A defining feature of the ascendency of Donald Trump and the far-right over the last decade has been the re-normalization of racist discourse and racist forms of amusement in U.S. society. This mode of right-wing enjoyment was clearly expressed during Trump’s final presidential campaign rally held at Madison Square Garden. The rally featured an onslaught of racist commentary and jokes from various speakers, including the viral racist punchline delivered by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at the event. While many believed these overt racist comments and jokes would torpedo Trump’s reelection bid and sink his support from Latino voters in battleground states, not only did Trump win the 2024 election, he also seemingly increased support among Latino voters, some of who presumably enjoyed the racist jokes and commentary targeting Latinos and other marginalized groups featured that evening. How could this be the case?
While this kind of overt racist discourse and humor is most often associated with white right-wing and conservative political ideologies and worldviews, it is worth revisiting the racist political scandal that took place in the Los Angeles City Council only two years earlier, an incident that took the city and nation by surprise given the involvement of four Democratic Latino leaders in the city. In October of 2022, City Council President Nury Martinez, Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, were heard trading racist comments and jokes about Black, Indigenous, and other racial and ethnic communities in the city during a political strategy meeting that was being secretly recorded without their consent. Some of the most egregious remarks were the cavalier racist comments and jokes shared by Council President Martinez, who referred to fellow Democratic councilmember Mike Bonin’s adopted Black son as an “accessory” and a “changuito” (a little monkey), joked about beating Bonin’s child, and laughed while she described Oaxacan and Indigenous community members in the city as “short and ugly.” “Tan feos,” she remarked in Spanish, while other Latino leaders in the room chuckled along and added to these and other racist slights throughout the meeting.
This incident, I argued at the time, revealed what many of us Latinos have routinely experienced and witnessed in our everyday lives with family, friends, co-workers, and communities, but rarely examine critically or discuss publicly. Racist notions and emotions among Latinos are routinely expressed through what I describe as “amused racial contempt” in my book The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. I define “amused racial contempt” as a centuries long affective mechanism rooted in the history of European colonialism, racial slavery, and race making, one that makes use of racist fun, amusement, and humor to reinforce the affective dimensions of racism and racial othering alongside the broader historical development of whiteness and white supremacy in the U.S., Latin America, and globally. While I emphasize that this form of racist fun and humor stems from a white settler colonial framework, I note that amused racial contempt is a practice also engaged by non-whites in ways that can reinforce dominant racial ideologies and worldviews.
Critically examining the role of racist amusement in the reproduction of racism and racial othering is crucial for seeing how such comments are often more than “just jokes.” In turn, I argue that a critical approach to these and other forms of racist fun helps to move us beyond the “racism as hatred” model in the study of racialized emotions, which sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes as the specific racial feelings and emotions that emerge within racialized societies that work to link seemingly personal and private racial feelings (and pleasures) to the persisting problem of structural and systemic racism. Moreover, by centering a critical analysis of the racist forms of amusement shared and enjoyed by whites and non-whites, and how these forms often overlap around similar racialized targets, this approach can also give us better insight into the everyday affective politics of racial othering and belonging, and illuminate how they contribute to the formation of what political scientist Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness.” Beltrán describes multiracial whiteness as a framework that renders “whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity.” It is a “discriminatory worldview” Beltrán notes, “in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.” The everyday dehumanization of others, I argue, often takes shape under the guise of fun and humor.
In this brief essay, my goal is to initiate a larger conversation about the everyday forms of racist enjoyment engaged by Latinos in the current social and political era, how they reflect racist forms of amusement rooted in the history of European settler colonialism and white supremacy, and what they potentially reveal about the racialized emotions and worldviews harbored within this racialized community in the U.S. and beyond. I begin by reflecting on the following questions: How does racist humor and right-wing enjoyment serve to normalize hegemonic notions of race among Latinos? How might its usage shape their sense of belonging within the larger cultural, political, and economic fabric of a racialized society that so often regards Latinos, the “largest minority” group in the country, as “less-than” and expendable? And how does racist enjoyment and humor engaged by Latinos contribute to everyday forms of affective othering, such as anti-blackness and anti-indigenous racism, that persist within Latino communities in the U.S. and beyond?
