Racist and anti-racist discourse in Greek migrant/refugee jokes:
A multiliteracies teaching proposal for liquid racism
Following the multiliteracies model (Kalantzis & Cope 2012), we explore the designing of a critical teaching proposal focusing on migrant/refugee jokes. Although these jokes have an anti-racist intention, they end up reproducing racist views, bringing to the surface a modern and subtler kind of racism, i.e. liquid racism (Weaver 2016). The aim of the analysis of such texts in class is to enable the students to identify how and why “anti-racist” jokes can, through an amusing and seemingly innocent way, (re)produce racist interpretations, such as the assimilation and deprecation of migrants/refugees. Critical teaching of humor and discussions about racism, anti-racism, and liquid racism could contribute to the deconstruction of established concepts of immigrant/refugee populations, reinforcing different and antagonistic views to the hegemonic racist discourse.
References
Kalantzis, M. & Cope, Β. 2012. Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weaver, S. 2016. The Rhetoric of Racist Humor: US, UK and Global Race Joking. London: Routledge.
Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 