Cultural Diversity and Racial Discrimination Justyna Urbaniak, College 2 Student
“Why are some forms of racial discrimination more accepted by the society, whereas others not?” The first year of the IB programme has already kept some of my classmates and me quite busy. Our first bigger assignment for “theory of knowledge” was a presentation. The general topic assigned was cultural diversity, so as a Polish citizen living in Switzerland, the first real life situation that came to my mind was the stereotypical jokes that are made about other cultures, for instance Italians being bad at driving, and in my case Polish stealing cars. So I firstly asked myself, why do people even make jokes? I think we can all agree that we tell jokes to make others laugh, to prove ourselves worthy and sometimes even to be in the centre of attention. But why do we make jokes that concern and ridicule other people’s cultures and races?
Justyna Urbaniak
Some people treat them as normal jokes, some, however, intentionally want to offend another person, but what is more interesting is how people react to those stereotypical jokes. Namely, for some people national stereotypes are harmless jokes, and to others they might provoke racism. Now, among those jokes there are also other forms of racial discrimination. For example, there are certain names used to describe dark skinned people, which are often used as nicknames or in songs and to which society reacts very differently. So my final question was: “Why are some forms of racial discrimination more accepted by the society, whereas others not?” After having analysed the different forms of discrimination, I came to a conclusion that generally, compared to other forms of racial discrimination, jokes are more accepted, because the majority may see jokes as rather harmless. Firstly, the intention of the person telling a joke is not always clear and therefore we tend to interpret it as friendly, secondly, jokes are mainly meant to be funny and peaceful. Very importantly, however, everyone has different levels of tolerance.
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