Critically analyzing Latinos during the current and ongoing fascist assault on Latinx communities by masked ICE agents and the Trump administration is not something I engage in lightly, as this assault is one that has been aided and supported by Latinos who have become increasingly aligned, politically and affectively, with what Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes describe as the “multiracial right.” As HoSang argues, the right has been more adept and successful than liberals and progressives in offering “cultural responses to the failures of neoliberalism as a means for shaping worldviews… all while speaking to people’s day-to-day concerns, lived experiences, and discontents.’” In turn, HoSang notes that “People of color are not immune to such appeals…” as the pressure and precarity produced under neoliberal capitalism contributes to “reshaping everyday interests, needs, and desires in ways that have allowed the Right to forge new inroads into communities of color.” In a racialized society, one of the keyways that everyday concerns and discontents over racialized others is often expressed, and momentarily relieved, is through engaging in the shared ridicule of racialized others, a collective form of racist fun and amusement that I described below as right-wing enjoyment.
Racist Humor as Right-Wing Enjoyment
Emotions, worldviews, and modes of enjoyment are always socially and politically situated. As philosopher Todd McGowan argues in his book, Enjoyment Right & Left, larger political struggles “take place to determine what form of enjoyment will predominate.” The popularity of racist forms of humor, entertainment, and imagery in the U.S. and Latin America during the 19th and much of the 20th century, like blackface minstrelsy for example, reflected the predominance of a social and political system and worldview invested in racial hierarchy and white supremacy. While such forms of racial amusement were contested as “racist,” in the post-Civil Rights era, the current right-wing mainstreaming of racist discourse in public life over the last decade has contributed to the re-normalization of dehumanizing and anti-egalitarian forms of amusement that constitute a mode right-wing enjoyment. “Right-wing enjoyment requires an enemy to serve as a frontier separating those who belong from those who don’t” McGowan notes, adding that a “right-wing joke operates according to a strict opposition between belonging and nonbelonging.”
Over the last decade, there has been increased research on the usage of racist amusement and humor among white Americans on the right, and how this practice contributes to reinforcing and reproducing racism and white supremacy in the current era. Yet, little has been said about the ways that these racist forms of enjoyment and humor are also shared and expressed among non-whites in general, Latinos in particular, even among Latinos who are presumably “liberal” or ostensibly on the “left,” as was explicitly illustrated by the four Democratic Latino leaders in Los Angeles.
This oversight contributes to what critical race and law scholar Tanya Katerí Hernández describes as racial innocence. Hernández contends that we often ignore, downplay, or deny the existence and prevalence of anti-Blackness and other forms of racism and racialized emotions harbored within the Latino community. “It’s an uncomfortable truth,” notes Hernández, “but belief in racial hierarchy is common in Latino communities like it is in others.” One contributing factor comes from the histories of racism, slavery, and European settler colonialism that also constitute part of the development of Latin America. Another comes from the racial socialization that Latinos experience and internalize by living in a racialized society like the U.S., and from the hegemonic racial ideologies that have long been exported globally via U.S. media and popular culture. In exploring how Latinos use amused racial contempt as a form of right-wing enjoyment, it is worth considering to what extent this issue is, or is not, a prevalent problem within the Latino community today.
Amused Racial Contempt among Latinos in the U.S.
While there is little scholarly research highlighting the usage of racist humor among Latinos in the U.S, there are recent indications that this is an issue worth examining more closely. For instance, a 2022 Pew survey revealed that about 50% of Latinos reported that they “hear racist or racially insensitive comments or jokes” from friends and family about other Latinos, while nearly half of Latinos surveyed also reported that they “often or sometimes hear Hispanic friends or family members make racist or racially insensitive comments or jokes about others who are not Hispanic.” In other words, today roughly 1 in 2 Latinos regularly hears racist comments or jokes, about Latinos or other racial and ethnic communities, from their own Latino family members and friends.
