Ethnic Jokes: An Introduction to Race and Nationality

I begin a course in Race and Nationality with a skit depicting an angry confrontation between a white professor and a black student over a racial joke. I do so in order to create immediate interest in the question of how to interpret jokes. The students are asked to fill out a questionnaire dealing with matters raised in the skit. Then they are assigned a field project designed to measure the incidence of ethnic joking on campus and to collect other information on the subject. The skit, in combination with the field research, findings of which are discussed in class, provide an important link between common student experiences and rather abstract issues in race relations. The five-session introduction to racial joking is a provocative introductory section to the