Roseanne Barr (1952- ), US comedian and conspiracy theorist, is best known as the star of “Roseanne” (1988-97), a US television comedy on ABC about a White working-class family. The show made a comeback two months ago, March 2018, quickly becoming one of the most watched television shows in the nation – only to be suddenly cancelled yesterday on May 29th.
Barr destroyed her show in just 53 characters on Twitter:
“muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj”
This was so racist that even Sean Hannity of Fox News found it “appalling”.
“VJ” is Valerie Jarrett, a long-time adviser to President Obama and an object of right-wing conspiracy theories. Jarrett is also a Black woman.
Blacks as apes: Barr said it was a “joke”. Ha ha. It plays on and pushes the profoundly racist idea that Black people are like apes, less than fully human. It is an idea Western science spent the 1800s trying to prove, and, in the 2010s, it makes police violence against Black people more acceptable. “Black Lives Matter” should go without saying – but in the US it does not.
Wanda Sykes, head writer on the show, is also a Black woman. She tweeted:
“I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC”
Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment which airs “Roseanne”, is also a Black woman. She said:
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel the show”
And just like, in less than 12 hours, the show was gone. Poof! Viacom and Hulu pulled their reruns. Even Barr’s agent dropped her.
Excuses: Some blamed her unstable mental state. Others blamed the “tone” set for the country by President Trump. Barr herself blamed Ambien, a sleeping pill. Sanofi, the maker of Ambien, stated:
“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
The “Roseanne” show of the 1990s was one of the few shows that was by and for White working-class people. That was because Barr had gained creative control from people who did not know that lunchmeat was square. Most television in the US is made by and for those who can afford new cars, making it about another world that most people only know from – television. Even “The Cosby Show” had that strange level of unreality to it.
The reboot was the same as the old boot, it seemed, only this time Barr’s character had a Black grandchild, Muslim neighbours, and, like Barr’s real life, a sister who voted against Trump, setting them at odds.
The reboot was seen as a show for Trump’s America. President Trump himself said the show “was about us.”
But then when Roseanne Barr, a real-life Trump supporter, acted like a real-life Trump supporter, ABC was shocked, simply shocked.
In 2013 Barr tweeted about Susan Rice, a Black woman who was the US ambassador to the United Nations:
“susan rice is a man with big swinging ape balls.”
That, presumably, was “consistent” with ABC’s values.
– Abagond, 2018.
Update (June 4th): President Trump, condemning Samantha Bee for calling his daughter the c-word while not condemning Roseanne’s racist remark, accuses the media of a double standard. Bee has apologized – something Trump has never done for his serial vulgar misogyny. Despite that, he wants Samantha Bee fired.
See also:
- Black people as monkeys
- racist jokes
- killer cops
- Why do Whites hate, demonize, fear and look down on Blacks?
- ABC
- The Cosby Show
- Donald Trump
- conspiracy theory
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Roseanne Barr is a disgusting, virulent, insane conspiracy nut job. She is a mirror of the rotten soul of this country.
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At first i felt bad for the people who would lose their jobs, but had to rethink and no I don’t feel bad for them either because they knew who this deplorable was when they signed on to work with her, they are just like the deplorable ghouls that voted for Trump.
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Good for Channing Dungey for taking out the garbage that is the Roseanne show.
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I feel the same way. I had some sympathy at first, but then I asked myself, why did they sign on to work with her.
I knew she’d become a vile person, which is why I knew I wouldn’t be watching the reboot of the show. I liked the old show, and knew they could never recapture that something something that the old show had, as it took place at a very specific time and place. This ain’t that time or place.
Everybody out there blaming everybody but her for what she did. She destroyed her show. Nobody else.
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And she had the nerve to say Ambien made her tweet those disgusting tweets. The pharmaceutical company that makes Ambien had to respond and say “Ambien does cause racism.” She really should have felt stupid after that.
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When I first heard it I laughed out loud at the official, deadpan, “racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.” statement from the Ambien makers.
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ABC is still owned by Walt Disney right? It’s funny how when I visited Disney World Magic Kingdom late last summer I couldn’t imagine the ‘Trump’ like ignorance of crossed eyed Polynesian Village Depictions and then the ‘Progress’ BS that avoided mentioning anything about social relations but concentrated on an all ‘white’ family’s life made easier by progressive technology. Very BS in every way.
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At first I thought she had gone temporarily insane. Now I can see that the insanity is not temporary.
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Reblogged this on We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident and commented:
It seems as if we’ve gone from dog whistles, to outright, in-your-face, bigotry.
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A SofS. Never found her ‘funny’.
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I never watched her program, not even the reruns.
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i have always dispised that show. So then she shoots herself in the foot, and blames it on prescription medicine. What’s her answer? Quitting twitter. enchante. Then, she doesn’t quit twitter and makes it worse, wow. Someone best forgotten, maybe we have a shot now since her broadcasting partners are dropping her like … whatever.
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I really enjoyed the “Roseanne” original series. Some of the episodes are really inspired. The Connors winning the lottery, paying off their bills and house should have been a great series ending, especially if it meant them doing great things for their kids and grandkids.
But the last few seasons you can really see where Roseanne the actor gets in the way of what the series could have been and should have been. The series reboot was actually going pretty well but her Trump support on the show and online could I have been seen as just an anomaly or a set up for a character revolution, but Roseanne the person simply can’t allow her TV family to exist outside her reality.
How did the Roseanne of the 90s become the Rudeness of 2018? How did the champion of liberal values, the LGBTQ community, and someone who routine called out the oppression & microagressions against Asians and Bosco people (before this were ever buzzwords) turn into a woman who regularly slings racial slurs casually and cares so little for her words that she gets her while show cancelled and all three jobs and work that go into it?
Roseanne the character is poor but Roseanne the person is not. Yet on and offscreen their life experience still leads then to the same conclusion. That the ways of age-old racism are best age in the end, white people are needed to keep black people in line.
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Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
In a nutshell … ‘This was so racist that even Sean Hannity of Fox News found it “appalling”.’
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[…] Source: Roseanne Barr […]
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@ thatdeborahgirl
Great points!. I felt the same way about the original series.
Roseanne’s comments are a window into the revulsion many White people felt about the Obama years:
A (mostly) Black family in the White House (it’s called that for a reason) who did not play to stereotypes really freaked out a large swath of the White population.
A Black president who pandered to White people. He even insulted Black people to please them. All to no avail.
An administration featuring high profile Black, Latinx and Asian officials.
Some White people are working hard now to stuff that Black genii back into its bottle.
Fear of losing status and privilege is an ugly thing.
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I got a very similar impression as Afrofem to what happened to a large swath of the white American population (except for a few bicoastal urban white liberals) with the election of Obama and his administration. They really got scared over what was happening to “their” country.
I think they are stuck in the past and the rest of the country has moved on. They had predicted in the 1980s that the transition to a minority-majority country by the 2040s would be a bumpy road for “ordinary” Americans.
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In a nutshell, fear of losing default status as many have stated previously. S of S! They know what they are about make no mistake, them and their white adjacent ‘allies’.
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I’m not saying that there’s any excuse for what Barr tweeted. But delving into her background story you get that her family was not only Jewish but Orthodox ones from Austria-Hungry. They basically kept their background hidden while participating in the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) while she was growing up in Utah. (youth identity crisis) She ran away from home by the age of 18. So you sense there is a resentment towards her biological parents including her mother.
Now when I sit back and think about those terms and I take look at the picture of Valerie Jarret and think about what Barr’s biological mother would have looked like ….. subconscious hate for her own mother…..
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@ jefe
In a sense it is a shame the show was cancelled since the town in Illinois it was based on (Elgin) is now minority-majority.
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You can take the trash out of the trailer…
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At the risk of sounding really stupid, what is S of S?
Already googled but not finding it….
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@Solitaire
We are in the same boat then.
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@ Sharina
Oh good, it’s not just me!
I’m assuming it’s similar to p.o.s.
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S o S is Sack of S*hit
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Thanks bliff! 🙂
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Well, sharinar, good to hear from u again. I see ur still spewing your angry black woman hate.
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@Bliff
“angry black woman hate”—It’s actually sharina”L”r.
“I see ur still spewing your angry black woman hate.”—If only I could be the angry black woman you image, but do provide an example of this angry black woman talk you speak of. I really hope it isn’t some uncomfortable truth. 🙂
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^^ Oh and open thread would be better as to not go off topic here.
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“How did the Roseanne of the 90s become the Rudeness of 2018? How did the champion of liberal values, the LGBTQ community, and someone who routine called out the oppression & microagressions against Asians and Bosco people (before this were ever buzzwords) turn into a woman who regularly slings racial slurs casually and cares so little for her words that she gets her while show cancelled and all three jobs and work that go into it?”
The answer is Israel. She fears that Blacks want to take Israel’s welfare money. The hate is especially intense for VJ because she knows that Iranians are human beings, not bomb targets, having been born and lived in Iran.
Roseanne is to the USA what Kiwi was to this forum. The thing that set that bozo off was the Peter Liang hubbub.
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@ gro jo
“She fears that Blacks want to take Israel’s welfare money. The hate is especially intense for VJ because she knows that Iranians are human beings, not bomb targets, having been born and lived in Iran.”
Interesting analysis. Do you have links to articles that go deeper into VJ? She seems to be an object of intense reaction among certain Rightwingers.
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Sorry, can’t help you with that. They hate her because she is a ‘superior’ i.e. well connected and educated black woman. Her father was a noted geneticist.
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I don’t think it’s smart to call a black woman a monkey or any type of primate when a black woman is signing her checks. At the end of the day Roseanne Barr will be fine she is still a rich woman.
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Update: President Trump, condemning Samantha Bee for calling his daughter the c-word while not condemning Roseanne’s racist remark, accuses the media of a double standard. Bee has apologized – something Trump has never done for his serial vulgar misogyny. Despite that, he wants Samantha Bee fired.
