Episode Transcript: #970 - Bret Weinstein

All right, we're live Brett first of all thanks for doing this appreciate it man. I'm glad to be here

You look great despite all this pressure. You're smiling is a

For people that don't know what's going on. Let's lay out all of

all 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?

Well, this goes back farther. Yeah, let's lay out the whole thing. Okay, so we couldn't possibly lay out the whole thing

Let's just for people that have no idea what's going on, right?

They're listening right now. They're like, who's this Brett Weinstein guy? 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 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 their roles in the town that the white population is unaware of

And as you would imagine all hell breaks list. So anyway, that's a 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

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