#970 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:06)

All right, we're live. Bret, first of all, thanks for doing this. Appreciate it, man.

Bret Weinstein (0:09)

Very glad to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

You look great. Despite all this pressure, you're smiling.

For people that don't know what's going on, let's lay out all of the events that have transpired. Essentially, you were being asked to step away from your college for a day. Is that what it was? Is it one day?

Bret Weinstein (0:33)

Well, this goes back farther than that.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Yeah, let's lay out the whole thing.

Bret Weinstein (0:36)

Okay, so we couldn't possibly lay out the whole thing.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Well, it's just for people that have no idea what's going on.

Bret Weinstein (0:42)

Right.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

They're listening right now, and they're like, who's this Bret Weinstein guy?

Bret Weinstein (0:46)

So the core of it surrounds a tradition that we have at Evergreen called Day of Absence. And this tradition stretches back long before I was ever at the college. I've been there 15 years. This tradition stretches back into, I think, the early 70s. And it's built around a play written by Douglas Turner Ward, a black playwright. And the play portrays events in a fictional town where the black population decides not to show up one day in order to emphasize their roles in the town that the white population is unaware of.

And as you would imagine, all hell breaks loose. So anyway, it's an excellent play.

And some early faculty at our college decided that we should have a day that mirrored this event. And originally black faculty and students and then later people of color would leave campus for a day to emphasize the role that they play in our community. And then they would later, the tradition was amended and had a day of presence added to it where people would come back to campus. And this has been going on, as I said, since the 70s and the whole time I've been there. And then this year, it was announced by the organizing committee that the situation would be reversed. And they asked white student staff and faculty not to come to campus.

And that did not at all sit well with me. As I said in my letter to the person who had announced this, Rashida, who I should say is staff, and she has ended up at the center of this controversy, I think, wrongly, just because my letter in response is addressed to her, and then it was made public by our school paper, so her name has been dragged front and center. But in any case, my letter, I said that there was all the difference in the world between a population deciding to absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their role, and a population deciding to absent another population from a shared space, which I find unacceptable as a person, as somebody devoted to the gains of the civil rights movement. I just, I should also probably say as a Jew, when people start telling me where I can and cannot be, it rings alarm bells.

So that's the gist of the story. And the letter caused quite a stir amongst student staff and faculty who responded, many of them, quite angrily. Privately, of course, people were, much more divided on the matter, and there were plenty of people who agreed with my letter, but publicly speaking, there was condemnation of the letter. But the event itself, Day of Absence, was mostly uneventful. I did go to campus, as I said I would, in my letter, and I actually, it's neither here nor there, it was accidental, but while I was on campus, I ran into a student that I know very well, actually a student that my wife and I were abroad in Ecuador with last year. We were teaching abroad and we had 30 students with us. And so one of the students who had traveled with us to Ecuador happened to be on campus too. This is a student of color.

Joe Rogan (3:59)

I'm going to stop this right here because there's too much banging around in here.

Bret Weinstein (4:12)

That's all right.

Joe Rogan (4:15)

That was going to go on, that was going to drive me crazy.

Bret Weinstein (4:17)

Right, I understand.

So, I ran into this student that I know well and care about quite a bit, and we had a very nice conversation, mostly not about Day of Absence. As a matter of fact, I can't even remember if we did talk about Day of Absence, but there was something poignant to me about the fact that while I was being condemned for refusing to accept this new formulation, that I was able to meet with a student who is important to me and neither of our racial backgrounds is primary in our relationship. We know each other as people, and that's really how I would like to see all of us interacting on campus. We all have our backgrounds, they matter to us, but it cannot become the primary interface between us.