In which she summarises the summaries

[zeborah]

without having actually read the original studies:

1. Listening to sexist humour makes people act in a more sexist way than listening either to non-sexist humour or to sexist statements.

2. Being powerless impairs cognitive functioning -- allowing -isms and other hierarchies to be self-perpetuating.

(IIRC, one of these was via Figleaf and the other via Bitchy Jones. OTOH I'm not entirely all here this week so I may be wrong. OTGH they're both good blogs anyway.)

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Listening to sexist humour makes people act in a more sexist way than listening either to non-sexist humour or to sexist statements.

Or men, anyway. I'd be very interested in the results of a similar study performed on a group of women. I also wish the article mentioned how they determined the subjects' level of sexism (sexism is marked enough now that I would expect a lot of sexists to be less than candid about it) and how subjects with a low sexism rating behaved in the experiments.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Both of those definitely feel intuitively "right" to me.

I've noticed that if you're in a crowd that's just on the borderline of being aware that maybe they have some advantage relative to black people, telling a "reverse racist" joke (without expectation that anyone will find it funny) can help some of them get to really thinking about it all.

[zeborah]

What do you mean by a "reverse racist" joke - taking a racist joke and switching the nouns, or something else? Interesting either way.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I was trying to find the link to the best example I meant, but I'm not having any luck. It goes something like this:

So, two blacks are walking down the street. They come to shop with a sign in the window: "Become white: $25". One of the blacks says "Hey, what do you know? We have a $50 bill. It's worth a shot, hey?" The other one is a bit more cautious, but curious, so waits outside while the first one goes inside with the $50 bill. Some time later, the first comes out, and what do you know? White! The second one says "That's incredible! It really works! I didn't believe it but wow, that's impressive. Give me the other $25 so I can do it too". And the first says "You think I'm some kind of charity?"

[zeborah]

Oh, ouch. That's a good one; I can see why people mightn't laugh at it.... <wry grimace>