Playing with Oppression: Latinx Students’ Use of Humor to Navigate Assumed Racism

Humor as Play and Ambiguity

Members of oppressed groups have historically used humor to contest oppression (Abrahams 1962; Gordon 1998; Levine 1978; Obrdlik 1942). Understanding humor as a way to navigate racism requires understanding two characteristics of humor: (1) its play frame and (2) its ambiguity. Here I explain each characteristic in detail.

The meanings of words, gestures, and other expressions are not intrinsic or fixed. Instead, they depend on a frame or logic of interpretation that indicates to the receiver how to understand the messages contained therein (e.g., Bateson 1955; Goffman 1974). Play is a type of frame. In the play frame, the typical meanings messages would have in a serious frame are erased (Bateson 1955). Many social actions—including humor—are in a play frame (Fry 1963; Goffman 1955, 1974). When interactions are interpreted through a play frame, the interactions are established as not literal or real, and therefore, the joker can dissociate from or disclaim a statement (Bateson 1955; Fry 1963). Therefore, because they use humor, individuals do not face the usual consequences of transgressing norms or expressing aggression (Emerson 1969; Stephenson 1951).

Humor in general is ambiguous because of its bisociation of meaning: two incompatible interpretations, each of which is governed by a different logic (Koestler 1964). However, both are correct interpretations within the respective framework (Davis 1993). The flexibility for interactants to choreograph their interactions lies in this duality of meanings and logics (Tavory and Fine 2020), and this inherent ambiguity of humor allows interactants to negotiate the meanings and relationships in interactions (Kuipers 2008:373). Indeed, previous research on interactional dynamics in interactional humor highlights theirsocial dimension, such as defining self or defining others (Fine 1984) and boundary-making or boundary-testing (Walle 1976). In other words, the process of negotiating frames is fundamentally sociological in that it exposes and reinforces social relationships through interactants’ engagement (or lack thereof) with the play frame.

Making Sense of Ambiguous Encounters

The negotiation of subjective meanings iscentral in symbolic interactionism. Symbols (e.g., words and gestures) that interactants interpret meanings from, however, are inherently ambiguous, and their meanings are determined by others’ responses to them (Fine and Kleinman 1986). Role-performing (also known as role-playing)—a sociological concept that refers to an individual enacting the behaviors expected when inhabiting a specific position—cannot occur unless the individual first imagines another person’s point of view (i.e., role-taking; see also, Abrutyn and Lizardo 2022; Turner 2010). ³ In other words: role-performing requires one to imagine another person’s attitudes and then anticipate that person’s behaviors (Coutu 1951). Nonetheless, the imagined construction of meanings through role-taking is interwoven with social context and social structure. To infer from the ambiguity inherent in what is observed, one may assume another’s attitudes on the basis of one’s knowledge of the situation, one’s prior experiences with similar people, and other criteria of inference (Turner 1956). For example, a young Black man might interpret a repeated “Can I help you?” in a particular tone from a White person in a service role (e.g., a salesperson and a security guard) as “What is your business here?” His interpretation is inferred from the situational cues he detects, including the repeated questioning and the tone used. Furthermore, a Black person’s awareness of the stigmatized status of being Black “occurs in subtle and ambiguous ways over time” based on accumulated experiences and observations (Anderson 2015: 15–16). In similar ways, other racial groups extract racial meanings from the ambiguity in interactions. In such situations, race serves as a master status—a status that transcends all other statuses—when inferring racial meanings to conceptualize similarity among a given group of people. ⁴ When interpreting the ambiguity in interactions with another person of a different race, one appeals to one’s experiences with other people of that race and anticipates the other person’s attitudes based on those experiences.

