Roseanne has learned the hard way that racial insults (or even racial allusions) are forgiven only when white Leftists make them about black conservatives.
You may have heard that ABC, a Disney subsidiary, cancelled Roseanne’s megahit reboot of her old show. The reason given was that Roseanne sent out a tweet criticizing Valerie Jarrett for being a Muslim Brotherhood stooge and likening her looks to a character in Planet of the Apes.
I gather that the offense was not that Roseanne said Valerie Jarrett holds views common to a murderous, genocidal organization that seeks world domination. The horror of it all was the suggest that there’s a simian look to Valerie Jarrett:
ABC promptly clutched its pearls and cancelled an unusually successful show:
ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey said in a statement on Tuesday that the network would not be producing the show’s second season.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” Dungey told Fox News.
A rep for Barr did not return Fox News’ request for comment. She was also dropped from her talent agency, ICM Partners.
I have a bunch of points I want to make, so I’ll just throw them out here in no particular order:
1. I have no problem with insulting Valerie Jarrett. I won’t expand on that here, but you can check out the following links: this, this, this, and this. I applaud anyone who tackles Jarrett, but you have to make a clean tackle to score a point. Roseanne, apparently unaware of the unspoken rules about arguments that implicate race, made a dirty tackle. If you attack Jarrett, attack her political, social, and economic views. They are easy and fair game.
2. There is no way you can compare black people to anything simian without looking bad. One of the internet’s favorite games is likening celebrities, including political celebrities, to their animal twins. Indeed, for eight years, this was probably the top animal = celebrity image:
Although the picture is kind of cute, it was not meant as a compliment. We all remember the “Chimpy-Bush-Hitler” meme.
Bush isn’t the only famous person whom the internet compared to something simian. A 30-second search yield several more celebrity = simian images:
The important thing to note is that all of the men in the above pictures are white. Roseanne transgressed one of America’s major shibboleths, which is that you never liken a black person to any creature in the simian family tree.
I happen to agree with this shibboleth. There are too many centuries of such comparisons in America, and they were always meant to imply that blacks were subhuman. The fact that Roseanne’s comparison was to superhuman simians (the sympathetic, brilliant apes in the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise) is irrelevant. It simply smells bad thanks to centuries of intentional, demeaning racial prejudice aimed at exploiting blacks and depriving them of the liberties inherent in all human beings. [Read more…]