, they're going to be eaten by alligators. And that in itself became a whole kind of meme and a joke in itself. So I think the dehumanization is a consistent theme in the kind of humor that Trump has been circulating. And Raul said that in more private spaces, humor is also reinforcing norms and ideas that are connected. So he said this has happened in police group chats that have been made public where officers are joking about black and brown people as criminals and subjects of violence. It's happened with DHS. There was a very powerful ProPublica investigation. I believe it was 2019, that highlighted the way that Border Patrol officers, you know, had created a sort of private Facebook group with about 10,000 Border Patrol officers, where they sharing memes with each other you know laughing at the deaths of migrants at the border And he said that seeing the way that people in these powerful positions you know positions that have the ability to really affect people lives seeing them make jokes that dehumanize the people they interacting with it kind of undermines the idea that people in those positions are, you know, just doing their jobs. No, they're not just doing their job. They actually enjoy what they're doing. And what they're doing is engaging in racial violence. One of the other things Bravo brought up is that a lot of what makes all of this fun is that it is so taboo. And this is another thing that makes humor and certain forms of humor enjoyable. It's not just when they confirm a worldview. It's also when there's like a little bit of a danger factor or like a naughty or like it's like we're not supposed to say this in public. Yeah, for sound of like, oh, I'm transgressing somehow. And it makes sense, Right. Like we've talked before on the show about how making these taboo jokes also kind of lets you explore the limits of certain ideas without having to fully commit to those ideas. Right. Yes. I remember this. It was that episode you did about mass deportations. Damn. I will never forget you called it the Nellie principle. I actually want to shout out Lisa Hagen, our colleague who called it the Nellie principle. That was a reference to that line in Hot in Here. Right. He's like, you know, asking the woman, like, hey, I got a stripper pole in the basement if you want to dance on it. And she's like, what? He's like, I'm just kidding like Jason. Which obviously brings us back to that video with the Obamas as apes. It was this taboo thing, but it also, I think, provided some really useful information about how far the public is willing to go with racism, at least like right now. And I think Trump realized with the blowback even from his own party. And he said, OK, well, you know, I saw the limit. I saw the line. Can't go further than that. OK, but obviously there's a lot of space still between not racists at all and the first black president. His wife are apes. Yes, this is true. And I do think it's worth noting as well that largely because of the civil rights movement, anti-blackness is much more legible in this country than other types of racism. That's right. So we all know that equating black people with monkeys is racist. But when Trump calls COVID like Kung Flu or talks about the impending threat of taco trucks on every corner, like that doesn't necessarily get the same degree of outrage by certain types of people. Yeah, those things are allowed to just be, like we said, like just jokes. And Raul says, again, when we reduce each of these individual things to just a joke, we're totally missing the fact that humor can be this immensely powerful political tool. Racist humor has been central to the story of American society, but in a way that we haven't fully acknowledged. So here I'm trying to say that this is something to take a look at more closely, more critically, more consistently to treat racist humor as not isolated incidents by a few kids here and there, but how it's been used politically, strategically, how it's been weaponized past and present. And then what does it do? What are the consequences of this humor when it's deployed in these ways? It's funny because, like, comedy and humor have become this culture war battleground over the last 10, 15 years, right? But besides that, it's also really interesting that, like, for a lot of people, comedy is where they, like, encounter ideas for the first time, you know what I mean? And so, like, a lot of people, you know, just don't think about, like, say, trans issues outside of engaging with them in the context of, like, a Dave Chappelle routine, you know what I mean? And so there's all these weird ways that, like, edgy comedians are, for a lot of people, like, their sort of avenue to the news and to what's happening in the world. Does that make sense? Totally. I mean, I remember in high school, like, the way that people, like, learned about the news was watching The Daily Show. Mm-hmm. Which is, you know, arguably a more responsible way of learning about things than, like, a lot of the, like, edgelord comedians today. But I do think that the work that comedy is doing as this educational tool is a lot more powerful and widespread than it often gets credit for. by going to npr.org slash codeswitchnewsletter. Yes, that's where I test out all my best jokes. And just a reminder that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and public media, and you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash codeswitch. This episode was produced by Kayla Lattimore. It was edited by Dahlia Mortada. And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the residents of Joke City Central. That's Christina Kala, Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, B.A. Parker, and Yolanda Sanguini. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. And I'm Leah Dinella. Be easy, yo. Stop eating red meat. Truly, it's one of the worst things you can do for the planet.
