South African expatriate comedian Trevor Noah set the internet on fire in a recent podcast when he questioned whether “integration was the right move”.
“That may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever…” exclaimed actor and comedian Darryl “D.L.” Hughley, when he heard what Trevor Noah had said. “First off, I’ve heard enough from South Africans this year. That’s enough. Between Elon Musk and Trevor, I don’t need to know about race from two dudes from South Africa. I’ve heard enough.”
What did Noah say to provoke this fellow’s ire?
“Trevor Noah and Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin advocate for the reintroduction of racial segregation in American schools,” posted Timcast News, over on X, complete with a two-minute-plus video extract from Noah’s podcast of 13 February 2025.
Noah’s guest on his show, What Now?, was Ruha Benjamin, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, who studies the social dimensions of science, technology and medicine.
“So Trevor Noah is cancelled right?” wrote one X user. “This South African and his Indian guest are agreeing with each other that Segregation is good. I think he’s cancelled. Someone take his Black card away, if he got one from us when he got here.” (Benjamin was born in India, of a black American father and a Persian-Indian mother.)
“Think about how shallow your ability to critically think has to be to make such a suggestion. A mindset no doubt driven by hate and racism,” wrote another. “I would have been the guy standing up for what’s right way back in the day and I’ll do it now.”
The dialogue
I’ll quote the segment of the dialogue that went viral, which starts at 34:45 in the full show (and eventually – eventually! – made its way to my own timeline). I’d recommend, however, that you listen to more of the discussion, and especially the half-hour or so that preceded the controversial clip, in which they discuss the end of diversity, equity and inclusion and what it has and hasn’t achieved. Context matters, and neither Noah nor his guest are complete fools.
Noah raises the question:
“There’s one question I wanted to ask you, which is extremely controversial. … Do you think that integration was the right move?
“Like… and now I’m separating two things, because I know in America people are like, ‘Well, of course, I mean, people were… there was racism and there was segregation.’ And I go, yeah, no, no, no, I’m separating them. Let’s separate someone being oppressed and someone not being able to get a job and someone not being able to get a bank loan. Let’s take all of those, the negative things away.
“Because I’ll put myself out personally and say, I think whether we talking about gifted kids who are anomalous, let’s say, to the norm; whether we are talking about, and I mean anything, anything that does not fit into a category.
“I think part of the reason Finland is able to do it [referring to success in education] is because… Have you been to Finland? I’ve been to Finland. You know who’s in Finland? Finnish people. That’s it. That’s it. And because they’re all Finnish, there’s an idea of like, no, we all head in the same direction. We all know what our actions mean.
“And that’s a really powerful thing I’ve learned in communicating with other people. When I’m in a room with anyone, where we start to tie together multiple things. So if I’m in a room with black people already, there’s like an implicit trust because we know what certain actions, words and vibes mean.
“And then you’re in a room with another African. Ah, already? Yes. Now, even if you shout at me, I know what your shout means. The same way in Italian knows what an Italian shout means. Yeah, right. And also I’m prefacing it with a lot, because yes, it’s a loaded question.
“But I would love to know if you think integration was the right solution, maybe, on the other side of, you know, of civil rights.”
His guest, professor Benjamin, responds:
“Yeah, no, I don’t. And I don’t think it’s actually that controversial when if, if you understand that segregation and integration weren’t the only options. Like, within those two options, it may seem like integration is the more progressive… like, of course we don’t want segregation.
“But again, when you’re being integrated into institutions, into a culture that’s a supremacist culture, that’s a culture that feeds off of hierarchy, that feeds off of insecurity, anxiety, why are we being integrated into that?
The viral clip was cut off here, but it’s worth continuing to listen to Benjamin:
“And so part of it is to question what we’re being invited into. And so again, when you think about the example of [the] Finnish being homogenous, you know, nation states are imagined. National identity is not something that is, you know, God given. It’s not something that, you know, existed for eternity.
“These identities were created, maintained, you know, made durable over time. And so part of stretching our imagination is to recognise all of the things that have been made up, but made to seem immutable, fixed, you know, intrinsic, including our national sort of identities.
“And so part of it is to really like to denaturalise the things that we take for granted as somehow magically operating to make us feel connected to each other and ask ourselves, how else can we be connected to engender the sense of solidarity, where what I want for my kids, I also want for my neighbors’ kids, I want for the kids who don’t speak English, I want for the kids who are just arriving.
“And so, again, to push ourselves, when you think about expanding our imagination, to make it more embracing of seeming differences that are not intrinsic, that are not something that are inevitable.