Some of this behavior among Latinos has also been spotlighted in high-profile news stories over the last decade. For example, only a few months before the racist L.A. City Council recordings were revealed, in August of 2022 the L.A. Times reported that the largest workplace discrimination cases in California involve Latino workers accused of racially harassing and abusing their Black co-workers inside various warehouse storage facilities and other workplaces across the state. Hundreds of incidents revealed that Latino workers and supervisors expressed anti-Black slurs, jokes, and ridicule in both English and Spanish. Black employees have also filed major lawsuits against Latino co-workers and supervisors for racial abuse and harassment in university, nursing, and agricultural workplaces throughout California. Although workers from all racialized backgrounds, including Latinos, experience racial abuse and harassment in the workplace, the investigation noted that cases involving Black victims are the most frequently reported.
While the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) tracks the race and ethnicity of victims of workplace discrimination, it does not compile official statistics of offenders in these incidents. This makes it challenging to determine the number of Latino workers who express anti-Black and other forms of racism. Yet, the L.A. Times story also notes that “court filings, victims’ allegations, and employer records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Angeles and San Francisco offices involved discrimination by Latinos.” While another third of these incidents are reported as being perpetrated by white workers, together these incidents reveal that amused racial contempt is a significant way in which Latino and white workers are currently channeling their racialized emotions and frustrations towards their Black co-workers.
This pervasive usage of racist enjoyment is also noteworthy among Latinos employed within the criminal justice system. Over the last decade, Latino police officers have made headline news for their role in using racist jokes and ridicule against racialized and targeted communities as well. For example, in 2016, Tom Angel, Chief of Staff for the L.A. Country Sheriff’s Department, the largest sheriff’s department in the U.S., resigned over his role in sharing racist emails to numerous staff members that contained racist jokes that mocked Black, Muslim and Latino communities. Angel, who identifies as Mexican American, apologized for having forwarded these racist emails, but noted that his “intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes.” Angel came under fire as thousands of other police officers in numerous police department across the U.S. were being investigated for similar behavior taking place on their work phones, email accounts, and on social media, something I document more closely in my book.
As police departments across the country were under closer scrutiny for engaging in racial abuse and violence, a problem made more visible by the Black Lives Matter protests and uprisings that took place throughout the U.S. and globally, other law enforcement agencies, such as U.S. Border Patrol, faced similar investigations. A 2019 ProPublica investigation, for instance, spotlighted a private Facebook group with nearly ten thousand current and former border patrol agents that contained numerous examples of racist and sexist jokes and memes. Here, agents were also found joking about the deaths of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and traded sexually graphic images of congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as other derogatory comments directed at Latina/o Democratic officials. According to political scientist David Cortez, Latinos comprise about 50% of border patrol agents and 30% of ICE agents in the U.S.
These forms of amused racial and gendered contempt take on an added layer of cruelty when wielded by public servants ostensibly sworn to “protect and serve” the public, who have discretionary power to use force and violence to uphold “law and order,” and when they are shared by Latinos in positions of power who engage in racial abuse against their own racialized communities.
More than a Joke
As Latinos are projected to comprise over a quarter of the total U.S. population within the next few decades, and will continue to play a larger role within U.S. society, it is crucial that we have a clearer understanding of the ways that Latinos not only experience racism and discrimination, but how they contribute to the reproduction and maintenance of everyday and systemic forms of racism and discrimination as well. By looking more closely at the use of amused racial contempt as an everyday form of right-wing enjoyment among Latinos, I argue we can better understand the everyday affective mechanisms and processes of racial othering and belonging taking place within this racialized community.
Moreover, in a society that has generally regarded the problem of racism and racial othering as a Black and white issue, and as a problem most often associated with “ignorance” and “hate,” we must analyze how right-wing and racist ideologies can come to constitute a part of the social and affective habitus of Latinos in everyday life, a mode of right-wing racial enjoyment that has the potential to align with the affective politics of a growing multiracial right. The point of developing a clearer understanding and interpretation of this issue, however, is to find new and better ways to disrupt this growing social, racial, and political alignment in order to change it.
Featured Photo Credit: Photo of New Kids in the Neighborhood by Rockwell at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Flickr user Peter E. CC BY-NC 2.0