Joe Rogan sparks outrage over comments about African skin [video]

Joe Rogan suggests only char-skinned Africans can identify as 'black'.

By / / News
Joe rogan

Renowned podcaster and former mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Joe Rogan drew ire from social media over his comments about the term ‘black’ and how it relates to people from Africa.

Watch: Joe Rogan faces backlash for comments on African skin

On the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the leading Spotify podcaster sat down for a four-hour conversation with Dr Jordan P. Peterson, a controversial clinical psychologist infamous for his anti-political-correctness rhetoric and his growing rightwing fanbase.

Much of the conversation was centred around Peterson’s works in psychology, and his ascension to stardom as a revered Canadian public intellectual and best-selling author.

However, things took a sour turn when Peterson addressed a time writer Michael Eric Dyson, a black American academic, labelled him a whiny, “mean, mad white man”.

Peterson, presumably being sarcastic, scoffed the comments, calling Dyson a liar for claiming he was white when, in fact, he is ‘tan’. He further added that Dyson “was actually not black, he was sort of brown.”

This moment which, if it had ended right at that bizarre comment, would have been a light-hearted dry joke, morphed into a wild rant, where Rogan went on a riff about the ‘weirdness’ of black people identifying with the colour.

“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 colour, it becomes very strange.”

Already faced with heaps of backlash for being a ‘fake news spreader’ on COVID-19 vaccines, Rogan was targeted by naysayers who were left offended by his comments on African black people.

Daily Show host Trevor Noah also chimed in, lambasting the podcaster for his sheer ignorance in suggesting that black people coined the descriptive term.

“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 ofbBlack 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,” he said.

Here are more reactions from people who were offended by the podcaster’s comments: