Comedy Central
After spending greater than quarter-hour breaking down why he felt Joe Rogan’s apology for a historical past of racist jokes and commentary on his fashionable Spotify podcast was so disingenuous final week, Trevor Noah doubled down Monday evening, turning over all the Day by day Present episode to an prolonged dialog with the singer who helped break open the controversy earlier this month.
“Tonight, we had an episode deliberate across the Tremendous Bowl and Ukraine and simply catching up on all of the information, however I had actually one among my favourite conversations with a human being that I ever thought I might have,” Noah stated on the prime of the Valentine’s Day broadcast earlier than introducing his visitor, India.Arie.
Simply over every week in the past, India.Arie posted a video to Instagram that featured a stunning compilation of Rogan utilizing the “N-word” together with a clip during which he in contrast a movie show in a Black neighborhood to The Planet of the Apes. She introduced that she was becoming a member of different artists who had been asking their labels to take away their music from Spotify, explaining that she didn’t need her artwork to assist pay for his hate speech.
India.Arie advised Noah that whereas eradicating her music from Spotify in protest doesn’t really serve her pursuits, she felt like she was being “disrespected,” including that she “didn’t count on anybody to hear” as a result of she’s “used to this sure sort of therapy from the trade the place they don’t hear.”
Now, she defined, she’s “nonetheless in a struggle” to get her music off of Spotify, with Common Music Group refusing to comply with her needs. “However that’s a complete different dialog,” India.Arie added.
India.Arie defined that she at all times tries to make the excellence between “acutely aware” and “unconscious” racism, providing “forgiveness” for the latter, earlier than arriving on the conclusion that with regards to Joe Rogan, “he's being consciously racist.”
“I feel he was saying it as a result of it bought an increase out of individuals,” she stated. “That’s why he would say it. He knew that it was inappropriate. And I feel the truth that he did it repeatedly and was acutely aware and knew, I feel that's being racist.”
When she first heard his apology, India.Arie stated that her first intuition was to provide him the good thing about the doubt and say “he tried,” however “after I go deeper and ask myself what I actually suppose from my dedication to reality that I’ve made this final yr, what I actually suppose is that he was being consciously racist and it makes me marvel what he talks like behind closed doorways.”
“As a comic,” Noah appeared inclined to defend Rogan, as he did instantly following the podcaster’s apology, asking his visitor what the “path to redemption” may be for him, assuming “all of us need individuals to get higher.”
“I don’t suppose being a racist makes you a nasty particular person, essentially,” India.Arie responded. “It makes you an individual who was raised in our society.” However whenever you put the “energy” of somebody like Rogan, who has such a large viewers, behind these racist concepts, then “that’s racism” and he’s “emboldening” his listeners to do the identical.
When Noah pressed her to say once we, as a society, ought to settle for Rogan’s apology, India.Arie advised him that she hasn’t seen sufficient proof but that he has actually modified.
“I don’t suppose he absolutely understands what he did,” she stated, noting that she has been receiving a barrage of racial slurs from his followers. “If you wish to actually lead your listeners down a brand new path, then lead them, to the purpose the place they don’t really feel that's the proper language to return in my DMs and name me an ‘N-word’ in protection of him.”
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