Last night I found myself writing an essay-length response to a Facebook post, and realized that its topic is part of a much bigger discussion that, both as a Trans individual and as a Unitarian Universalist, I believe we should all be pondering more deeply: the issue of inclusion. In particular, the difference between the brave language we like to use (*cough* "inherent worth and dignity of each person"), and what it might actually look like down in the trenches.
I therefore present, for your thoughtful perusal, the joke about the UU "cross".
It's an oldie, and it goes like this:
How do you intimidate a UU?
Answer:
Burn a question mark on their lawn.
It's clever. It references the fact that UUs advocate a questioning approach to life and faith, rather than offering a predetermined set of religiously authoritative answers. It jokingly sets up the question mark as a "holy symbol" of UUism - a jab that is sometimes used disparagingly toward us by more traditionally-religious folk, while being acknowledged laughingly with a certain pride by UUs themselves.
It also, of course, references the very real historic fact of physical intimidation used toward African-Americans in the "bad old days" of the KKK.
Recently a version of this old joke surfaced in a Facebook group of which I am a (very part-time) moderator, the marvelous Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society. The UUHS is a humor-based group that is grounded in UU principles... which means that we sometimes get into very complex and passionate discussions over the intersection of humor with issues of respect and tolerance. Is a certain joke "funny, but"? ... i. e. funny but racist, funny but homophobic, funny but based on socioeconomic class or gender stereotypes? We respectfully ask that "funny, but" jokes not be posted, we weed through them by hand when necessary (no small task in a group of over 250,000 members)... and when possible, we try to have serious conversations around them rather than just deleting them, because we are a lot less interested in policing language than we are in getting people to really think about the elements hidden under "funny" that can put others down, make them feel unwelcome, or perpetuate harmful assumptions about certain categories of people.
It's difficult to have these discussions, especially in an online environment. Sometimes we do need to police the comments section, or even just delete a post, because the whole thing is just too big to deal with and threatens our commitment to being a safe and respectful space for members who are non-white, non-cis-hetero, non-middle-class, and so forth. But when we can, when no explosions are imminent, we take the time and effort to talk through the reasons for our boundaries, to point out the hidden assumptions that aren't always noticeable and how they affect other real people in the group.
And so last night we embarked on the dread topic of burning the "UU cross". It's obvious that no one actually meant any harm, so a couple of us mods waded in to explain why it's a joke that crosses (no pun intended) some of the boundaries we try to respect.
Here, for your thoughtful pondering, is my "comment that somehow became an essay" of a response. Which boils down to: Yes, it's a joke with both a clever twist and a deeper meaning... but it's also a kind of humor that carries some pretty serious underlying issues with it, and is very problematic in a context like this one.
Here's why:
One prevalent aspect of our sense of "what's funny and what isn't" in this modern culture is that jokes with violent or hurtful connotations are generally only funny when they're not part of our immediate reality. (The exception to that is when we're "whistling in the dark," using black humor to face an imminent danger - but that's clearly not the case here in a casual Facebook group.)
So we can joke about, say, someone being tarred and feathered, without it feeling cruel... because chances are pretty good that we don't know anyone who has actually been tarred and feathered. It sounds like a comical punishment, and it IS... if you don't think about the fact that they sometimes used blistering hot tar which could only be removed from whatever remained of the victim's skin with further-blistering chemicals.
If we lived in a society where that actually happened to people, maybe even people we know, most of us wouldn't find it funny. It wouldn't be a matter of "censoring" it for being "offensive"... it would simply rouse too much painful empathy. It's worth noticing that we're a lot more careful when making jokes about things that someone in our own time-and-place might have actually experienced. That's why jokes about rape are (a.) rare and (b.) not generally perceived as being funny.
And so it's easy, and might seem harmless, to laugh at jokes that reference the physical and moral intimidation of other human beings based on race IF WE THINK OF IT AS ANCIENT HISTORY... something which clearly would never happen in our enlightened day and age.
But the most recent cross-burning happened in Mississippi in 2022 (look it up)... and other kinds of physical intimidation and outright abuse continue to be perpetrated on other humans in the here-and-now... witness Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and a long list of other literal victims of racism in our modern, "enlightened" society.
Whether intentional or not, the underpinning of this kind of joke is that I can laugh at it because it's not part of MY world. And that says something about who we are as a people. It says either "I dwell in a bubble where I am unaware of how some parts of my society treat non-white people" OR "I am aware of how some parts of my society treat non-white people, but I don't think it's important".
Neither of those is a good place to be, for a religious community that holds the worth and dignity of all people as one of its basic principles.
It also subtly creates an "us" and a "them"... with "us" being people who talk a good game about inclusion, but don't recognize when we are unwittingly excluding someone... and "them" wondering why they somehow just don't feel quite as welcome as we say they are.
Yeah, that's a lot of food-for-thought from a one-liner that most people would consider harmless. But... you're invited to this feast of ideas. And I hope you'll come. Because these are the kinds of problems we need to be probing if we want to reach a level of genuine inclusion in our communities, instead of just saying it as if we were already there.
