Joe Rogan | The Re-definition of Racism

Another thing that's alarming to me is the redefining of terms like sexism and racism. Where sexism against men is impossible, racism against white people is impossible. This redefining as these prejudices only exist if you're coming from a position of power. That's really weird. And it also, it opens up the door to treating people as an other. Really the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling justified because of it and having a bunch of people that will agree with them that this is in fact not racism and this is pushing back on white privilege and saying all these different weird things that, you know, and they feel really comfortable in saying these open racist generalizing things about white people or about white men or about, you know, fill in the blank about whatever group that you're attacking. And it's really strange. It's really strange to see. But again, it makes sense if you look at the different games. So if you're on a university and you think you're playing the truth game and philosophers are great at this, they're always unpacking terms, and so you might try to define racism or any sort of ism and a common sense of view would be an expression of hostility or resentment or limitation on a group based on their identity. But that's if you're playing the truth seeking game. If you're playing the politics game or the warfare game, you want to define the terms to give your side maximum advantage. So there's a wonderful social psychologist named Phil Tetlock at Penn at Wharton and he talks about these different mindsets we get into and one of them he calls the intuitive prosecutor. So if my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them and I am always trying to defend seven different identity groups against the straight white men, they're the accused, I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict. And so I'm going to say racism, microaggressions, it doesn't matter what the intent was, all that matters is the impact. All that matters is what the person felt. That way, as long as someone's offended, I get to charge you with a crime. And also on racism, you can say, as a lot of kids are learning in high school these days, racism is prejudice plus power. So by definition, a black person or a gay person or whatever, cannot be racist or whatever or other term because they don't have power, regardless of their social class. This is actually being taught. Yeah. So the professors, this is coming out of their mouth, teachers are saying this? This is taught in a number of high schools. My nephews went to Andover, they learned this. That's an offensive thing to teaching children. It's not just that it's offensive and obviously hypocritical, it's that it's crippling. Can you imagine? So look, you've got kids, right? You have two daughters? Yes, three. Okay, so you have three daughters. Can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak of invulnerability where you say, you put this on now, you get to attack others, but no one can touch you. This is going to warp their development. Power corrupts and even moral or rhetorical power corrupts as well. How is this being taught though? I mean, how is this being justified? How is this accepted as a part of a curriculum? So because the goal is not truth, the goal is victory over racism, let's say. And so if that's the case, you're going to focus on educating kids about their white privilege and making... And so that's what a lot of these privilege exercises are. You line kids up by their privilege and your goal is to make the straight white boys feel bad about their privilege and therefore talk less, take up less space. This is what we were talking about earlier about. The goal is no racism. The privilege only exists if there's racism. Like instead of concentrating on the privilege, it only exists if people do preferentially treat certain... Preferential treatment towards certain races. If that doesn't exist at all, then white privilege doesn't exist. Well, I'm not sure I'd agree with you on that. So we had a funny episode last night. So my wife and I, we're out in LA, we were invited to the Golden Globes by a friend. And so we're here in LA. So we go to bed in the hotel room and at two in the morning, the guy's pounding on the door saying, come on, let me in. It's me, it's me. And I wake up and I go to the door and I say, wrong room. He can't hear me. So I opened the door a crack and to show him, look, I don't know who you are. And some drunk guy. And I said, you've got the wrong room. And I went back to bed. And at breakfast this morning, my wife says, why did you open the door? How could you have done that? I said, we're in a nice hotel. I mean, what's going to happen? And she made it clear, a woman would never have done that. She said, you as a man, you have the ability to go out in the world and engage with it in a certain way that I don't have as a woman. And that's a great example. So there is a kind of male privilege that exists even if there's no sexism. Yeah, that's an interesting example. That's a sexism one, but that's also a physical danger one. There is a difference between just the way women have to go out into the world being vulnerable and also being the target of just a male sexual attention. It's a very different thing. It's an aggressive and dangerous thing. Yeah. But I think you could say the same thing about race in this way. Because there's racism though. Well, okay. Okay, you're right. If there was absolute zero racism anywhere, but we're never going to get to