To not make fun of something is, we believe, itself a form of bullying. When a humorist makes the conscious decision to exclude a group from derision, isn’t he or she implying that the members of that group are not capable of self-reflection? Or don’t possess the mental faculties to recognize the nuances of satire? A group that’s excluded never gets the opportunity to join in the greater human conversation.
At work today, I listened to a group of white and black people joking around. A black guy talked about his love of Popeye’s fried chicken and joked that the reason there weren’t any franchises nearby is because the residents think “we’ve already got enough black people around here!” A white guy talked about walking into a Waffle House in Atlanta and wondering why everyone was staring at him. “Oh. I’m the only white guy here. Yeah, guess I’ll go ahead and leave, then.” A black guy talked about being pranked at an event by a friend who set it up so that the (white) band stopped playing and all the (white) guests turned to stare at him when he walked in.
I guess it’s a sign that I’ve spent too long on the Internet that I was struck by how friendly and easygoing everyone was, even while discussing potentially sensitive topics. I laughed to myself, thinking about how your average twitosphere SJW would have been having an absolute hyperventilating shitfit while trying to monitor and regulate the conversation to their fragile standards.