Joe Rogan apologises for using N-word and racist Planet of the Apes story

[Dill]

(02-08-2022, 02:49 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: That Planet of the Apes story is, objectively, a racist story. Now, Joe says he isn't a racist, but he only says that because he has it in his head that a "racist" is only someone who looks at a black person and rage fills their heart.

He doesn't realize that casual or comedic racism is still racism. I know why he told that story the way he did. He was going to see a movie, Planet of the Apes and he happened to go to a black neighborhood. There's a long standing racist trope that black people behave like or look like apes. So in his brain, he linked the two and made a joke. He thought of it as a clever quip.

He wasn't, in that moment, thinking "I'm going to insult black people in 3...2...1...." so, in his mind, he isn't racist.

He didn't invent the racist link between black people and apes. He didn't even necessarily endorse the link. But his mind is geared that way because of years of exposure to those racist tropes.

In a way, Joe Rogan and his Planet of the Apes story is the perfect encapsulation of what it means when you say "racism is ingrained in our society and culture."

Or, to put it another way, that our society is systemically racist.

Excellent analysis.  Remember the comparisons of Michelle Obama to a "gorilla"? 

I only differ from the bolded in that I think people who make ape/black jokes ARE endorsing the supposed "link" between black people and apes. They help to naturalize what its a specific cultural inheritance, explain it away as a "natural" visual association anyone anywhere could make. 

Nothing gets the Right agitated quite like the assertion, or even just the implication, there can be racists who don't know they are racists. 

But that "unknowing" racist is the corollary of any conception of "systemic racism" that I am aware of. Keeping that unknowing unknown is the only way systemic racism can continue, and critique from it be deflected, in a liberal democracy founded on natural equality. 

When we are speaking of comedy, the latter serves as one public platform upon which racial issues and boundaries are defined and policed, and where people may have permission to say things they cannot in other venues. Arguments about Rogan's comments look mostly like arguments about what racist discourse really looks like and whether it really has any social effect, such as shoring up existing racism and reviving permission for racist inflected humor as it existed in the 60s and 70s.