After spending more than 15 minutes breaking down why he felt Joe Rogan’s apology for a history of racist jokes and commentary on his popular Spotify podcast was so disingenuous last week, Trevor Noah doubled down Monday night, turning over the entire Daily Show episode to an extended conversation with the singer who helped break open the controversy earlier this month.
“Tonight, we had an episode planned around the Super Bowl and Ukraine and just catching up on all the news, but I had truly one of my favorite conversations with a human being that I ever thought I could have,” Noah said at the top of the Valentine’s Day broadcast before introducing his guest, India.Arie.
Just over a week ago, India.Arie posted a video to Instagram that featured a shocking compilation of Rogan using the “N-word” along with a clip in which he compared a movie theater in a Black neighborhood to The Planet of the Apes. She announced that she was joining other artists who were asking their labels to remove their music from Spotify, explaining that she didn’t want her art to help pay for his hate speech.
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India.Arie told Noah that while removing her music from Spotify in protest doesn’t actually serve her interests, she felt like she was being “disrespected,” adding that she “didn’t expect anyone to listen” because she’s “used to this certain type of treatment from the industry where they don’t listen.”
Now, she explained, she’s “still in a fight” to get her music off of Spotify, with Universal Music Group refusing to follow her wishes. “But that’s a whole other conversation,” India.Arie added.
India.Arie explained that she always tries to make the distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” racism, offering “forgiveness” for the latter, before arriving at the conclusion that when it comes to Joe Rogan, “he is being consciously racist.”
“I think he was saying it because it got a rise out of people,” she said. “That’s why he would say it. He knew that it was inappropriate. And I think the fact that he did it repeatedly and was conscious and knew, I think that is being racist.”
When she first heard his apology, India.Arie said that her first instinct was to give him the benefit of the doubt and say “he tried,” but “when I go deeper and ask myself what I really think from my commitment to truth that I’ve made this last year, what I really think is that he was being consciously racist and it makes me wonder what he talks like behind closed doors.”
“As a comedian,” Noah seemed inclined to defend Rogan, as he did immediately following the podcaster’s apology, asking his guest what the “path to redemption” might be for him, assuming “we all want people to get better.”
“I don’t think being a racist makes you a bad person, necessarily,” India.Arie responded. “It makes you a person who was raised in our society.” But when you put the “power” of someone like Rogan, who has such a massive audience, behind those racist ideas, then “that’s racism” and he’s “emboldening” his listeners to do the same.
When Noah pressed her to say when we, as a society, should accept Rogan’s apology, India.Arie told him that she hasn’t seen enough evidence yet that he has truly changed.
“I don’t think he fully understands what he did,” she said, noting that she has been receiving a barrage of racial slurs from his fans. “If you want to really lead your listeners down a new path, then lead them, to the point where they don’t feel that is the right language to come in my DMs and call me an ‘N-word’ in defense of him.”
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