Bret Weinstein Explains the Evergreen "Day of Absence" Controversy - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. For people that don't know what's going on, let's lay out all of the events that have transpired. Essentially, you were being asked to step away from your college for a day? Is that what it was? Is it one day? Well, this goes back farther than that. Yeah. Let's lay out the whole thing. Okay, so we couldn't possibly lay out the whole thing. Well, it's just for people that have no idea what's going on. They're listening right now and they're like, who's this Brett Weinstein guy? So the core of it surrounds a tradition that we have at Evergreen called Day of Absence. And this tradition stretches back long before I was ever at the college. I've been there 15 years. This tradition stretches back into I think the early 70s. And it's built around a play written by Douglas Turner Ward, a black playwright. And the play portrays events in a fictional town where the black population decides not to show up one day in order to emphasize their roles in the town that the white population is unaware of. And as you would imagine, all hell breaks loose. So anyway, it's an excellent play. And some early faculty at our college decided that we should have a day that mirrored this event and that originally black faculty and students and then later people of color would leave campus for a day to emphasize the role that they play in our community. And then they would later the tradition was amended and had a day of presence added to it where people would come back to campus. And this has been going on, as I said, since the 70s and the whole time I've been there. And then this year it was announced by the organizing committee that the situation would be reversed. And they asked white student staff and faculty not to come to campus. And that did not at all sit well with me. As I said in my letter to the person who had announced this, Rashida, who I should say is staff, and she has ended up at the center of this controversy, I think wrongly just because my letter in response is addressed to her and then it was made public by our school paper. So her name has been dragged front and center. But in any case, my letter, I said that there was all the difference in the world between a population deciding to absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their role and a population deciding to absent another population from a shared space, which I find unacceptable as a person, as somebody devoted to the gains of the civil rights movement. I just, I should also probably say as a Jew, when people start telling me where I can and cannot be, it rings alarm bells. So that's the gist of the story. And the letter caused quite a stir amongst student staff and faculty who responded, many of them quite angrily, privately, of course, people were much more divided on the matter. And there were plenty of people who agreed with my letter, but publicly speaking, there was condemnation of the letter. The event itself, Day of Absence, was mostly uneventful. I did go to campus, as I said I would in my letter. And I actually, it's neither here nor there, it was accidental. But while I was on campus, I ran into a student that I know very well, actually a student that my wife and I were abroad in Ecuador with last year. We were teaching abroad and we had 30 students with us. So one of the students who had traveled with us to Ecuador happened to be on campus too. This is a student of color. I'm going to stop this. There's too much banging around in here. It's very distracting. Sorry. That's all right. That was going to go on, that was going to drive me crazy. Right, I understand. So just keep going. So, I ran into this student that I know well and care about quite a bit. And we had a very nice conversation, mostly not about Day of Absence. As a matter of fact, I can't even remember if we did talk about Day of Absence. But there was something poignant to me about the fact that while I was being condemned for refusing to accept this new formulation, that I was able to meet with a student who is important to me and neither of our racial backgrounds is primary in our relationship. We know each other as people and that's really how I would like to see all of us interacting on campus. We all have our backgrounds. They matter to us. But it cannot become the primary interface between us. Let me stop you here and let me try to understand what the reaction was. You rightly said that you think there's a huge problem with asking people to not show up simply based on their color of their skin. Exactly. And what was the argument against that? Like when you said that and I read your letter and your letter didn't sound racist at all. It sounded very well thought out. It made a very good point. But the response, the inflammatory response to your letter was so disturbing and shocking. Was there anyone who had reasonable debate with you about this? Was there anyone who said, well, we should take into consideration why they're asking us to do this? We should sit down with them? We should talk through this? Was there anything reasonable or was it just dig your heels in the sand and then let the insults and the white privilege and all these accusations fly? Well, like I said, there's a huge difference that you can't see unless you're at the center of one of these things between the public discussion and the private discussion. Privately I had very interesting discussions with many people that was not absent. But if you were to look in on the discussion at the public level, it looked as if there was consensus united against me. Now when you say public and private, are the same people making contradictory statements in public that are commiserating with you in private or is it just different people? A few of them do that. That actually is the thing I find most surprising is that sometimes people will privately say one thing to you and then publicly do another. Mostly it's different people. And I should say the people who have talked to me privately and expressed concerns are actually quite a diverse group. So it's not as if white