Ethnic Jokes

Yesterday's Honolulu Advertiser had a letter from Jerome Nihipali defending ethnic jokes.

(That letter can't be found on the Web version of the Honolulu Advertiser, for some odd reason)

Ethnic jokes, like other jokes, can cause different reactions from different people. You can tell a joke about Filipinos, one Filipino might laugh, another Filipino might get mad, another will just think it's lame.

Ethnic jokes are one of those things you better be MEGA-careful about. You make all the jokes about the opposite sex, you probably won't offend much people.

But when the issue is race, people can get defensive.

Why?

When was the last time you heard about a gender-based riot? Never!

But race riots happen all the time WORLDWIDE! People get killed for having the wrong skin color, the wrong facial shape, wrong eye shape, wrong accent, etc. You're dam eff'n right someone would get defensive when you joke about that.

Nihipali said in his letter that ethnic jokes were a bonding thing between differing ethnicities in the plantation era. Again, context is everything. A Japanese and a Filipino co-worker who get along with each other, can make all the jokes they want about each other. They can say something like "yo mama is so Filipino.... yo mama is so Japanese" and they can laugh about it.

It's when people who dont really know each other, that's when one should restrain from ethnic humor. But some do ethnic humor, not so much to reach out, but to put down. It's the attitude of "what the fuck are you people doing here?"

Think it doesn't happen here? Just look at one of my recent posts about this Chinese guy who hated Polynesians. That didn't pop out of nowhere. And that was from someone who grew up in Hawaii, NOT California.

Nihipali talks about the plantation culture and applies to some people in Hawaii. In high schools like Pearl City, Castle, Campbell, Aiea, Waialua, etc, most students are descendants of the sugar plantation workers of the early 20th century!

NOT IN McKINLEY HIGH SCHOOL! I'd say about HALF the students weren't even born in the U.S. And at least half of the rest have parents who were immigrants who came after the 1970's when the sugar plantations started to fade away. If my predictions were right, that means less than 25% of the student population even relate to the plantation experience through family lines.

The same dynamic can be found at schools like Radford, which has a LARGE number of students who are military dependents. The Hawaii plantation culture that Nihipali so celebrates is something a lot of Radford students can't relate to at all. Plus, the word "plantation" doesn't bring sweet memories to African Americans, it brings the images of slavery.