Ordinary people are telling ordinary in-group jokes... but now they're about Martians. The joke is invariably that Martians are stupid, dirty, uncivilised etc. One of these people observes to his (we infer black) employee that the discovery of Martian life won't make any "difference to anybody". The employee politely disagrees, pointing out that it already made "a damn big difference to me".
Indeed, that's what's going on in Pohl's "The Day After The Day The Martians Came".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_the_Day_the_Mart...
Ordinary people are telling ordinary in-group jokes... but now they're about Martians. The joke is invariably that Martians are stupid, dirty, uncivilised etc. One of these people observes to his (we infer black) employee that the discovery of Martian life won't make any "difference to anybody". The employee politely disagrees, pointing out that it already made "a damn big difference to me".
Pohl wrote that in 1960s America.