In case you missed it, podcast host Joe Rogan, a man who used to pressure people into scarfing down bull testicles on TV, and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian men’s rights activist who nearly died from scarfing down too much red meat, recently weighed in on what it means to be Black—as millionaire white men are wont to do.
Peterson, addressing the time the writer Michael Eric Dyson labeled him a “mean, mad white man” for “whining” about how much of a victim he was despite his millions and large platform, said that it’s “a lie” to call him white because he’s “kind of tan,” and added that Dyson “was actually not Black, he was sort of brown.”
The exchange got even more bizarre when Rogan agreed with his guest, reasoning, “Well, isn’t that weird. The Black and white thing is so strange because the shades are such a spectrum of shades of people. Unless you are talking to someone who is, like, 100 percent African from the darkest place where they are not wearing any clothes all day and they have developed all of that melanin to protect themselves from the sun, even the term Black is weird. When you use it for people who are literally my color, it becomes very strange.”
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Naturally, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah felt compelled to weigh in on these two culture-war hustlers believing that people like him are not Black people. (Noah was born in South Africa to a Swiss-German father and a Xhosa mother.)
Feigning a look of shock, Noah stared at his hands and exclaimed, “Oh my God! I’m not Black! I’m… not Black! Joe Rogan’s right! I’m like a Caramel Mocha Frappuccino. This changes everything… This changes everything!” He then ran off the set as police sirens blared, only to return and explain that “the police said I’m Black.”
“But yeah, apparently Joe Rogan really wants to know why they say ‘Black people’ if they’re not the color of a Sharpie,” he offered, before schooling him a bit on why.
“The things these guys seem to be ignoring is that Black people didn’t call themselves Black. You understand that, right? It’s not like Black people were like, ‘We’re Black.’ No. In Africa, we have tribes. We have cultures. Zulu. Xhosa. Baganda. Igbo. Wakandans! But then white people got there, and they were like, ‘Wow. There’s a lot of Black people here. A lot of Black people.’ Then in America, they invented a rule that if you had one drop of Black blood in you, that makes you Black—which defined how you were treated by the government and by society.”
