Trevor Noah Educates Joe Rogan on Blackness After Jordan Peterson Interview

Trevor Noah: 1, Joe Rogan: 0. On Wednesday night, The Daily Show host skewered Rogan for spewing hate about Black people during an interview with Jordan Peterson, a far-right professor, on his podcast.

During the podcast episode, which was released early Wednesday, Rogan said, "The Black and white thing is so strange. There's such a spectrum of shades of people. Unless you're talking to someone who is, like, 100% 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 color, it becomes very strange."

Peterson, for his part, complained that Michael Eric Dyson called him a "mean, mad white man," and insisted that the writer "was not actually Black; he was sort of brown."

"Oh my God! I'm not Black! I'm not Black!" Noah, feigning sarcasm, said after playing a clip of the interview. "Joe Rogan's right! I'm like a Caramel Mocha Frappuccino. This changes everything, this changes everything!"

Noah ran off the set, only to return after police sirens wailed. "The police said I'm Black," he said, matter-of-factly.

The Daily Show host then stepped up to educate Rogan and Peterson in the wake of their overtly racist remarks. "Joe Rogan really wants to know why they say 'Black people' if they're not the color of a Sharpie. And this really is a common question," he explained. "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 of Black 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."

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah airs weeknights at 11:00 PM ET on Comedy Central.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.