How did you people turn out normal?

My friend asked me and two others this question. She is from the Boston area and the three of us grew up in the Western/Southwestern Ohio region. We were discussing the differences between growing up in Boston v. Ohio. For example, she was raised by a nanny (her mom was a single mom) and we were raised by our parents, babysitters, daycares, or friend's parents. It got really interesting when we discussed race relations in the respective areas. The other two talked about how they had 2 black kids or 2 asian kids in the whole school, and me discussing how much difficulty Miamisburg had in transitioning between a change in demographic junior year of high school. She posed that question that pretty much pervades my entire project for anthropology: "How did you guys turn out normal? You're not racist or crazy, yet you grew up in this incredibly homogenized area and quite often been exposed to different forms of racism" (I'm totally paraphrasing the second sentence). Well, one of the ways I believe we negotiate this environment is through jokes. It's almost as if we've had to work to suppress everything we've been taught in how to talk, how to view others different from us and what is right or wrong (I'm not saying from our parents but society as a whole). One of the ways I believe we can diffuse this active suppression is through joking.

One conclusion I've come to (not that I wasn't already aware of this) Is that the American relationship between race, gender, and the history of these two is seriously fucked up. Now, I'm not saying this is only true in the US, I have just come to this conclusion from my Joke project with linguistic anthropology where the people I recorded are US citizens. "A joke is never just a joke". Language and discourse reflects and recreates culture and society, and jokes are often ways of negotiating relationships that are unacceptable to talk about so openly in every day society. And the jokes I recorded are seriously fucked up. There are holocaust jokes, black jokes (involving lynching and cross burning), sexist jokes, mexican jokes, cuban jokes. And there are of course mere verbal art, almost all involving puns or some form of word play. What do ducks eat? Quackers. So they're not all horrible, but the ones that were are so hardcore that I have to address it.

The two jokes that got the best reaction:

What's the useless piece of flesh around a vagina? A woman.

(everyone laughed including the girls in the room which I thought was interesting. Women are only useful for sex... haha?)

How do you get five cubans in a shoebox? Tell them it floats.

Those are the jokes that everyone felt comfortable enough to really laugh at. Everywhere else, such as the black jokes (especially since there was a black male and a half black male present) were treated with a sort of delicacy or recognition that "this is wrong" as deemed by what is acceptable in society. But those two jokes were acceptable EVEN though there were three women in the room. Recreation of gender roles and in/out groups anyone? It's just very strange.

Now I don't say that these people are fucked up. I can't read people's minds, I don't know how they think. I can say that they are recreating the society surrounding them. Hence, society is fucked up, and requires seriously strange ways of negotiating these complicated relationships and roles. I believe that is exactly how I'm going to phrase it in my paper : ) 

Gah. It's depressing, frustrating and fascinating all at the same time.