that. But the thing that we're worried about is the racism. If you say you have white privilege, well, that only exists if you're being dealt with in a racist manner. So if you're a black person and there is racism that's being directed towards you and it's not being directed towards me, then you can say, well, I have a white privilege. But if there's no racism directed towards anybody, that doesn't exist anymore. So the issue is racism. Yes. Right. Okay. So look, I think it's helpful to always try to look at it from the other person's point of view and to listen to their arguments. And so for example, when you and I go into any social encounter, it never occurs to me that something's going to come up and someone's going to call me a kike, let's say. Right. Because I'm Jewish. And it just never crosses my mind that someone's going to humiliate me because I'm Jewish. But if you're black, even if you're in a very tolerant society, at some point, someone is going to make an assumption. It might not be possible, it might be. So all I'm saying is you and I, there are certain things we don't have to think about. Whereas if we were black or other identities or visibly gay, there would be the risk of spoiling of a social interaction. So I'm totally comfortable saying we should be telling our kids about this, but what follows from it? What follows from it? Should we therefore be telling kids, okay, so judge people based on their appearance, be suspicious of people based on their race and gender. That's where I get off the bus. That's where I say now we're really hurting kids. We should be turning down the moralism and we're turning it up. Right. But what I'm getting at is pointing at someone and saying you have white privilege if they are not racist. You're giving this person, you're putting this person in a category that really only exists in the face of racism, where the real problem is racism. Yes. The male-female thing is a very different thing. Male privilege I think is way more slippery because it's biologically based. There's a creepiness to men. Yeah, that's right. There is. As much as a nice guy as I'm sure you are, and I try very hard to be a nice guy, Jamie's a little slippery. Every woman's encountered creeps. Yes. It's inevitable because there's a game being played that is pursuing of sexual pleasure or of sexual encounters. This doesn't exist or shouldn't exist with races. The real problem in my eyes is racism. If we could figure out a way to just complete ... Obviously, it's not going to ... Look, people are flawed. They're going to be ... Until there's some sort of new way that we interface with each other that eliminates lies and deception and allows each other to completely understand each other's feelings and appreciate them, which may happen someday, probably technologically driven, until that happens, there's going to be a certain amount of it. The real enemy is racism. It's not white people just getting lucky. Okay. But I would say- Not that we shouldn't acknowledge it. You said earlier about how definitions change. We are evolving as a society. We're getting less sexist and racist. Our threshold for what counts as sexist and racist is going down. That's a good thing. That should happen. Right. I think what we need to call attention to is that if you lower the threshold faster than the reality changes, then you make progress, but yet people feel worse and worse. I think that's part of what's happening on campus. That makes sense. The loudest protests tend to happen at the most progressive schools. It's places like Middlebury and Yale and Berkeley. I think that we are ... If you bring in a diverse student body, and we're all trying to diversify, every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student body. If we do that and we bring people in and we give them a common humanity approach, it's going to work great. Diversity, if you handle it well, it can confer many benefits. But if you handle it wrong, if you try to make people see race and other groups more and you attach moral valences to it and you give them a lot of the stuff that they get in the grievance studies, of course they're going to be angry and of course they're going to feel that people hate them. It's a terrible thing to bring people into a university and to teach them, you know what? This institution is white supremacist. People have implicit bias against you. Wherever you go, people are going to hate you. No, this is a really bad thing to do to create an open, trusting, inclusive, diverse environment. The right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is and about how damaging it is, not just to our culture, but to you as an individual, to look at people in that way and not open your heart and your mind to all these different races. I think one of the worst examples of modern racism that's gone unchecked is what's going on at Harvard with Asian students, where Asian students are instead of being completely neutral in terms of how they approach all these races, Asian students actually have to try harder to get into Harvard because there's so many of them and they're doing so well. They're being punished for excelling, which is really racist. It's racist against the people that are doing the best, which is really crazy and they're a minority, which is even more crazy. Even because of their culture, because they're so hardworking and they're not in general, they're not the type to be really loud and protest these things. It's gone on. It's an easy target. To the point where now they've had to have a class action lawsuit.