Jokes are one way racism is normalized and Black people are dehumanized - Tricia Rose on the BBC

Tricia Rose joins the BBC to offer her perspective on the racist video circulated by the White House. Rose says that racist jokes powerfully reinforce dehumanizing tropes about Black people. When we’re depicted as less than human, injustices against us can be understood as “justified.”

She also explains that the dehumanization of Black people is a long-standing device of racist storytelling. It is part of a bigger anti-civil-rights project to justify the destruction of equal rights for all human beings, especially the rights of Black and Brown people.