Racism Isn't Just About White Supremacy | Joe Rogan and Dr. Cornel West

The people that don't suffer in those communities that aren't a part of that community, there's a natural inclination to resist. Oh, that's true. And it's because they don't want to do anything. They don't want to think they're responsible. They don't want to think they're a part of it. They don't want to discuss it. Even discussing it, you feel resistance. They were in a state of denial. Yes. Trying to avoid and trying to evade. No, it's very, very real. It's very real. But you know, it also works within communities of people of color. And this is again why I think we have to resist any monolithic or homogeneous characterizations of people. You see? So, anytime you talk about white supremacy, you've got the John Browns. And you know Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was a black woman who was worth $347 million in the 1840s. She's called the mother of human rights and California. What did she do? She made a rich white brother and he died on her. So, she ended up with millions of dollars. Worst thing she did, she gave John Brown a million dollars. John Brown had a new... She probably didn't even notice it. ...from her in his pocket when he was at Harper's Ferry. That's how he survived. You see? Now, John Brown was killing innocent people. I think that's wrong. I don't believe in innocent people no matter who they are, no matter what color. But at the same time, John Brown had a love for black people much deeper than many black people have of themselves, because he's willing to die for black people. But the same is true within, let's say, black communities. You've got, okay, 1% of the population in America who owns 41% of the wealth. You've got three individuals who have wealth equivalent to 160 million fellow citizens. But within the black community, the top 1% of black folk have over 70% of the wealth. So that means you got a lot of precious Jamaal's and Latisha's out there who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities. So it's all about representation rather than substantive transformation. You get that in politicians. You got a black president, all of y'all must be free. Isn't that a beautiful thing? Live through him. Live through the family. Beautiful achievement, magnificent achievement. But it's not about symbolic representation only. This is about fundamental transformation. So it's a challenge. Mary Ellen Pleasant and others, and Martin King and others, are challengers for those of us who do have some resources to still raise our voices, because you can be black, highly well-adjusted to injustice economically in terms of race and so forth, you see. And the same is true. Brown, you can be... So it's not just a matter of looking for that one individual who represents. It's a matter of connecting that representation to fundamental transformation. If there's no fundamental transformation, you end up with a whole generation of peacocks. Look at me, look at me, look at me, all about foliage. And what does that do? That falls directly into the culture of superficial spectacle. First thing we need is just spectacle with no substance in that way. And this is a battle within the communities of peoples of color, because it's not going to be a matter of just pointing out white supremacy. Of course, white supremacy is a fundamental foundation and part of the country. It's not the only foundation, because you've got resistance to white supremacy. You got Lydia Maria Child. She wrote a book in 1834 called An Appeal for That Class of Americans Called Africans. It was deeply influenced by one of the greatest works ever written at that time by David Walker, Appeal to Colored Citizens of the World. She's a white sister. She is as vanilla as Doris Day in the 1830s, a fundamental part of the black freedom movement, right? Well, you see, those folks need to be lifted up, because what does that do? That exposes our humanity in terms of the choices we make, not just the skin color we have. And I would say the same thing in terms of gender. The brothers who are fundamentally concerned about breaking the back of patriarchy, even we know patriarchy is shot through us, because we grew up in the 1950s and 60s. No man escapes it. But you try to reconquer it all. And the same is true of our precious gays and lesbians and trans folk, you see, to be decent human beings who make moral choices. See, I believe in the primacy of the moral and the spiritual, the centrality of the artistic, especially the musical and especially the comics, as the vanguards who represent a freedom and a courage and a vision to connect us as human beings. You can't really be a comic with a wholesale Nazi ideology. Now, you can be a Nazi genius like Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher and a genius and a thug when it comes to politics, you see. But a comic has got to be able to be open enough to deal with the incongruity and inconsistency and the sheer absurdity of it all. You talked about moments of freedom earlier, and I recognize that as one of the greatest things you ever see when someone's on stage and they're killing, there's moments where everyone's together. They're all together locked up in the laughter, and they're all together. There's a sense of community that you share with the people that are in the room. It does bring people together, even if it's for brief moments, for a few seconds or moments it takes. Moments are not to be trashed. Life consists of moments. You know what I mean? Definitely. And see, it's in a democracy, you see, it's those moments that constitute the memory of what could be as opposed to what's in place. You know, the great August Wilson, the great playwright, black playwright, deeply influenced, he said, by the Blues, Baraka and Bearden, Romain Bearden, the great painter, Mary Baraka, of course, from Newark, like yourself, just like Sarah Vaughan and Philip Roth, right there from Newark. He used to say that performance authorizes alternative realities for the audience that gets them to unsettle their conventional perceptions of the world. Whoa. And that's what great artists and great comic, but that's what you do at strange times, though, brother.