Playing with Racism Using Humor

Playing with racism through humor includes joking about racial inequality as an abstract idea and about concrete experiences with racism. Ethnic humor—humor that makes fun of stereotypes that delineate social distinctions among ethnic groups—is another type of humor that involves racism. Ethnic humor has been theorized as both aggressive and benign as well as both oppressive and subversive (e.g., Apte 1987; Boskin and Dorinson 1985; Lowe 1986; Pérez 2017; Weaver 2016). It can involve joking about stereotypes of an outside group (i.e., other-directed ethnic humor) or those of one’s own group (i.e., self-directed ethnic humor, which is a type of self-deprecating humor). While other-directed ethnic humor is mainly theorized as expressing aggression, such as control and conflict between races (Boskin and Dorinson 1985; Burma 1946), self-directed ethnic humor has been theorized as “a weapon of liberation” (Lowe 1986:442). African American humor has a long tradition of contesting power inequalities (Abrahams 1962; Carpio 2008; Gordon 1998; Levine 1978). A type of African American humor—through storytelling and canned jokes—that portrays Black people through stereotypes and thereby exposes the absurdity of these stereotypes releases “pent-up Black aggression toward it” and “rob[s] [others] of their power to hurt and humiliate” (Levine 1978:335–36). Scholars have also observed self-directed ethnic humor in spontaneous interactions and have discussed its “liberating” elements. An ethnography shows that immigrants in Denmark use self-deprecating humor that involves their own ethnic stereotypes preemptively and thereby critique and ridicule the tropes (Esholdt 2019).

From a symbolic interactionist perspective, spontaneous self-directed ethnic humor also involves racial minorities controlling their self-images. Face-to-face interactions involve cycles of role-taking and role-performing. To make matters more complicated, various cues become available during the role performance in these interactions—whether they are compatible with the person’s self-image or not. Therefore, interactants often take active control of implications of these cues (Goffman 1961). In the case of the stigmatized (i.e., individuals with discrediting attributes; in this case, those discredited by racial stereotypes), they sometimes consciously perform the expected behaviors of their stigmatized roles (Goffman 1963:110). In performing these roles, the stigmatized use role distance—behaviors that convey the separateness between the individual and the role—to resist the (stigmatized) roles and ultimately control their self-images (Goffman 1961). Levitin (1964) observed that a low-status worker, by making himself the object of self-deprecation humor, separated himself from his low-status work while performing his low-status role. Similarly, the stigmatized invoke their own ethnic stereotypes preemptively to humorously perform an imagined, expected role and to ultimately dissociate themselves from the tropes (Esholdt 2019).

Prior research on self-directed humor generally does not explicitly discuss the role-taking process that occurs prior to humor. In this article, I use ethnography to capture two types of ambiguity—the often ambiguous, situational cues and the inherently ambiguous impromptu humorous remarks—in spontaneous interactional humor when used as an interactional strategy. In what follows, I first introduce my fieldsite, Spruce High School, as a racialized context and present the method I employed. Then I discuss how racial minority students negotiate racial meanings through humor and focus on illustrating the two types of ambiguity central to such humorous interactions.

Humor as a Strategy of Playing with Perceived Oppression

During a self-study period, Paola, Victoria, Irma, and Adriana (all Latinas) sit around a round study desk right behind the reception desk (less than 10 feet away). The students chat about various things, and some of them burst out laughing. After a while, one of the staff (a White-passing Latina) walks over and tells them to be quiet, but to no avail. ⁷ Then the librarian (a White woman) at the reception desk turns to the group of students and says in a firm voice, “We are trying to get some work done, so if you’re gonna be loud, you need to be in a different area.” Both Victoria and Adriana respond politely. This scene takes place a few seconds later:

The students look down at their desk and say nothing, then they chuckle. Eventually, Paola mumbles under her breath, “I had librarians that were mean bitches before.” “So annoying,” Victoria says slowly. “But we shoulda went to the Spruce public library. The shit be poppin’,” Victoria adds “We shoulda stayed out of school TODAY!” ⁸ Victoria repeats. The table giggles. “Should just skip this mother fucker,” Paola agrees and adds, “TODAY!” louder than Victoria. Paola extends her arm and accidentally knocks her water bottle over. She quickly picks it up. “My bad,” Paola apologizes, leaning her head towards the desk. “I’m interrupting your learning, LUHORRRNING,” she says and giggles. Then she adds, “I hate her.” Her hand reaches into a bag of Doritos. Adrianna looks up and tries to spook Paola, “Hah!” “Please,” Paola puts up her palm against Adrianna’s face. Victoria leans towards the group and says, “I maaaaht be disturbing your learning.” The group giggles.

The direct communication between the girls and the staff follows typical social norms in the serious frame: students acknowledge and accept the staff’s request. The initial silence is a response to the power dynamics: the staff hold authority over the students, so the students comply. The giggles at the conclusion of the silence mark a transition from a serious frame to a play frame.

The staff’s behaviors toward the students as situational cues can invoke interpretations in addition to racial discrimination, from my perspective. For example, one may interpret the cues as the staff simply enforcing rules in the library. It is difficult to determine precisely when the students began to impute racial meanings to the staff’s behaviors. Only after the aforementioned scene occurred did one of the students explicitly express her belief that the staff’s behaviors were racist. Shortly after the incident, the staff person at the reception desk told the girls that they could not sign up for the next period unless they moved to another space in the library. Some of the students said: “You are kicking us out,” in disbelief to each other and to no one in particular. Victoria mumbled, “Colored kids get treated different,” and walked away from the reception desk. This comment highlights Victoria’s interpretation of the staff person’s actions as racially motivated and as an extension of her experiences with racism at the school. The students’ heightened racial awareness (i.e., their awareness of their stigma) is seen elsewhere: both Adrianna and Victoria told me on separate occasions that the White kids at the school were racist. They also recounted White adults’ racist interactions with them in the past. For example, Victoria noticed being monitored at a store one time. Adrianna told me that she was treated differently by the parent at a White friend’s house. In an interview, Paola expressed her belief that “someone that wasn’t White” would have been punished for a misdemeanor for which a White student did not face any punishment.

Paola’s use of the sexist word “bitches”—commonly used as an insult to dehumanize women—suggests her desire to assert her dominance over the staff member (see also, Kleinman, Ezzell, and Frost 2009). The sarcasm marks the students’ shift into a play frame and begins when the students mock the staff’s logic that the students are interrupting their work. In the play frame, Paola and her friends are performing the role of someone who agrees with the staff’s logics. However, by using sarcasm, they separate themselves from the role (i.e., role distance; see Goffman 1961) and therefore are able to express their resistance to it. Sarcasm, as a form of humor, is bitter and biting and “announces a position. . . not often inherent in the denotative meanings of the words of themselves” (Fine and Martin 1990:97). When Paola apologizes for interrupting her friends’ learning, her paraverbal expressions (i.e., her tone) conveys something else: she is ridiculing the staff for finding their earlier behaviors disruptive and, to some extent, the staff’s self-importance (“We are trying to get some work done”). In addition, their paraphrase, “interrupting your learning,” also mimics the language that staff tend to use. By distorting the pronunciation of “learning,” Paola shows her open contempt for the staff. One could also interpret this as Paola making the staff’s request ironic, by pointing out the incongruity between knocking over a water bottle and disruptive behaviors through their “re-enactment.” Thus, the students offer a critique of the staff’s logics embedded in their “oppressive” behaviors.

Overall, the students’ sarcasm suggests that they interpret the staff’s behaviors as an affront, which is consistent with superiority theory in that humor involves self-aggrandizing as a way to counterattack, with relief theory in that humor relieves embarrassment when one experiences conflict or tension, and with solidarity theory in that humor builds ingroup solidarity when facing external threat (Burma 1946; Coser 1959; Francis 1994; Koller 1988; Obrdlik 1942). Importantly, because humor’s inherent ambiguity frees the joker from the usual consequences of expressing “inappropriateness” (Emerson 1969), the students are able to play with perceived racist affronts with impunity. At least one of the staff, throughout the scene, sits within earshot of the students and chooses not to engage with the students in either a play frame or a serious frame after the initial interaction.

