Multiculti mutterings

There is/was an ethnic joke which was ok to tell because all the castmembers were White. No colored people* were harmed in the telling of this joke. So it was called a "nationality" joke. It was a Brit's description of Hell:

the place where the Germans are the police, the Swedish are the comedians, the Italians are the defense force, Frenchmen dig the roads, the Belgians are the pop singers, the Spanish run the railways, the Turks cook the food, the Irish are the waiters, the Greeks run the government, and the common language is Dutch.

If you really want to know the truth, listen to jokes. Literary form as cultural court jester.

Now if we extrapolated this genre and expanded beyond White nationalities to protected races or other officially-recognized oppressed groups, what is humorous here would become heinous and bigoted hate speech.


*BTW, interesting that "colored people" is a grievous racial slur but "people of color" is as proper as a Presbyterian voting to boycott Israel. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will get your ass sued, fired and jailed. And moderns look down on the testiness of duelling gentlemen who killed each other over words like "rogue" or "scoundrel" and the fights over homoousios and homoiousios.Yep, we sure have made ourselves some progress.