Joe Rogan | The Origins of White Supremacy in America w/Dr. Cornel West

The problem is this, that if we have to view democratic socialism as a moment in the larger movement of democracy, my dear brother Jeff Stout, who's one of the great philosophers and thinkers of democracy, calls them egalitarian freedom traditions. And that's simply a way of saying that if you look at the world through the lens of the masses of people who are poor and working people, what are the conditions under which they can have security from domination? What are the conditions under which they can have dignity by holding forms of oppression at arm's length? And for me, it's not an ism. You see, if capitalism vis-a-vis feudalism can generate liberties and freedoms, I'm for it. And that's precisely what the middle classes did when they broke from feudalism in Europe, or broke from feudalism in other parts of the world, right? You had to overthrow kings and queens in the name of personal liberties. But those personal liberties were confined too often to white brothers with property. When the white brothers with no property, they're either trying to hold onto their white and so they become like the white brothers with property, or they make moral choices and say, I want to be a person of integrity. I want to fight with the folk who are being excluded. And this is one of the problems in talking about race and white supremacy in America, because, you see, we think too often in monolithic categories. There's never been a white supremacy without fighting against white supremacy, and that includes white brothers and sisters. There's a tradition from Ann Braden, from Miles Horton, you know, of Highlander Center. You got that wonderful picture of Rosa Parks. She was at Highlander Center four months before she was arrested, before she sat down on a bus in order to stand up for justice, right there at Highlander Center under Miles Horton. Who was Miles Horton? A white brother who brought black folk and white folk together, went to Union Seminary, trained under Reinhold Niebuhr. He had cousins in the Ku Klux Klan. So his Thanksgiving dinners were very complicated. But that's true for a whole lot of white brothers and sisters who fight against white supremacy. And Braden, Rabbi Abraham Joshua helped, that showed me, Edward Zayi, you have a whole tradition of white brothers and sisters who've been fighting against white supremacy. You get it in the music. Bex Beiderbecke, he's sitting at the feet of Louis Armstrong, and he's a great artist. Louis is genius of geniuses, right? And that middle class brother from Iowa, you asked him about white supremacy. You asked Brubeck about white supremacy. You asked any of the, Paul Desmond, all of these folk who are connected to traditions in which black humanity, brown humanity, is seen and affirmed. You had a point in the book Race Matters that resonated with me that I never really thought of before. And what you said was that because of the fact that the United States has this deep history of slavery and the slavery of African Americans, that white people became white people instead of Polish and German and Italian, instead of it being like most other countries where the Italians think of themselves as Italians and the Greeks or the Greeks, those were white people. They're all combined as white people. I never thought about that before. No, but I mean, you've got these scholars of American studies. I mean, Neil Payne was one of the towering ones, but it goes all the way back to Alexander and David Roddinger and some others who've been talking about the way in which whiteness was created. Take, for example, an Irish brother who calls to Ellis Island. His people have been dealing with 800 years of vicious British colonialism and imperialism, vicious attacks, various famines that were in some ways created or at least enabled and so on. They get to New York and they're told that they're white. They say, no, no, because we know the British are white and we're not British at all. But then they say, yes, you are. Look at Brother West, look at Jamal, look at Letitia. Where you going to go on the Jim Crow bus and you just get off the boat from Ireland? You go to the front, you're with vanilla folk. You go to the back, you're with the chocolate folk, what you're going to do. And for our precious Jewish brothers and sisters, it was even more complicated. Because they get there and they say, no, we're not with the Goya and we're not with the Gentiles. Y'all been oppressing us for 2,000 years. Pogrammes, ghettos, holocaust, vicious attacks and so on. But then they get there and say, well, are we going to be in the back with the black folk? Some of them did. You see, because you got a rich tradition of progressive Jews. You know, Chomsky would have got back there. Stanley Aronowitz would have got back there with the black folk. You see what I mean? But you got some other Jewish folk like any other group. Well, we kind of lukewarm. Let's just kind of move back and forth. And then some of them want to assimilate completely, especially