This may reflect something I experienced. I grew up in Salt Lake City. I'm not Mormon. In high school, I felt very isolated. I felt like all the social activities centered on the Mormon church, and that I was an outsider because of that.
Twenty or thirty years later, I started to realize: Maybe it was just because I was a nerd. I was small, short, socially awkward, geeky - the usual. It didn't take people rejecting me for me to feel like an outcast.
But the article said there were also racist and sexist jokes. That's an additional source of feeling isolated that the white males (me included) don't have to put up with - and which nobody should have to put up with, ever.
I'm a Non-mormon nerd who grew up in SLC, too. I felt the same way, with kids asking me which ward I attended, etc. I've wondered how much of it was from group differences and how much was from personality differences. It may be telling that none of my friends were Mormon (except for one whose parents were Jack-Mormon). There was definitely a sense of exclusion when I lived there, at least on the part of the kids.
Living in Florida now, where LDS are a small minority who are perceived as wholesome, friendly, peaceful, quaint, and somewhat like a more modern version of the Amish. People laugh when I tell them I was beaten up by groups of Mormon children. Being a minority of any type is tough.
BTW, if you lived in the Aves, or attended Horizons or EQUIP in the '80s, I might have known you. There couldn't have been more than a few hundred non-Mormon nerds in the valley, I think.
Please, tell, what jokes are acceptable? That's a very serious question.
You cannot joke about gender or race, ok, fair enough.
The I guess you cannot joke about nationality as well. Same goes for physical traits or occupation. Same goes for the marital status. Well I guess better not to joke about the humans at all.
What's left? Animals? Better not, PETA may be all over you.
Let's play it safely and joke about rocks.
And before you are outraged how dare I compare such serious problems as racism and sexism with some trivialities ask yourself: isn't it racist or sexist not to compare them? You say black person has more right to be offended by the joke about black people than some poor white bachelor by the joke about bachelors?
Sadly it seems that the concept of joke is being lost. You can hardly convince anyone that it is possible to tell all kinds of not PC jokes without being racist, sexist, homophobic. Heck the joke itself may be the joke ridiculing racism, sexism, etc. Alas, the finer points will be lost for sure.
We are losing personal responsibility and personal ethics. It's being replaced by pattern recognition and very crude pattern recognition, mostly with stupid regexp matching single words and not being able to see the context at all. _if (match_found) then self.offended = true_
> "That's an additional source of feeling isolated"
gives you a rule of thumb. Are these jokes isolating? Dave Chappelle tells racist jokes all the time, and they're side-splittingly funny and as far as I can tell not at all isolating. His "black white supremacist" skit is absolutely hilarious. On the other hand, some comedian just today started making slavery-and-rape jokes about a black woman on TV, and it was both unfunny and clearly isolating (as a straight white male, I felt isolated by his jokes. That's how creepy and weird they were.)
Twenty or thirty years later, I started to realize: Maybe it was just because I was a nerd. I was small, short, socially awkward, geeky - the usual. It didn't take people rejecting me for me to feel like an outcast.
But the article said there were also racist and sexist jokes. That's an additional source of feeling isolated that the white males (me included) don't have to put up with - and which nobody should have to put up with, ever.