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MEDICAL RACISM IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT
Why Black People Will Never Accept Joe Rogan's Lame Duck Apology
Joe Rogan promotes the racist lie that Black people are violent, dangerous, and have different brains than White people
If you think the only reason Black people have called Joe Rogan racist is that he dropped the n-bomb on his show, you're just scratching the surface. We're not just talking about a linguistic fumble — Rogan has spread White supremacist rhetoric. And in making a safe place for these ideas, Spotify also bears some of the blame.
Rogan also promotes speakers who spread conspiracy theories. And we're not talking about the "oh, well, I don't believe we ever made it to the moon" harmless type. I'm talking about the anti-facts, anti-vax, anti-Black kind of rhetoric. But, to understand why his lies about Black people are unforgivable, you have to understand what medical racism is and how it continues to impact Black people's lives.
You may have heard this one too often, but race is a social construct. And it was constructed by White physicians in an attempt to establish and justify White Supremacy. Their theory of the case went a little something like this. Black people and other groups are inferior, and thus, their diminished status in society is only logical. So, you can see how Joe Rogan's assertion is dangerous under this context. "That doesn't, by the way, mean that Black people don't have brains. It's a different brain," Rogan once told his audience.
As a Ph.D. student, I have studied the structure of the human brain, and there are no biological differences amongst races that justify the illustration above or the rhetoric you hear on Joe Rogan's show. Yet, White people keep spreading lies about biological racial differences, and in response, Black people find themselves on the same intellectual battlefield as previous generations.
Consider W.E.B. Du Bois had to fight against the rhetoric eugenicists used to justify racism. "In smaller letters, the ad asked, 'Has the Negro…
