Learning the Concept of Racial Consciousness Through Muhammad Ali's Humor and Irony
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The world of formal schooling is not the sole location of socialization in terms of race. Spoken and recorded in public settings, Muhammad Ali was a master of popular racial pedagogy, teaching both mass audiences and his audience to the public the suppressed history of race, structural racism, and the often-unspoken, though deeply rooted, ideology of race in the daily cultural signs of everyday existence. In this study, 20 videos of Ali's speeches are analyzed using Barthes's (1972) theory of myth and Freire's (1970, 2000) critical pedagogy framework which is based on two categories of rationalization and mythopoesis as proposed by Van Leeuwen (1996, 2008). The study employs three research questions: How did Ali make use of humor and irony in order to reduce the resistance of the audience? How did Ali's analogical reasoning teach the audience the new way of thinking structurally about race? How did Ali's narrative and mythopoeic strategies convey suppressed histories of race and culture? The results reveal that Ali's pedagogy was a threefold process: defamiliarization through humor and irony, demonstration through structure according to analogy, and restoration of knowledge through narration, where multimodal performances play a crucial role in each. The study can be read as a piece of critical pedagogy scholarship work, of race and communication research, and of the study of popular education as a space of counter-hegemonic knowledge production. Keywords: Muhammad Ali; critical pedagogy; racial consciousness; humor and irony; analogy; popular education; Freire; Barthes; multimodal rhetoric.
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7222913492
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