ROSEANNE'S RACIST TWEET REVEALS SHE FORGOT WE ARE NOW LIVING IN A NEW ANTI-RACISM ERA:
JIM CROW RACISM IS NO LONGER TOLERATED OR COMICAL.......NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN IS NO LONGER TOLERATED OR COMICAL........NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
EVERY MEDIA NETWORK NEEDS TO ADAPT STARBUCKS' ANTI-RACISM TRAINING MODEL FOR ALL EMPLOYEES, INCLUDING CELEBRITIES.
ABC WAS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT TO CANCEL ROSEANNE'S NEW SHOW.
TWEETING SUCH RACIST RHETORIC WAS DUMB & IRRESPONSIBLE.
THE BLACK VOTE IS STILL EXTREMELY VALUABLE.
Post Sources: CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NY Times, Youtube
****** Roseanne Barr Crosses a Line, and ABC Draws One
There is, it turns out, a line. Early Tuesday morning, Roseanne Barr crossed it. And within half a day, ABC, though Ms. Barr had given the network its biggest hit of the past season, enforced it.
First, the comedian and star of the revived “Roseanne” leveled a dehumanizing insult at Valerie Jarrett, calling the African-American former adviser to Barack Obama the offspring of “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.” Then she tried to pass off the slur, by way of halfhearted apology, as a “joke” — as if, somehow, a racist joke were any better than a racist statement.
Here’s the sad thing. Ms. Barr’s tweet, while shocking, was not unbelievable. What was truly surprising was that a commercial TV network took action against a valuable star, quickly and definitively, and in plain words.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” the ABC entertainment president, Channing Dungey, said in a statement.
You could criticize ABC for working with Ms. Barr, who has a long history of offenses, especially since she joined Twitter. You could argue that the network was just trying to stave off bad publicity or boycotts. You could wonder if behind-the-scenes troubles or declining ratings (common to many TV revivals) played a role.
But credit where due: ABC canceled its highest-rated show, a linchpin of its fall schedule, as a stand against its star’s racism. That decision will probably cut into the network’s advertising profits. There may be no perfect moral actors in this world, but that’s still a moral action.
As we’ve seen with #MeToo, which has taken figures like Louis C. K. and Matt Lauer off TV, this is the sort of decision that corporations in our society often make more quickly and punitively than voters. But it is not a step you can take for granted.
Take Donald Trump. Forget his statements as president or on the “Access Hollywood” bus. He began peddling the birther slur — that Mr. Obama, the first black president, was not born in the United States — while the fourth “Celebrity Apprentice” was on NBC. The network kept him as host for three more seasons, and aired one more on which he was executive producer.
In 2013, the “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson gave an interview likening “homosexual behavior” to bestiality and suggesting that black people in the South were more content before the civil rights movement. The A&E network suspended him for nine days before reversing its decision, less a slap than a tap on the wrist.
The “Roseanne” decision, on the other hand, will come at a price for ABC — and like any such step, will have collateral costs. In a Twitter post, Sara Gilbert, Ms. Barr’s co-star and an executive producer of the revival, deplored Ms. Barr’s comments as “abhorrent.” She added that the series was “separate and apart from the opinions of one cast member.”
There’s some truth to that last comment. “Roseanne,” the revival, was imperfect but complicated, trying to engage with important if volatile issues. At times, it had ugly racial overtones, including a snide swipe at ABC’s sitcoms about “black and Asian families” and references to “illegals.” At other times the show pushed back against her character, or even ridiculed her.
But finally, none of that matters. “Roseanne” is a story. The issue here was the real act of a real person, saying the sort of thing that leads to real corrosion in the real world when it becomes normalized.
Make no mistake: The “Roseanne” decision would also have been expensive if ABC hadn’t canceled the show. It’s just that the costs would have been borne, as they generally are, by vulnerable people whose tormentors would be emboldened by seeing someone famous and powerful get away with it.
For that matter, it would insult people in small towns like the Lanford, Ill., of “Roseanne” — towns like the one I grew up in — for a TV network to imply that the only way to represent them is by indulging racism.
The character Roseanne said something like that a quarter-century ago, when her son was reluctant to kiss a black girl in a school play. “I didn’t raise you to be some little bigot!” she told him. “Black people are just like us. They’re every bit as good as us, and any people who don’t think so is just a bunch of banjo-pickin’, cousin-datin’, barefoot embarrassments to respectable white trash like us!”
Corporations involved in controversies like this usually simply want them to disappear. This one, because “Roseanne” has long since been drafted into the culture war, probably won’t.
Even if the president, who praised “Roseanne” to his supporters as being “about us,” doesn’t weigh in, even if Ms. Barr herself stays off Twitter, recent history tells us people will seize on the opportunity to say that the p.c. thought police are repressing us, because a rich woman lost her job for calling a black woman an ape. ABC will have picked a side regardless.
At least it picked the right one here. The battle against bigotry is not just about bigots. It’s about those who reap the benefits of ignoring bigots, and still think they should be able to call themselves good people. When an institution like ABC takes a stand — in prime time, where people notice it — that matters.
I’ll be cynical again tomorrow. For now I’m glad that a corporation had an opportunity to think only of its bottom line, and chose to draw a line instead.
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