Betsy Huang is a Professor of English at Clark University. According to her faculty profile,Huang “teaches and researches in the overlapping spheres of ethnic American and Asian American literature, genre fiction and theory with an emphasis on science fiction, and critical ethnic studies. Her teaching focuses on literatures on the margins: stories of people living and writing in spaces of cultural and historical invisibility.”

On September 26, Huang published an article for The Conversation titled “The audacity of Kamala Harris’ laughter – and the racist roots of Trump’s derision.”

Huang claims that any criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris’s style of laughter is racist along with the amusement that some, including former President Donald Trump, derive from it.

The professor states that racism towards the laughter of black people was first addressed by the novelist Ralph Ellison: 

“But in a little-known, 1985 essay called ‘An Extravagance of Laughter,’ celebrated American writer Ralph Ellison provided a sharp analysis of the subversive power of Black laughter in 1930s America.”

“Ellison’s essay, published in a 1986 collection ‘Going to the Territory,’ still offers useful historical racial context for explaining Trump’s animus toward Harris. Among the stories Ellison tells: Black people once had to put their heads in a barrel to laugh because their laughter unnerved white Southerners.”

Huang failed to connect the laughter discussed in Ellison’s commentary with that of Kamala Harris.

Continuing with the theme of black laughter, Huang claims that former President Barack Obama’s “gleeful” roasting of Donald Trump in 2011 prompted the latter to enter the 2016 presidential race: 

“The first time Trump found himself the object of Black laughter was during the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, where he was publicly and mercilessly roasted by a gleeful Barack Obama. The experience appeared to humiliate and infuriate Trump and is widely seen by political pundits as the catalyst for Trump’s entrance into the 2016 presidential race.”

Please send information on Besty Huang to Watchlists@tpusa.com.

Published – October 1, 2024