On Roseanne and the Dangers of Corporate Censorship
This time the networks got it right. What about next time?
This time the networks got it right. What about next time?
Roseanne speaks publicly for 1st time since tweetstorm
Roseanne Barr spoke publicly for the first time since her ABC show was canceled on Tuesday, telling a reporter that…abcnews.go.com
Language, by its very nature, is not violence. Yet, words can and do hurt, and there lies the complication. We need to be free in our speech, but also understand the power that speech has to injure, to do harm. Navigating these lanes, however, is difficult.
When Michele Wolfe torched Sarah Huckabee Sanders by complimenting her eye shadow, conservatives and the liberal keepers of propriety went ballistic. She crossed a line, they said, and the White House Correspondence Association, which invited her, threw her under the bus. She was accused of attacking Sanders’ looks — a bogus claim, I believe — and of just being really mean.
Here is the joke in full:
I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like, maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.
The joke here is not about Sanders’ looks, but about her complicity with the Trumpian narrative, a collection of lies, distortions, attacks, and overall disreputable reality-show-like behavior that Sanders seems all too happy to both present and defend.
Wolfe’s verbal shot is of a piece with much of the comedy leveled at the Trump team — Melissa McCarthy’s brilliant and critically accepted portrayal as former presidential spokesman Sean Spicer as a want-to-be bully/spoiled kid throwing a tantrum was vicious, in no small part because the bully was being portrayed by a woman.
The targets, in both cases, had immeasurable power, while the comics, who have an earned a level of cultural power that is greater than the average American, were “punching up.”
This brings me to Roseanne Barr and her Twitter rants. Barr at one time was a powerful voice for working class concerns. The first three to four seasons of Roseanne, which aired during the Reagan era, were shocking for their presentation of the cultural and social costs to the working class of closed factories and shrinking opportunities.
At some point, however, Barr became overcome by her fame, the show started flailing about, and Roseanne became little more than your standard family sitcom. Barr, herself, slid into a miasma of conspiracy nonsense as she moved from failed talk show to a political career that was nothing more than an extension of her brand.
Barr, who long ago severed any connection she had the the working class, had become a Twitter troll who trafficked in racism, anti-Semitism (yes, Barr was raised Jewish), and an array of oddball critiques, ultimately becoming a high-profile Trump supporter.
With the networks and the media, more broadly, being criticized by Trump and the right as out of step, ABC opted to bring the show back. The premise offered complexity — Roseanne and sister Jackie on opposite sides of the Trump debate, Roseanne and Dan’s kids back at home, their three grandchildren (including a multi-racial grandson and a grandson who identifies as female). The show, which I refused to watch because of Barr’s public racism, received good reviews and was supposed to return for another season.
Then came the tweet.
Barr compared former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape, making use of one of the longest-standing racial tropes available. Equating a African Americans with apes, dehumanizing them, transforming hem into beasts, has a long history. (The Irish also we’re depicted as apes in the United States in the years leading up to and shortly after the Civil War, and the British referred to the French and Irish the same way.)
Historian Arica L. Coleman, an African American, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that “Barr and others (may) dismiss their association of people of African descent and apes as a mere joke,”but
“this racist trope has been used for centuries to condone slavery, segregation, even eugenics. The trope has its roots in 16th- and 17th-century European and American thought, when it was used to argue that Africans were subhuman, thereby justifying the enslavement and second-class citizen status of African peoples.” It was about dehumanization, about stripping the enslaved of any vestige of humanity. African Americans were animals, according to this argument, prone to violence and controlled by lusts and hungers, unlike the polite and refined white Europeans who created these tropes.
The argument, she said,
was burned into the European and American psyche, justifying the centuries-long enslavement of African peoples who were chained and herded like cattle onto slave ships to be sold at auction to the highest bidder. Reduced from human beings to chattel, slaves endured speculators prodding and picking at their potential commodity to ensure the quality and production in labor. For women, their childbearing potential as “breeders” to reproduce the slave labor force was seen as a premium. The inspection included the public examination of teeth, limbs and private parts. Such indiscretion was viewed as natural because of their status as property rather than people.
