On Violence as One Form of Domination
and humor as its rebuke
Margaret,
I’ve been thinking about something you wrote last year, about how history writes the future and about recovering your personal history as an American; of Irishness subsumed into the North American notion of Whiteness. You wrote, “Whiteness is the eradication of culture in exchange for a nearly infinite amount of privilege.”
That privilege for our ancestors was the freedom to navigate the American landscape. You also shared about recovering the rebel history of your Irish ancestors before they emigrated to America and how that has connected you to a wider sense of inheritance, looking for those around the world who share your values.
Let’s be clear about the whiteness that our immigrant ancestors were absorbed into: the culture of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant minority of migrants, or WASPs, who founded the country and have had an overwhelming influence on the economic and political decisions since then. Irish people weren’t even considered white by the WASPs until increased Slavic and Asian migration to the North American landmass. This “invasion” forced them to stop gatekeeping Catholics out of whiteness to figure out what this country was in the new global order.
I hope you don’t mind if I draw on my ancestry. My ancestors on my father’s side, Scandinavians, were immigrants during the last major immigration boom (the late 1800s), when the share of foreign-born residents in the U.S. was over 14% of the population, comparable to our present moment.1 Those Scandinavians were the first model minority. The Scandinavians were seen as good, hard-working additions, not pollutants. This is most likely due to the long Anglo tradition of fetishizing Scandis but also because they were Protestants.
It was easy for them to succeed, though, because post-Civil War America shared similarities with their homelands. Trade was managed by an upper-class minority (the Dutch and Germans). There was an indigenous people who were being pushed off their land (the Sami). European Protestants asserted their concepts of property rights to extract resources necessary for a regional elite to participate in the global mercantile economy.
Why would they leave their homeland if they were doing so well? It was the failure of a particular New World crop that enabled larger, healthier families—like many Irish immigrants, the Scandinavian migrants left their homeland because of hunger.
Having spent a few hundred years perfecting the separation of their public personas from their private lives, when they came to this continent, they weren’t concerned with getting ahead: they knew they just had to get along. The halo effect from Anglo infatuation might have enabled the model minority perception, but to maintain that standing, the group had to engage in “self-policing.”
This meant that when a member of the Scandi community acted in a way that cast the community in a bad light, consequences were swift from members inside the community to “correct” the bad behavior.
Think of a family—migrants are always bringing their families along—that’s how these Anglos got here, right? Chain migration! Here my ancestors are a great example. John O. Ekster came from Scandinavia shortly after the Civil War and turned an abandoned mill into a homestead where he raised nine children. Some of those children were smart and emulated their father’s example (perhaps they were all right-handed). They woke up early, said their prayers, tended the fields, milked the cows, went into town on Sunday, and dutifully sat in boring Protestant church (there’s no images of the Mother of God as a sexy babe in Protestant churches), never thinking about the people who were on the land before them.
Imagine now one of those children twisting the words of the prayer or spooking the cows or starting a fire that burnt the family vegetable patch. Public punishment of the offending child could provide instruction in the risks of breaking the rules to the others; John O., like so many western fathers before him stretching back to pre-Christian Rome, could use violence to teach the lesson. The teenager caught napping in the fields might be kicked to alertness by their father.
Just kidding! Scandis were like the Wendat, reserving violence for outsiders. What do you think four hundred years of raiding the British Isles and the European mainland was about? Walking away from a fight at home. Scandis loved their families so much that not only did they avoid physical violence, they avoided overt emotional violence as well.2
The rebuke of the child squirming in the pews of church? The lesson wasn’t taught with a hiss into her ear or a pinch to the leg reminding here that soon, they will leave God’s house. It was a raised eyebrow, then a low, gentle laugh to remind that child that she should be good, like everyone else. There was nothing special about her that would allow her to disrupt the service that others might be enjoying. This child, though beloved, would not be accorded any special privileges to act any differently than anyone else.
Hence, Minnesota Nice was born. Then ruthlessly enforced.
There are other ways to learn the rules in a new system, though; and in it, it can serve as the opening salvo to negotiations, generally. Think of a family again—new family, not John O’s but some other family with less regard for the safety and autonomy of their children than your average Scandi family had. This family has worked a hard day on the homestead together. It is the oldest child’s turn to say the prayer before the meal and he dutifully thanks God for his family members and their contributions that helped put food on the table. When ending with his youngest sibling, a toddler born two harvests ago, the child, upon hearing her name, purses her lips to make a raspberry, a fart escaping from her rear as well.