Similarly, students use humor to deal with perceived affronts in their regular classrooms. The next scene takes place when a substitute teacher asks the class to work on a few algebra problems from the textbook. Daniel and Rafael, both U.S.–born Mexican American, are long-term English learners and habitually skip class. They sit at a circular desk in their algebra class. The desk is up front, near the door, and away from other students who sit in groups of four at rectangular desks. While taking attendance using a photo roster, the substitute teacher, a White woman in her late 50s, confuses Daniel with Rafael and vice versa.

The teacher asks the class, “Which question are you on?” Then, she points to each number listed on the blackboard and asks the students to raise their hands to indicate where they are. No one raises their hands until Daniel and Rafael raise their hands for the last question. “Looks like everyone is finished,” the teacher says, scanning the room. With their hands still raised, Daniel and Rafael look at her and then at each other, then start giggling. The teacher notices this and says to them, “I saw it. I saw it.”

She immediately turns to a math problem written on the board and reads, “If you want to make 150 this month, and you get paid 10 dollars an hour. How many hours do you have to work?” “Don’t they take out taxes from the paycheck?” Daniel leans into the back of his chair, smiling and looking at me. I nod. Then he says to me, “You should tell her!” He folds in his lower lip, gently lifts his arm up, and gestures me to say it to her. Then Daniel looks at me, “See?” as the sub says to the class, “Yes, there are taxes. This is an ideal situation.” Then, a White girl yells out a number. The sub responds with “Favorite student of the minute!” in a performative, fun voice. Daniel leans back into his chair with a smirk on his face and says to me, in his usual lax tone, “Oh, I’m jealous.”

Ethnographic evidence suggests both boys have heightened racial awareness, particularly the awareness that others (often White individuals) perceive them to be racially inferior. During interviews and observations, Daniel often commented on the whiteness of the school and his desire to dissociate himself from it, and Rafael shared his experiences with racism and expressed a sense of helplessness. One time during lunch break, Daniel told me, “I don’t fuck with no one here [at the school]; it’s just all White people.” On a separate day, during algebra, he said to me and Rafael out of the blue, “I don’t like my White boy name.” Rafael laughed. In another instance, I asked Rafael if he did anything when a White boy in the school hallway pointed at him and his Mexican-American friends and called them “clones,” he said no and explained: “Because it happens, so, there's nothing we can really do.”

In the classroom scene just described, when the teacher ignored their raised hands, Daniel and Rafael interpreted this as a slight, although an observer may attribute other meanings to her behavior (e.g., the teacher is in a rush to finish the lesson plan). Both boys’ heightened racial awareness suggests that Daniel and Rafael understood their subjectively experienced slights as racial or, at least, indicative of their stigmatized status as inferior. To the extent that they collectively reframe her dismissal as funny, their behavior is consistent with theories of humor that focus on ingroup cohesion and relief of discomfort in the face of external threat (Francis 1994; Obrdlik 1942). In fact, when the boys shift into a play frame that turns the teacher’s dismissal into something laughable, this helps them build solidarity and create a channel of catharsis. Their giggling is not necessarily a rebellious reaction to authority that aims to mock or disrupt; instead, the giggling serves as an interactional strategy to relieve shame or embarrassment and to counter the impression of being helpless. This resonates with what Bakhtin (1984:96) says about laughter: “[It] could not become authoritarian; it did not convey fear but a feeling a strength” as well as Koller’s (1988:12) interpretation of humor as a “defensive mechanism to preserve dignity.” The teacher, however, does not engage with their play frame. She takes the giggling as a cue and interprets it as the boys’ belief that she did not see their raised hands (rather than as a cue that they felt dismissed and embarrassed); therefore, she responds with a repeated “I saw it.” Next, she does not interpret Daniel’s comment on taxes as indicative of his desire to engage with her, or at least, she does not respond in a way that suggests she thinks it is worth engaging with him. Instead, she affirms the point of the exercise as working through an “ideal situation.” She then praises another student for volunteering the answer she seeks.