“…We are so creative in creating hierarchies and distinctions out of nothing. You know, if we channelled that creativity to actually work in the opposite direction. If we’re doing it to maintain hierarchies and division, perhaps we can do it to engender solidarity and connection. Right.
“And I think it’s a choice. When we give up our power and think, oh, this is something happening to us, we have to just navigate this crooked system as it is. I think, you know, that only serves those who are currently benefiting from the status quo. And so I always have to ask myself, who does my pessimism serve?”
Nuances
I’ll leave the cancelling of Trevor Noah to the habitually outraged trolls on both the left and the right of social media. (Is there a centre anymore?)
I could point out that Noah was careful to address only forced integration and its failures, and did not advocate a return to forced segregation, and certainly not to a pre-civil-rights era of racial oppression. Such nuances would be lost on the online outrage factory, however.
Benjamin raises some interesting observations.
The question of whether forced integration has worked, and whether people of different races aren’t better off separated from each other, is not new on the political and academic left, whence Benjamin hails.
I wrote about an emerging trend on the far left to re-introduce segregation, supposedly for the protection of the fragile sensibilities of minority identities, so they wouldn’t be exposed to toxic masculinity and white supremacist micro-aggressions.
In that piece, I wrote:
“…being judged based on one’s skin, gender, sexual orientation, or other group identity is exactly the sort of insidious stereotyping against which non-racial liberalism stands.
“It is true that many groups still experience hatred and discrimination not because of the content of their character, but because of who they are.
“We ought to always be sensitive to the hurt and injustice inflicted by the discriminatory policies of the past, and the continuing prejudice that some people still face today.
“However, two wrongs don’t make a right. Just as non-racial liberalism stood against segregation when the racists of the past divided society based on harmful stereotypes, so it stands against it today, when the neo-racists of the left are trying to re-segregate society based on those same harmful stereotypes.
“The cure for prejudice is organic, unforced integration, not institutionally enforced segregation.”
Identities are not innate
The idea that different nationalities and cultures are better off gathered together, and separated from other groups, is also nothing new on the right, of course.
What struck me about professor Benjamin’s answer is her observation that nationality and other identities are not innate. They’re not fixed.
I think that is a very important observation. I like to associate with people who share my interests, and share my politicial views. I dislike associating with people who do not. Their race, or nationality, or age, or gender, never enters into the equation.
People do not necessarily share anything substantial in common just because they’re white, or black, or coloured, or Afrikaans, or Xhosa, or German, or Spanish. We sometimes like to pretend we do, especially when sports matches come around, but we don’t, really.
If you listen to the earlier parts of Noah’s podcast, Noah’s problem was with forced integration, into a regimented one-size-fits-all school system that was never designed for racial or any other kind of diversity. He mentions that he was expelled from school back in the day, and said that he should have been expelled, because he didn’t fit in and was disruptive within that system. He thinks there ought to be other options for people who choose not to “fit in”.
This is why the adjective is important in “unforced integration”. As Benjamin said, the options weren’t between forced segregation and forced integration. Those are both involuntary, government-imposed systems.
Forced and unforced
In a free world, there would be unforced integration, and unforced segregation, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with either of them. As long as segregation does not extend to domination or oppression, then who one chooses to mix with is a matter of freedom of association.
In that article on segregation, I related how much I benefited from being exposed to diversity at Wits University back in 1989, coming as I did from a whites-only school in a whites-only suburb. I truly do see diversity as valuable.
As a liberal, however, I cannot agree with coercive integration and diversity. Let people associate with whomever they wish.
Some will, unfortunately perhaps, associate with people of their own nationality or the colour of their skin. But that’s their choice. Others will associate with people based on what I would consider to be more sophisticated criteria, namely the content of their character.
Shared interests, be they cultural or economic, and shared philosophies, beliefs or politics, are all better reasons to associate with others than immutable characteristics like birthplace or bodily features. These features do not speak to their character, nature or opinions.
Non-racialism means not judging people or treating them differently based only on the colour of their skin. That precludes racial discrimination in formal settings, but it also precludes social engineering policies like affirmative action, or, as it has become known, diversity, equity and inclusion.
On that score at least, both Trevor Noah and his guest, professor Benjamin, are quite correct. For better or for worse, classical liberalism implies non-racialism, and individual liberty – and South Africa’s Constitution, for that matter – implies the right to freedom of association.
[Image: Comedian Trevor Noah in a video still from his podcast, What Now?]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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