folks are disturbed by this and people of color are united. It's not at all like that. Part of the hidden story here is that in order to advance certain policy proposals, it has to appear that the community is united behind them and that anybody who stands against them is standing against them for illegitimate reasons. So that means that the number of people who are willing to express any sort of nuance about what's taking place has to be small and they have to be dismissible. What they did is they called me a racist, which is ironic because I'm an anti-racist. I've gone out of my way to first of all study the question of why racism occurs and I believe been pretty courageous in fighting against it where I've run into it. To challenge me with that particular epithet was a mistake on their part. It was a strategic mistake. I kept trying to tell them while this was still internally being discussed in the college, I kept trying to tell them that they should really check the concept that I'm a racist. They should ask because if they did, they would discover that they were actually way off the mark and then they would have an interesting puzzle on their hands. Then they would have to explain to themselves why they had found themselves hurling this most poisonous term at somebody who not only isn't a racist but is pretty nearly the opposite. It's a standard maneuver when someone wants to silence someone, when someone wants to put someone in a category that's instantly recognizable. One of the best ones is racist. Oh, absolutely. What I found is that people simply could not figure out what they would do if that term was applied to them. They were able to preview in their minds what that would be like and so many people could see that there was no escape for them. It's like being called a rapist almost. It's like even if you are exonerated, there's still that cloud hanging above you. Yes, but this also actually points to something pretty important. For anybody who travels this ground themselves, they're going to discover this, that many of the terms that are being used have been redefined but they haven't been fully redefined. One of the things that I've seen in several places is that a term like racist has been redefined so that the bar for being a racist is so low that you couldn't possibly help but trip over it. But then once you've tripped over it and you have accepted that you are a racist, then the stigma goes back to the original definition. So it is the dodging and weaving between the two definitions that actually does the heavy lifting. Well, there's also a really disturbing idea that's being bounced around lately that it's impossible to be racist if you're anything other than white. Right. Which is ridiculous. It's preposterous. Anybody who looks up the actual definition of racism will discover that that's preposterous. But yes, that does pass in certain places as logical. Yeah, and just it's parroted in this very bizarre way that's supposed to be unchallenged. And this is a fairly recent thing. This is not something that existed two decades ago. Right? I agree. And the pace at which it's moving in the last few years is very surprising. It is surprising, but it kind of makes sense because you get into these groups of people, they have this confirmation bias, they lump up together and they all reinforce their ideas in this echo chamber. And they all do it inside the colleges. And then when it gets out to the rest of the world, as we're seeing with your case at Evergreen, the rest of the world is like, what is going on over here? Like what is happening in school? And people who are sending their children off to school are very concerned with the indoctrination of these ideas. Adopting these very rigid mindsets that the rest of the world just simply could pick apart pretty quickly. Well, this is the most shocking thing because I haven't been censured, I haven't been suspended, I'm still on the email distribution list. So I'm watching the traffic inside of my college and I'm able to compare it to the huge flood of stuff that I'm seeing from the outside world as they get wind of what's going on at Evergreen. And the difference is a million miles inside of Evergreen actually we are descending further into madness. The faculty are blaming the fact that the campus had to be suddenly closed due to a threat from the outside yesterday on me for having talked about this in the outside world specifically for- It's hilarious. Not to you. I can't use that term yet. To me, hopefully someday. I hope it's soon. I must say, one thing that we haven't even talked about where I got thrust into the spotlight here which your listeners are going to have to know in order to understand why I'm even sitting here. But the intensity and the out of touch nature of the discussion inside the college simply reinforces the impression that something is desperately off. What we really have is a filter bubble that is so strong that even when the world sends very clear evidence that you've missed something somewhere and it's time to rethink what you've been doing, they're not waking up. I love this college. This college, maybe we'll get to talk about it, but the structuring of this college is so unusual and what one can do as a professor at Evergreen, if you're really dedicated to teaching, it is the place to be because you have unparalleled pedagogical freedom. More freedom than you'd have as a tenured professor at Harvard. You also have room to teach individually to students because our students take one program at a time. They're full time in one program and the professors teach one program at a time, full time and they can go on for a full year. When you've got 25 students and you have them for a year full time, you really know every student in your class individually, not just by name, but you know how they think, you know their backgrounds, you know their blind spots and that allows for a kind of teaching that can't be done anywhere else. I am quite distressed at the fact that Evergreen is now endangered by what's going on and I really would like to see it wake up and rescue itself because it is worth rescuing.