Daniel’s body language and tone convey sarcasm when he says, “I’m jealous.” Sarcasm, epistemologically means “to speak bitterly—literally to tear flesh” (Ball 1965:192). Accordingly, Daniel’s facial expression and tone are suggestive of this bitterness. His sarcasm suggests that he interprets the teacher’s behavioral cues as indicative of her unfair attitude toward him, although from my perspective as an observer, the interpretation of this teacher’s series of responses is not limited to racial discrimination against the boys (and therefore her behaviors are ambiguous situational cues). His humorous response is consistent with both the superiority/attack and relief theories in that humor is used in the face of tension or a threat. Furthermore, his expression and tone convey an open contempt for the teacher, his rejection of her authority to define what counts as a good class contribution, and his dismissal of her opinion in general. Therefore, Daniel’s sarcasm relieves the tension between him and the teacher and also serves as a critique of the teacher’s logic for what counts as “good.”

By stating, “I’m jealous,” Daniel performs the role of a student who yearns for the teacher’s approval. In addition, his awareness of the general racial hierarchy, specifically that others perceive him to be of inferior racial status, suggests that he also performs the role of a Latino boy who is stigmatized by racial inferiority. By performing as someone who desires approval and is inferior, Daniel uses himself as the object of sarcasm, which serves to separate himself from these very roles (i.e., he generates role distance). Distancing himself from the stigmatized role allows Daniel to deny that he is a victim, an idea that is implied in the stigma and defines the unequal relationship as an object for mockery, as suggested by Goffman’s (1961) concept of role distance. Daniel’s use of sarcasm allows him to control any potential meanings, for example, he is helpless and victimized, implied by the situational cues of the teacher’s dismissal.

Humor and Preemptive Testing

During my first visit to the Spanish course for heritage speakers, Leo, a U.S.–born Mexican-American boy, talks to me for the first time.

“How you doin’?” Leo looks at me, his elbows on the desk. Paola turns to watch our interactions with a smile. I walk closer to middle of the room. “Hey, I was on probation,” Leo smiles. I ask, “Who was?” and walk closer to him. The room laughs. “I was on probation,” he repeats with his head down. Someone yells, “He wasn’t!” “I WAS,” Leo insists, his voice a little louder, looking at Lucas. “He wasn’t!” someone yells again. “Yes, I was,” he insists. He then lifts up his ankle and points, “I had ankle bracelet, on house arrest—I just got off it a few days ago.” Paola turns around and looks at him, “Well, you are free now.”

This interaction suggests that Leo thinks my presence brought an unpredictability to the social situation, in line with Linstead’s (1988) observation that individuals use humor to explore uncertain situations. Specifically, Leo uses humor to “feel out” the uncertainty: the nonseriousness of the interaction available in the play frame provides the joker with an “out” by claiming what they said was a joke (see also, e.g., Mulkay 1988; Walle 1976). My presence, from my perspective, can indeed provoke various interpretations and therefore is ambiguous. Nonetheless, Leo uses a racist trope in his humor. In other words, he sees racism as relevant in the ambiguous situation. The most sociologically significant point of the interaction is not whether Leo was on probation but how and why he used the story, including those social conditions that generate feelings of uncertainty regarding others’ perceptions of him being Latino. The uncertainty suggests that Leo is aware of others’ perceptions that being Latino constitutes a stigma associated with criminality. In my interviews with some of the Latinx students, they said because of their race, they were “judged” more harshly through disciplinary actions and also in daily interactions with teachers. For example, a White teacher tried to motivate Rafael by asking whether he wanted to end up selling drugs, or the teachers assumed several Latino or Latina students were selling or using drugs. Although Leo never explicitly revealed such experiences, his playful use of the probation story suggests his hyperawareness of his stigmatized role as a Latino in others’ eyes, which created anxiety and uncertainty about how others might respond to this perceived stigma. This interpretation dovetails with previous sociological work that explores the uneasiness the stigmatized experience in interactions with others (Anderson 2015; Goffman 1963).