There are many ways that the family can react to this sacrilege, to instruct our girl in the rules. They can ignore the sound and the odor and say their amens. They can scold the toddler, wagging fingers in her face or take her food away or pinch her or—there are so many ways to use violence on children, do I need to name them all? Or the family could choose to acknowledge the absurdity that this great gift from God could ruin a meal and consecrate it with a heart-felt laugh.
I can’t know if humor was one of the ways that that the Scandimericans navigated the rules of the Anglo world—part of being fetishized by the Anglo mainstream is that once you’re deemed good looking, you don’t need to be funny. The erasure of Scandinavian comedic potential is visible in the lists of Famous Scandinavian Americans: the politicians, scientists, athletes, actors, models, and Bond Girls are all remarked upon without comment; anyone who made their money making people laugh is marked as being “3/16th Norwegian” or “his paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Finland”.
But Margaret, I can’t even relate to these Scandimericans. Their success in procreating exceeded their ability to hoard inheritable wealth. My Scandimerican grandparents had to leave the North American Danelaw where marling and cow calling were celebrated past times.3 The connections I have to this culture—my heritage, by the look of my last name—born from long winter nights and summer dips in the icy waters of fjords are a love of sauna culture and an intense attachment to “Take On Me” by A-HA.
Foundational to my inheritance than my actual ancestry was the national (and global) dispersion that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century in response to the economic ramifications of the world wars. You see, my particular ancestors were not good at hoarding inheritable wealth.
My grandparents had to go into exile from the American Heartland to make their lives. In exile, though, they found a place for themselves that gave them another avenue for advancement: enlistment in the US military--or marriage to someone who had.
Enlistment in the US military meant tutelage in strict hierarchical behavior codes and the use of violence. Indeed, one of the job functions of an enlisted soldier is to act as a symbol of the threat of violence when not actually perpetrating it.
My grandfathers didn’t have good work-life balance; they took the physical violence and rigid hierarchies of work home with them. Being only enlisted personnel (it’s quite hard to make it up through the meritocracy of the US military without a Bachelor’s degree), they didn’t know how to explicate the rules before they enforced them. Or even that there were rules to the use of violence.
If you were a dependent of a soldier honorably discharged as an E3, unschooled in the ways of the military, every utterance brought the chance of violence. And there was a lot of violence in these families. In a household like this, play, improvisational and creative, was used to highlight the rules in effect for the day.4 The next day, though, the boundaries of conduct might be different; something new might provoke the smack or the choke, or a laugh and a smile.
Humor, in this way, infected both of the family cultures of my parents. In my mom’s family, the sick burn was king. I attribute this to my grandfather never being the true head of the family; my grandmother (the daughter of Swiss immigrants) made more money in her role as a purchaser for the Navy Exchanges in Southern California than he did running a small convenience store post-discharge. Thus, the easiest rebuke for him punching you was to remind him that his wife was the breadwinner, implying that he wasn’t actually a man. The rub: he could reveal his fragile ego and react with another hit, or he could pretend that he was unbothered, maybe even laugh.
Thus, a strange intimacy was formed in the household; everyone could say aloud each other’s deepest insecurities and most shameful fears—that their acne made them unlovable, that their boyfriend was only interested in them for sex, their girlfriend for the money they earned from smuggling drugs or that they struggled to read—and in this teasing, you could find a home if you chose to respond with a laugh rather than a fist or storming out the door. Worse than beating someone up for the joke was getting butthurt about it.
Most of the ribbing in Nancy’s family became creative riffs on how stupid each other was. While studying AAVE in college, it clicked for me: my family engaged in a practice not dissimilar from the dozens, or ritual insults. Our insults, though, were almost always personal, unlike a your momma joke. These insults helped us feel closer to one another. If you could have your ego flayed and not flinch, if you could laugh it off and come up with your own verbal volley that provoked a guffaw, you knew you loved these people and they loved you. To have your deepest insecurity spoken aloud took some of the sting out of it, too; in laughing at it, it didn’t feel so shameful.5 The shared laughter about these shameful fears became a powerful antidote to overcome them. What higher expression of love could there be, to help someone overcome their shame of who they are?
In my father’s family, the Scandi descendants, the humorous counterattack to the violent tentacles of imperialism strangling the family bonds took the form of the prank. In the year that I’ve been ruminating on this letter, I’ve struggled to theorize what the pranks in this household were trying to do. Were the pranks an attempt at FAFO, crude provocations to learn the boundaries of the household? Or were they hopeful projects of connection, meant to flush out a smile and a hug? It’s hard to say; Danny has shared no loving memories of his father, only an Aenic6 piety for the man.
