Jordan Peterson is facing backlash online after telling MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan he’s “not really brown.”
The Canadian right-wing pundit’s bizarre tweet came after Hasan’s monologue addressing the racist attack in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday.
“Tonight, this brown Muslim is asking the white conservative community … get your house in order, crack down on the hate preachers … condemn the right of white supremacist ideology,” Hasan said of the shooting.
The shooter was a 21-year-old who killed three Black people at a Dollar General store.
Hasan’s monologue compared the treatment that Muslim communities faced when some Muslims committed terrorist acts to the treatment of conservatives following rising radical, right-wing racist violence.
Conservatives, Hasan explained, have asked where the violence comes from in Muslim communities, so he’s now asking white conservatives to do the same.
“Republican presidential candidates didn’t want to do any soul-searching of self-reflection” the day after the shooting, Hasan said.
Peterson responded with what looked like free-verse poetry: “You’re not really brown / More like a light tan / Just like ‘white’ people / Plus you’re a Caucasian / By definition / Buddy.”
“Poetry has really gone downhill in recent years,” user @ahtralfie commented on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Others posted memes pointing out the incoherence of what Peterson was saying.
Other X users found the remarks less funny.
“So…rather than perhaps being a human and joining in condemnation of a racist mass murder he’s splitting hairs about skin color and ethnicity? Weird stuff man,” said @RudeBoyNYK.
“We are at the point where white ppl are leading ppl off a cliff lma,” @Strwbrycough1 added. “This dude is a sensationalist at this point.”
“Nothing to see here, just Jordan Peterson, a white man, telling me I’m not brown, I’m actually white,” Hasan responded to Peterson. “Also, how am I a Caucasian, ‘by definition’?”
“You’re not black/And you’re not Asian/What’s left?/Caucasian/It’s not that difficult,” Peterson replied.
Peterson later replied to Hasan with a citation from Wikipedia which claimed that anthropologists believed Dravidians, one of the people of India, were “Caucasoid.”
The page Peterson cited explains, “The Caucasian race … is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race.”