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@ Abagond: It’s not like Trump hasn’t used disgusting language when speaking about women’s privates and his remarks about the black NFL players SOB’s. There is no end to his hypocrisy and madness.
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Didn’t Samantha Bee apologize already? Barack Obama and his family were called every disgusting name under the sun and he never called for people to be fired.
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@ Mary
Samantha Bee did apologize. Trump needs to grow up. He is the most powerful man in the world. It is unseemly for him to play victim. If he does not want his relatives to be attacked by comedians, then he should try not being a nepotist.
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@abagond
I have a confession. I grew up watching both the Cosby Show and Roseanne. I might not know every episode by name but would be familiar with each and everyone upon viewing. I can tell you that Cosby was the more ‘delusional’ of the 2 in both the stratosphere of relating to good down to Earth people and for educational purposes.
The people viewing and seeing most episodes of the Cosby show would definitely be more ignorant to the social conditions of marginalized people in real life as well as be able to afford to purchase new or newer vehicles. There was maybe 1 episode that taught anything about life to me on the Cosby show and that was the one where Theo Huxtable had a discussion with his father concerning ‘wanting to be a regular guy’ earning $250 a week while surviving on baloney and cereal. But his father won the debate when Theo mentions he would have a girlfriend which would leave him flat broke.
Roseanne on the other hand dealt with way more social issues. A struggling working class mid-western white family that didn’t want to labelled ‘white trash’ and focused on financial problems where they might lose the house to Roseanne working at a Diner, opening a Motorcycle shop with Dan, to opening up their own ‘LunchBox’ cafe.
There were episodes later towards the end of the series that questioned their perceptions of prejudice and hate. DJ not wanting to kiss a black girl for some play at school to Roseanne not wanting to serve a black customer late night towards closing at her diner.
You can’t judge a show you never watched. Cosby was viewed and beloved by many upper-class Americans while Roseanne in my opinion superior life lesson show without the fake facade.
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You know what’s funny? I actually think Roseanne Barr, Valerie Jarrett, and Susan Rice all look kind of alike. Based on their photos, I wouldn’t even know that Jarrett and Rice were Black if I hadn’t been told. The three women each have tan/olive skin, straight dark hair, dark eyes that taper a bit at the outer edges, arched dark eyebrows, and balanced yet unremarkable facial structures. When viewed all together, couldn’t they pass for cousins, if not sisters?
I wonder if, on some level, Barr realizes the similarities and wants to differentiate herself from the others. The joke’s on her, though: we’re all distant cousins at the end of the day, even if we don’t look much alike.
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@ TeddyBearDaddy
Huh? I must be missing your point. You sound like you are disagreeing with me but you seem to be pretty much restating (with examples) what I said here:
I am saying that most of US television is made by and for the well-to-do, even “The Cosby Show”, that “Roseanne” was an exception.
That is why, as you say:
and why
In this post I said “The Cosby Show” had “that strange level of unreality to it” and in my post on the show itself I said they were living on Planet Brooklyn, meaning it was like another world that was like Brooklyn in name only:
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@Abagond
I’m not disagreeing with your politics per say but the fact that you grouped Roseanne with the Cosby show in terms of pure audience. Cosby wasn’t a bad show at all just had a more “I’m better than you because my family is of this economic status” type of feel to it. It made the white majority viewers think all marginalized people need to just get out of that rut and live the way the Huxtables did. So that was the backlash of that show. Roseanne on the other the hand was more pure and truer to reality setting of a mid-western working class white family and many could relate to the financial struggles. It was a indeed a secret pleasure of mine I would never talk about in school amidst shows like New York Undercover and stuff like that my peers and friends were watching when I was growing up.
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@Paige
If someone discloses a real photograph of Barr’s biological mother it wouldn’t strike me as odd that the resemblance to Valerie Jarrett would be uncanny.
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@ TeddyBearDaddy
“Cosby wasn’t a bad show at all [,] just had a more “I’m better than you because my family is of this economic status” type of feel to it.”
I never got that feeling from the Cosby Show. To me, it was extremely contrived:
◉ 2 brown skinned parents
◉ 2 biracial looking older daughters
◉ 3 darker (than the parents) younger siblings
◉ a mother of five children with a fashion model figure (LOL!)
◉ they rarely talked about race or racial incidents
◉ few grandparents, cousins or aunts and uncles floating in and out of their home
I went to high school and college with Black people from the same economic level and above depicted in the Cosby Show. My classmates lives were quite different from the show and I recognized the discrepancies.
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@ TeddyBearDaddy
This is true.
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First off, I thought Bliff was banned from here.
Second, Roseanne Barr is another case of why celebrities should not be placed on pedestals, especially if they set themselves up to fall.
Third, it’s sad how racists don’t own up to their own racism. Some of them are conservatives, and conservatives generally believe in personal responsibility. But when they’re caught with something that’s obvious wrong, they will blame everything and everyone else before taking ownership. To them, personal responsibility is for everyone, except themselves.
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So I’m reading that Roseanne died by opioid overdose in the “Connors” spinoff.
I guess that’s reasonably close to Ambien, eh?
lol
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