Raúl Pérez

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on Gaza, following the 7 October Hamas attacks and breakthrough of Israel’s security wall, has been dubbed a “live-streamed genocide” as a growing number of entities around the world, including international human rights organizations and leading genocide scholars, have concluded Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute genocide. A key source used to highlight Israel’s genocidal conduct and intent towards Palestinians has been the proliferation of images of joyful cruelty and war crimes activities posted on social media by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, often intended to amuse or entertain themselves or an audience. This imagery is often accompanied by genocidal rhetoric towards Palestinians, rhetoric engaged by Israeli political and military leaders throughout Israel’s long history of ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the region. Such behavior, we contend, has vividly captured the joyful cruelty and sadistic amusement engaged by IDF combatants, and Israeli supporters, in real-time during Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, a phenomenon we describe in this article as genocidal enjoyment . Using theoretical sampling of illustrative cases, we examine this behavior by IDF soldiers, online supporters, and subsequent media coverage of their actions in the aftermath of 7 October, to analyze the role genocidal enjoyment plays in supporting, and condemning, the IDF’s brutality in Gaza. We situate such behavior and imagery as significant for furthering a cultural sociology of war by focusing on the meaning-making, narratives, and emotion work such images mobilize in a context of war and genocide.

"Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended--laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But, do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today. W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay The Souls of White Folk was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others--a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement. The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well-- and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth"--