Guest Lecture – Raúl Pérez

The Philosophy Department is thrilled to welcome Raúl Pérez! Raúl will deliver a talk entitled: “The Souls of White Jokes- How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy”

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 Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of La Verne. His book, The Souls of White Joke: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy has been recently published by Stanford University Press.