She didn’t wait a whole day before heading back to Twitter to post more than 100 times– tweeting, retweeting, reply-tweeting and deleting tweets– about ABC’s cancellation of her show, “Roseanne.” For those who may still be unaware, Roseanne posted a curious– and certainly ‘in-bad-taste’ tweet widely condemned as being racist– about a former senior adviser to President Obama.
She was responding to a comment about Jarrett when she said: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Jarrett is black.
The tweet itself seemed to have no other purpose but to offend a person Barr claimed she did not even know was African American.
“I thought she was Saudi,” Barr tweeted to one of her supporters. But in other tweets she said she thought Jarrett was “Jewish and Persian,” as if somehow that made the original tweet less offensive.
Barr, though, insists that she is not a racist, and wrote that losing her show was nothing compared with being labeled a racist over what she called a single tweet. “That I regret even more,” she wrote.
Technically, there was only one “tweet,” but Barr kept up her racist rant on Wednesday, “retweeting” photos of Jarrett side by side with an ape.
And this is not the first time Barr has chosen to denigrate a black female Obama supporter through association with an ape. In 2013, in a since-deleted tweet, she targeted Susan Rice and tweeted that “susan rice is a man with big swinging ape balls.”
Not a racist? This country’s soiled, racist past is filled with references to blacks as apes and monkeys. The idea behind the name-calling, of course, was the idea that blacks were– like monkeys and apes– not human. Sentiments like those helped justify slavery– until the south was filled with Massa’s half-black offspring. Later, they helped justify disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. It might be okay to ignore the past in ‘blacks are less than human’ rants like Barr’s, but it is certainly NOT okay to deny it. ‘Cause it is what it is.
Woe-man up, Roseanne. Maybe David Duke can fund your next TV project.
