That's what worries me too.
I like to throw a racist jokes, especially about my own nation from time to time
and I guess I'd have hard time in corpos and companies like faang because polacks tend to lack of thick skin /s
It's the idea of punching down, vs punching up.
That is, if you are joking about someone in a worse position than you, it's punching down, and a dick move. If you are joking about someone in a better position than you, it's punching up, and allowable. It's why it's okay for black comedians to joke about white people, but not okay for white comedians to joke about black people. It's why politics is always fair game to make fun of (people in power), but disabilities, say, aren't. Etc.
While punching across is technically doable, it's also very, very hard to do, because ultimately who are you telling the joke to? Who is laughing? I.e., if you talk about things your family does from your own homeland, and people laugh, what are they laughing at? They're laughing at your homeland, your culture, because they feel 'above' it in some way. It's an invitation to punch down. Otherwise it isn't funny; it's interesting. Truly punching across tends to be for an audience that is also the butt of the joke (think Vir Das telling jokes about Hindu beliefs).
Now, that's not to be confused with an explanation or similar. I've worked for a German company, and when asking about why we did something that seemed suboptimal to me, another employee, himself German, has said "That's very German". That's not necessarily a judgement, that's not an invitation to laugh at how silly German culture is; that's just a prelude to an explanation that it's a cultural difference in priorities.
The set of things you can comfortably joke about at work is pretty small these days and almost never includes jokes about any kind of group identity.
Do we really have to explain why that's inappropriate?
I view this as a kind of self-criticism, awarness that your country ain't as perfect as the gov paints it and so on
I understand that it’s more complicated when you are making jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that it’s not an issue of “bad culture fit.” As an example, employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their coworkers aren’t gruff people that have trouble fitting in to an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist jokes in the office. Just don’t do it.
(There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that’s a different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the office.)
Oh wow, here we go with racism gatekeeping.