In this exchange, Leo performs the stigmatized role when he claims to be on parole and points to an invisible ankle bracelet. The performance serves as a preemptive test to see whether I buy into prevalent stereotypes about young Latino men. This interpretation is similar to the idea that by making themselves the objects of their own jokes, the joke-makers attain role distance through humor. Leo creates distance between himself and the stigmatized role, which suggests that he rejects the implied image (e.g., a young Latino stigmatized as a criminal) and redefines that stigma as something ridiculous. Ultimately, Leo is actively controlling the imagined implications of his stigma, as suggested by the idea that role distance helps with impression management (Goffman 1961, 1963). Simultaneously, the other students are laughing during our interaction, which suggests they recognize his statement as humorous. A member of the support staff who is close to Leo confirmed that Leo had never been on probation. This fact further supports my interpretation that Leo used the probation story to test whether I am on his side. ⁹

Humor and Constructing Outsider/Insider Status

Paola, who is a U.S.–born, Latina English learner, and Yoana, a Latina who has just exited the ESL program, are assigned to work with two White girls (Emma and Aviva) in the same lab station during sophomore chemistry. Between the teacher’s instructions, the girls enjoy the beats of “Starboy” by The Weeknd that plays through Yoana’s earbuds.

Paola lifts her head slightly and sniffs. She says with a happy smile, “I like the smell of alcohol.” She’s referring to the alcohol burner that each group has. “Why?” asks Emma, who is tall and has long, straight blonde hair. She leans on the station with a pen in her hand. “I am Latino,” Paola says without hesitation, “it is all we have in our house.” Paola sounds proud and looks straight ahead. “That is not true,” Emma’s eyes widen and her voice becomes quieter and less certain. Paola does not engage Emma but instead addresses Yoana, who has just put her hand on a beaker: “Stop it!” Yoana does not start the experiment.

It remains unclear to me to what extent Emma’s question “why” is imbued with a racist interpretation of Paola’s physical and verbal cues. However, the stigmatized with their heightened awareness of their stigma (i.e., the inferior status and negative stereotypes associated with being Latinx) may read meanings into moments in ways that the other person does not intend (Goffman 1963). That is also not to say Paola’s interpretations are baseless. Imputing racial meanings into situational cues is not innate; one must learn to detect racial meanings in situational cues through experiential knowledge (Anderson 2015; Turner 1956). Therefore, one needs to view preemptively using a racist trope (“I like the smell of alcohol”) and interpreting Emma’s question of “why” as a cue that provokes racial meaning in the racialized school context, the political climate at the time of the ethnography (i.e., during Trump’s presidency), and the fact that several of my Latinx participants, including Paola, spoke about feeling incompetent and uncomfortable at school.

Upon imputing racial meanings to the cue from Emma, Paola plays the role of a stereotypical Latina, which involves behaviors associated with alcoholism. At the same time, by making herself the object of humor, Paula separates herself from that role and, ultimately, preemptively attempts to control how Emma interprets and responds to the stigma associated with being Latina.

This scene illustrates both the ambiguity and the contingency of humor insofar as the attempt at humor failed. Specifically, it marked the boundary between an insider and an outsider status. Both Paola’s statements (“I like the smell of alcohol,” and “it is all we have in our house”) are ambiguous because they embody a duality. On the one hand, they could be met with laughter and build solidarity through a shared understanding that she is playing with a racist trope (i.e., she is initiating a play frame). On the other hand, and as Emma seems to understand them, they could be taken as literal facts that conflict with an implication that agreeing to these claims would be seen as racist (i.e., Emma interprets the claims in a serious frame). As Emerson (1969:171) suggests, “by refusing to accept a joke, a listener inadvertently acknowledges a taboo topic.” Emma’s reactions to both statements suggest that she acknowledges the taboo. Moreover, Paola helps shape Emma’s outsider status; specifically, she states that she is Latina, reinforcing the boundary as a racial one. Then Paola further solidifies the boundary through a racist trope—“it is all we have in our house,”—in a serious tone. This is also similar to individuals, particularly those in subordinate positions, who use self-directed ethnic humor about racial stereotypes to mask their ridicule of those who actually believe in them (Carpio 2008; Piersen 1976). In addition, Emma’s outsider position is reinforced through her discomfort (by becoming quiet and questioning the racist stereotype) with Paola’s response.