the highbrow German Jews. We're actually white as well as the Gentiles. You're in America now. Get beyond that old world prejudice. You say, well, you better check yourself because every Christian civilization we know is shot through with Jewish hatred. Don't believe the hype. Soon our lady is going to be manifest. You see what I mean? And so in that way, you can see the discourse of whiteness, blackness, brownness, redness, and so forth become so deeply rooted in American law, American structures, American perceptions. And this is why the arts are so crucial because it's primarily in the music and in the arts where the breakdown of white supremacy begins to take place in the country. It's not the politicians. It really isn't. It really isn't. There's no accident that the first massive form of entertainment in the United States is what? The minstrels and blackface. And you see, what was going on with blackface? Well, Eric Lott and others have talked about the love and theft. On the one hand, there's a fear of black freedom because black freedom somehow means less freedom for whites. There's a fear of black creativity because that means maybe white supremacy is a lie. Maybe they're human just like us. Maybe they're just as creative, imaginative, and intelligent just like us. Then they hear the music and they say, ooh, they got something going on in the black side of town that we don't know. It's like you going to see prior, right? Somebody told you, oh, brother Joe, white supremacy America tells you that black creatively, black intelligence, black genius doesn't exist. And you go see prior with your parents and you go away thinking, Disney grows a genius. Somebody lied to me. I got to recognize that. And then you recognize, oh, there's a whole tradition of prior and we can go on and on from the cold train to Sarah Vaught and on and on and on, right? And so people begin to think, firstly white brothers and sisters, our parents have been lying to us when it comes to black intelligence, imagination, and genius and humanity. And yet the structures make it difficult for us to come together. We're talking about up until 1960. That's a long time though. 1776. 1964 and five. That's a long time for both slavery and neo-slavery to be in place. And here we are now 54 years later trying to create a multiracial democracy, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And it's already been enacted in the jazz groups, Sly Stone's bands, multiracial. The comedies, the studying of the comedies that you all have, you sit down with comics. Y'all talk about the genius across race and gender as if it's a natural thing. That already shatters. The white supremacists, and that's in male supremacist categories of whiteness, blackness, all in different silos. But it's so hard to do it on the ground. See, part of the problem of talking about race in America, this has been very critical of a number of contemporary black intellectuals because white supremacy cuts so deep in the culture, people begin to think it has magical powers and somehow it just floats above American history as if it's just part of our DNA in a biological way. But all conceptions of race in the modern world are grounded in predatory capitalism. So that the talk about whiteness and blackness becomes a way of rationalizing social structures like slavery and Jim Crow. And it has to do with trying to extract labor, resources. It's an attack on their humanity and identity, but it's tied to economic structure. So to talk only about race means we hide and conceal the social structures that are generating unbelievable suffering for everybody, everybody, you see. And so the last thing you want is to talk about race. I'd say the same thing about gender and the way gender is much more complicated because gender has been around for so, so long, every culture that we know almost. But in modern conceptions of race are tied to modern conceptions of predatory capitalism here and abroad, which includes imperialism, which includes empires. So the United States comes out of the British Empire. We engage in a heroic, courageous revolt against the British Empire. It was a magnificent struggle. That's what I like about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, because I'm an anti-imperialist. They were anti-imperialist. They're urban guerrillas. They're picking up guns. They're fighting. I don't go that far. But they're also white supremacists. You see? So as soon as they overthrow or push back the British Empire, what do you get in the Declaration of Independence? Beautiful words about equality, but you also get savages. We got to take their land. And you get an empire of liberty. This is where the comics come in. What does an empire of liberty look like? Who's not in on the liberty? It's a whole lot of people not in on it. Well, that was Carlin, right? Carlin had this bit about this country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. That's right. And talk about the American dream. You got to be. You got to be dreaming to believe it. You got to be asleep.