Racismo e humor : o impacto de piadas nas expressões de racismo

Abstract

In Brazil, racism is often denied and confused with forms of discrimination of social classes, peculiarities that were printed in our relations in the slave period. The Brazilians, with their tendency to be informal and friendly in their relations, brings up to the country a particular form of expression of racism where laughter is often used as a mediator or catalyst in their manifestations. Having said that, this study aims to investigate the impact of humour in expressions of racism in brazilian context. In Study 1, it was investigated the effect of humour on expressions of racism through na instrument that investigates implicit racism, which is The Police Officer’s Dilemma (Correll, Park, Judd & Winttenbrink, 2002). In study 2, it was investigated the impact of humour in controlled processes of response through the Modern Racism Scale developed by McConahay, Hardee and Batss (1981) and adapted to Brazil by Santos, Gouveia, Navas, Pimente and Gusmão (2006). The results of study 1 showed no effect of humour, especially the racist humour, the implicit racism of the participants. However, the results indicated an influence of the suspec’s skin color on the decision to shoot the participant in both the speed and the accuracy. The results of the study 2 did not show the impact of humour in the expressions of the explicit racism. The participants had near levels of expressions, which are below the average/medium point of the scale that indicates no explicit racism. We believe that the presentation of the instrument to participants at a later time to the normative priming the jokes did not allow an effective seizure of cognitive interval duration of the suspension of the anti- racist norm.