Humor and Self-(Re)Defining

Another interaction occurred in Valentina’s office. Val is a racial minority support staff member, and her job involves planning after-school programs for Latinx students and their parents. Latinx students also often come to her office to chat or do work, sometimes even during class time.

Rick (Ricardo) walks into Val’s office, still wearing his backpack, “Val, can you help me with my essay?” Val looks up from her monitor and asks, “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Immediately, Rick turns to me and asks, “Can you?” “Yeah,” I respond. Rick puts his bag down next to me. Val asks again, “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Rick responds, “Yeah. I asked the teacher if I can write it here. He said yes.” Rick looks at her and grins: “I’m scared of the White people.” Then, he pulls his laptop from his bag and adds in a louder voice, “JUST KIDDIN’!” “I get that sometimes,” Kenzie, a Latina, says with a straight face. She looks back at her laptop. Val looks at them, smiles, and turns back to her computer screen.

Here, the sociological significance is not that and to what degree Rick is scared of White people, but that he sees racism as relevant and invokes it when responding to Val’s suggestion that he should be in class—a situational cue that, from my perspective as an observer, does not unequivocally imply racial relationships. Whether the perceived relevance to racismis because of something that happenedin his class or because of his accumulated experiences with racism elsewhere, this remark nonetheless indicates Rick’s heightened awareness of racism. Furthermore, the very essay he is asking for help with involves a story about a smart boy who is not taken seriously by others because he is poor and “colored” and others do not look beyond his appearance, which further indicates Rick’s consciousness of racism. In our previous interactions, Rick had recounted an experience about being racially profiled while driving and another about the trouble he got into with the administration over a fight he had with a White student who had verbally insulted Rick’s mother.

The nature of Rick’s statement about White people is ambiguous, especially considering his “just kiddin’” and Kenzie’s response. Consistent with the idea that humor establishes ingroup solidarity in the face of external threat (Burma 1946; Obrdlik 1942), Rick marks White people or abstract whiteness as oppressive. Specifically, he uses humor to obtain a personal goal (to skip class) through ingroup solidarity.

His statement of fear is an active performance of the role of an “inferior Latino.” When he explicitly initiates a play frame by stating “just kiddin’,” he dissociates himself from his overtly expressed fear. By joking about his fear of White people, Rick creates distance between himself and the stigmatized role and thereby actively resists this stigmatized image of inferiority. One can also understand his use of humor as a way to negotiate his relationship with abstract whiteness insofar as he indicates that he is not actually afraid by shifting into a play frame. As Douglas (1968:366) argued: “whatever the joke, however remote its subject, the telling of it is potentially subversive.”

In this scene, Kenzie does not interpret Rick’s remark as a joke despite his “just kiddin’.” As Emerson (1969:171) suggests, a joke most likely fails “when the joker underestimates the listener's sensitivity to the topic.” Indeed, when Rick uses his fear of White people as a reasonable justification for skipping class, he exposes a truth he believes many in his Latinx community live by, and Kenzie confirms it nonchalantly as if it were serious; she normalizes the discomfort with and fear of whiteness.

So far, my data suggest that many spontaneous humorous interactions are a process in which students negotiate racial meanings. As a matter of fact, each of the scenarios presented in this article involves students who engage in some level of self-redefinition and, ultimately, manage their self-images. Two types of ambiguity are central in humor as an interactional strategy. First, the students interpreted ambiguous situational cues as relevant to racism, which suggest their perceptions of racial meanings in these interactions and ultimately, a heightened awareness of the racial hierarchy that others (often White individuals) are perceived to subscribe to. Second, interpretations of students’ remarks are defensible in a serious frame and in a play frame. The play frame allows students to dissociate from the content of their remarks and, thus, relieves them of the consequences of “inappropriate” expressions.