Jon Stewart: Morning Joe's 'Rap Causes Racism' Theory Was Dumb as Hell 

We’ve heard lots of hot takes on what made the racist dopes of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s Oklahoma chapter such racist dopes, but none was hotter than Morning Joe’s: it’s all because of that damn rap music. Wow. Does anybody have a pair of shades, to shield me from blinding light and heat of this take?

Jon Stewart also caught that dazzling mid-morning display of idiocy, and applied the lightest layer of sarcasm to what was really just a straight-ahead takedown: “First of all, the kids on that bus weren’t reapeating a rap song they had heard,” he pointed out on his show last night. “They were gleefully performing one of their fraternities’ old — let’s call them ‘anti-Negro spirituals.’ Featuring a word that pre-dates rap. And probably folk. And thought. Black rappers did not introduce that word into the vernacular.”

Stewart repeatedly referred to the “conservative media” and their reaction to racist stories like this, which is to always, always hold them as isolated incidents, rather than proof that we’re still a pretty racist country. But Morning Joe is on MSNBC; a “liberal” network. It makes the whole thing even more depressing, but on the bright side, it inspired Twitter to give us #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery.

Stewart also pointed out that University of Oklahoma Eric Striker, who posted a righteously pissed-off Snapchat video calling the SAE frat bros “motherfuckers,” among other things, actually apologized before they did. Parker Rice, the dudebro leading the chant, released a brief apology statement that makes no specific reference to the racist nature of the incident; he called it “wrong and reckless,” as well as “a horrible mistake.”

Yeah, who among us hasn’t sung a lengthy racist ditty by “mistake”? Good apology, Parker. Here’s Stewart’s full segment: