When ‘Just Joking’ Is No Joke: How to Respond When Students’ ‘Jokes’ are Biased or Offensive
Tools and Strategies
There are many benefits to humor. A good joke can ease tension in a stressful situation. Humor can connect people and bring them together. Jokes can bring levity to a situation that begs for lightheartedness. Being funny can signal to others who you are. Humor can even open a conversation that previously felt closed or off-limits. However, jokes and humor, when they target social identity groups, can do the opposite. They can make people feel unsafe, disconnected, excluded and…
Increase your awareness of religious obligations and ethnic and cultural festivities that may affect students, colleagues and neighbors in your community.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s came about out of the need and desire for equality and freedom for African Americans and other people of color. Nearly one hundred years after slavery was abolished, there was widespread segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement and racially motivated violence that permeated all personal and structural aspects of life for black people. “Jim Crow” laws at the local and state levels barred African Americans from…