Barr’s use of this trope was not accidental, nor was its result of her supposed mental health issues, or a product of Ambien use, as she attempted to claim. It was part of a pattern on her part, and remains central to efforts on the right to short-circuit African American activism and the fight to finally bridge the gap between the promises made to most of us and those reneged on for black Americans.
It’s what makes Barr’s tweet so much worse than those being used by the right to point out a supposed double standard. Yes, the same people who were upset at Michele Wolfe for crossing the line of propriety are now “shocked, shocked” that ABC reacted so quickly and fired Barr, while Netflix did nothing to Wolfe and TBS has done nothing to Samantha Bee, who described Ivanka Trump as a “feckless cunt,” a description that both crossed a rhetorical line and managed not to go nearly far enough in its attack on the First Daughter.
“Cunt” as a slur is relatively recent, and there are some who think we need to mainstream it, recontextualize it. Ana Marie Cox on Left Right and Center joked that she and her friends were going to start referring to each other using it in a positive manner, as in “my bitches” or the N-word. Bee, of course, was using it as a slur, one that has been used historically to demean and debase women, to dehumanize them by reducing them to their sexual characteristics. The insults used by Barr and Bee are not exactly analogous — Barr’s racism ultimately was an assault on all African Americans, while Bee’s was more directed, though inartful (a good explanation of this comes from Scaachi Koul, in Buzzfeed), and her gravest error might be giving the right the opportunity once again to cry hypocrisy.
Bee, it seems pretty clear to me, should not be fired — not only because she apologized, but because she was engaging in obviously political speech. Barr, it could be argued, was doing the same thing, though she veered wildly from criticism of Valerie Jarrett into explicitly racist territory.
And yet, the response to Barr’s firing points out something I’ve been saying for a while: Corporations are no better equipped than the government to adjudicate the line between what is acceptable speech and what isn’t. The right has ratcheted up the false equivalency and self-serving moral outrage machines, as I said. Trump and his team have used ABC’s decision as a diversion and as a way to prick the base to action. The question, they ask, is what keeps critics of the president who use harsh language on the air?
Money. Every decision about who stays and who goes comes down to money. Sometimes, as with Barr, the money comes down on the right side. More often, though, the money will freeze out marginalized views and marginalized people.
ABC cited creative differences in not airing an episode of Black-ish that focused on numerous social issues, but apparently hinged on the NFL protests.
ESPN, like ABC owned by Disney, bowed to pressure when it pulled Jemele Hill from her anchor slot over criticism of Trump and Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones. She later left ESPN for The Undefeated.
Lowe’s pulled ads from All-American Muslim, a reality show that lasted barely a season due to lack of ad support.
And then there is the case of Bill Maher. ABC fired him in 2006 after he called the American military “cowards” for some of their actions. His show found a new home, where he is free to demean Muslims — indicating some targets have more power than others.
This is not new. Bob Dylan walked off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 when CBS told him he couldn’t play “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.” The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was canceled because of the show’s strong anti-Vietnam War stance. Walmart, which before the online retail boom, was one of the only outlets for music in much of the United States, would not sell CDs marked Parental Advisory, essentially forcing artists to hold their tongues.
While I have no sympathy for Barr — she has proven herself a racist and ABC never should have given the Roseanne reboot a green light — I can’t help but worry about corporate censorship, about the progressive artists who follow in Barr’s racist wake. Will they get the chance to push boundaries, express unpopular or controversial opinions, or will they be pushed to the margins and shut out?
This minefield is only going to get more difficult to navigate as media companies continue to gobble each other up. Government certainly cannot be granted the authority to step in and arbitrate these issues, but it could be more aggressive in its anti-trust efforts, preventing mergers and focusing on protection of competition. Even then, these questions would remain.
I’m not upset that Roseanne is off the air, but I worry that the next cancellation won’t be a response to overt racism like this, but a more artistically of politically progressive and adventurous show. Because of this, our focus needs to be on creating alternative spaces that are not dependent on corporate largess, though I admit, that likely won’t be enough.