An example of the rule-breaking mischief executed by my father was when he and his sister decided to bring the horse, a revered symbol of grandfather Ekster’s exile from the golden fields of the American Danelaw, into the house. The horse, happy to be led through narrow corridors for a carrot, got stuck in a hallway where, despite their best efforts to coax it out, it stayed stuck until the patriarch came home. I don’t recall Danny telling me how the horse got unstuck, but I do recall him sharing that, once the horse was removed from the home, he was beaten. Yet he was still proud of the prank.
After grandfather Ekster’s death, the pranks continued, but the responses soften. Still, though, there was always an edge of danger to them. My dad’s sister poured red dye into her husband’s bath when she grew tired of his hours-long bath/naps occupying the only bathroom; he awoke thinking himself bleeding to death.
One Halloween in the nineties, my dad convinced my stepmother to show up at his sister’s house, masked, and pretend to rob her at the door. She, believing her worst fears to be true, pulled a gun on them. They ripped their masks off and she put the gun down.
I think she spent the next seven years plotting her revenge: a fake lottery ticket, given to him at his favorite restaurant during his fiftieth birthday, that claimed he had won $50,000. Even though he was only a year away from retirement (government workers) he was elated and, possibly to gloat that he had won this large sum of money, he took the ticket to the lead singer of the house band.
“Redeemable at your momma’s house” the singer read to the crowd and Danny slunk back to our table, apologizing that he had offered to pay for my college tuition.
It’s been a prank detente since then.
We make so much of heritage in this country, Margaret, yet we both know that as white people, there are more important determinants than the cultures of our “ancestors.” More important determinants for any difference in power between us7 is how the last three generations of our families of origins have navigated the systems that distribute power and segregate labor, ie, work.
When I try to ascertain my inheritance of history, my way into the good fortune of whiteness, I find a legacy of imperial violence that infiltrates the home. But I also believe that the home can be a site where this violence can be countered.
I think of my families and their twisted senses of humor and I hear the stories they tell of their parents and their rage. I see, though, a rebellious streak channeled into humor. Sometimes a good belly laugh is the only way to get over what you fear but cannot change. Telling a joke that makes someone angry or butthurt illuminates their vulnerabilities.
My proclivity for finding ways to tell jokes or pull pranks hasn’t made life easy for me. I’ve lost friends over jokes and at least once its affected my means of employment. But jokes and pranks have also drawn me closer to strangers and converted friends. And the person that I laugh the most at is myself.
Margaret, I know that many do not have the freedom that I do to poke fun at as many groups that I can—part of the privileges of being a [redacted] woman in a [redacted] marriage is that I can crack on my privileged intersectionality in public spaces with only a small amount of fear of violent retribution. If there’s something that I hope is retained in our changing world it would be the Anglo/white tradition of the jester speaking truth to power.
Jokes are important both in relationships and in societies. They might not lessen the sting of injustice, but there is a satisfaction in pulling a face for the crowd and farting a little in the jailers’ faces if you’re stuck in the stocks. Sure, it might risk further violence, but sometimes it’s a risk I’m willing to take, for the laughs. That’s my inheritance.
Your sister in Race Treachery,
Auxie
PS: If you felt any sense of disgust or even revulsion at my jokes-guess what, my girl? That’s the third leg of the reactions to humor: anger, laughter and disgust, as noted in the footnote. In the game of ritual insults, though, its still a W.
PPS: I think the thing I really want to engage with in my project is, uh, how anglophone privilege is the third most insidious privilege, and that might be the privilege that I’ve benefited the most from in my life.
PPPS: If you made it this far (and stats say most people don’t—look at you bucking the trends!), hit subscribe.
“What the data says about immigrants in U.S.” Pew Research Center, September 27, 2024. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findings-about-us-immigrants/. Accessed 2025 June 19.
I have no source for this, just some mythologizing tendencies.
Yes, as model minorities permitted to own land, they were able to keep their culture, being far removed from the cultural metropoles that projected the ideal pastimes of White America.
Graeber, David, Utopia of Rules. Melville House, 2015, pp.190-193.
There is a third response to these kinds of jokes: revulsion, which has the same effect as laughing at the joke, IMO.
I trust that you have a decent exposure to the foundational texts of the Western canon, but if you have forgotten, I am referring here to The Aeneid and to the virtues held in highest esteem of the Roman Empire when the epic poem was composed.
Footnote that remarks that I’m a [redacted] woman in a [redacted] marriage living in [redacted] on [redacted], so I’m pretty heckin privileged.