In the era of social media, it has become a lot easier to identify racist behavior and demand accountability for it. Many times those demands go unheard. Though it may represent the court of public opinion, evidence of wrongdoing online isn’t always enough to merit specific consequences for one’s actions. However, if that racism goes viral, it might sometimes generate enough attention, awareness, and pressure that offenders are made to face the consequences of their actions.
On Tuesday Roseanne Barr, star of ABC’s sitcom Roseanne, tweeted out disgusting and racist comments about Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Obama. She called Jarrett an ape, writing: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” She backtracked after the response was swift and fierce, deleting the tweet and calling it a joke.
It’s sad that in all her years in the comedy business, Roseanne has yet to learn that ape and monkey jokes about black people are not considered funny at all—but especially when they are told by white folks. There’s nothing creative or particularly special about them. Instead they are just age-old racist tropes. Moreover, using the “it was just a joke” excuse is pretty played out. When it comes to racism, there’s a long history of white people saying stupid, offensive, and harmful things and then wanting to be absolved of any responsibility for it by telling the targets of the joke that they were just kidding.
But there’s an old saying that there’s always a little truth in every joke. And while we shouldn’t believe that the truth here is that Valerie Jarrett (or any other black person for that matter) bears any resemblance to an ape, we should know that the truth is that Roseanne believes full well in what she tweeted and knows its not just a harmless joke.
After all, she’s said it about another black woman before, just a mere four years ago.
So let’s be clear that this wasn’t a mistake or poor comic timing: Roseanne Barr has a history of saying racist things. She’s a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter. She’s been spending a lot of time peddling horrible conspiracy theories about Democrats and doesn’t care about lying or offending anyone, as long as her bombastic rhetoric gets a rise out of the Trump supporters who think she’s just “telling it like it is.” They’ll tell you they think she’s just exercising her right to free speech. They might be right—although the line between hate speech and free speech seems awfully blurry for those of us who are not lawyers and constitutional scholars. Still, Barr does have the right to tweet what she wants, even if it’s vile and hateful. However, she is not exempt from the consequences of her tweets.
ABC knows this. It’s why, within a few hours of her tweet and the subsequent apology, the network announced that it was cancelling her show. As CNN writes, this decision was met with surprise, given how well the reboot of her show was doing.
"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.
The cancellation was a shock in Hollywood. The revival of "Roseanne" premiered to huge ratings just three months ago.
Pre-production was already underway on a second season, which was scheduled for Tuesdays at 8 p.m. this fall.
Too bad for the show’s fans and the remaining cast and crew, but this is a good thing. Roseanne was reportedly making $250,000 per episode of her show, in which her character, Roseanne Conner, is also a rabid Trump supporter. Hitting her in the pockets sends a clear message and spares the rest of us from having to watch yet another mainstream media attempt to normalize Trump voters at the expense of all the marginalized people impacted by his presidency. More importantly, though, let’s ask: Why it was that Roseanne was ever given a platform for her rebooted show in the first place?
As an article from late March in the The Washington Post notes, Roseanne’s Trumpian shenanigans are not new to the reboot of her show. She’s long been using the internet to become some strange hybrid version of Donald Trump and Alex Jones, obsessively tweeting about Trump, the Clintons, President Obama, and made-up conspiracies involving politicians and government officials.
It’s not just Barr’s generic support of Trump that makes her a hero to the pro-Trump Internet. It’s also her apparently deep knowledge of and active engagement with the memes and conspiracy theories that Only True Trump Fans Online would know.
Barr has tweeted a YouTube video about “Pedogate,” which essentially rehashed the 2009 arrest of a local campaign manager for Sen. John McCain for allegations of child molestation. “Pedogate” is the umbrella term for a series of conspiracy theories that accuse powerful figures — these days, often Trump’s enemies — of being part of a secret ring of pedophiles. Pizzagate is probably the most famous iteration of that conspiracy.
She has tweeted about Pizzagate, too, linking to YouTube videos promoting or defending the conspiracy theory and its amplifiers.
Barr has also tweeted about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot in Washington. Despite pleas from his family, online sleuths insisted that Rich’s death was a political assassination attempt that was then covered up by the Clintons. This conspiracy theory regularly goes viral on the pro-Trump Internet.
You may remember that the whole Pizzagate thing suggested that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager had ties to a human trafficking ring being run out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. It moved off the Internet and into real-life when a North Carolina man decided to drive from his home to said pizza shop and fired into it with an assault rifle—striking walls, a desk, and a door. Obviously, this sick rumor has no basis in fact. Like or dislike Hillary Clinton, most of us know that the idea that she has been involved in any kind of human trafficking is preposterous. But Roseanne believes it. Or, at the very least, she decided to fan the flames of hatred toward Hillary by sharing videos and tweets about this nonsense. Part of the whole reason this conspiracy resulted in a shooting (even though no one was injured) is because of the people like Roseanne who made this story go viral by sharing it again and again. So, while Barr is not necessarily directly responsible, her actions and those like it have been a catalyst for the MAGA crowd to harm and terrorize others.
So once again, it’s worth asking why exactly ABC decided to give her a show in the first place. In a capitalist nation where everything is a commodity, corporations and executives are all too willing to overlook a series of problematic behaviors and patterns if they can make a buck, and big bucks were made off of this show—millions of them. Since the network was so willing to overlook what was already so clear, no one should have been surprised when Roseanne eventually continued to show her true colors and finally said something that the public thought was unforgivable.
We’ve been saying these things for a while now. Those cries were unheard. But maybe now ABC has learned that if you consort with, employ, and support racists, that makes you look racist, too. And, in 2018, if you make your brand on being a network that has good family values (ABC is owned by Disney), racism can be bad for business.
All of this comes in the context of an America that is grappling with what it means to be more diverse, when discussions of racism and white supremacy are taking place so openly and in a world where the Black Lives Matter movement challenges us to understand all the ways that blackness is criminalized and victimized by state and societal violence. Earlier this month, ABC scrapped an episode of the show Black-ish, which was supposed to address Colin Kaepernick, the NFL, and nationwide protests against police violence. It was never completely clear why it was that the network decided not to air it—though many speculate that it was deemed too controversial to take on.
It’s worth arguing that now is the time to take on such a subject and air the episode. After all, Roseanne and her Trump-loving racist conspiracy filth online wasn’t controversial enough to stop her getting another show on the network. Why should engaging the nation in dialogue about police violence against black bodies be too edgy? And since ABC network chief Channing Dungey, a black woman and the network’s first black president, called Roseanne’s tweets “abhorrent,” maybe she’ll consider airing a show that could be educational and transformative for our country. As W. Kamau Bell puts it, there’s now a hole in the ABC lineup that the Black-ish episode can easily fit into.
Axing Roseanne’s show was a solid first step for ABC in letting the world know that in 2018, racism has consequences. It doesn’t change everything—but after racism won Trump the presidency, it feels good to know there are some lines we are not willing to cross. Let’s keep putting pressure on companies not to profit from celebrity racism and see what comes next.