At Hogwarts, student wizards make snails disappear by incanting “Evanesco!” In Hollywood, alt-right wizard Roseanne Barr incanted a racially insensitive and intellectually dumb tweet that made vanish her dignity and career, a high-rated TV show and the livelihoods of hundreds of people.
ABC quickly reacted to her post by cancelling Roseanne, to the praise of many. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, which owns the network, personally phoned former adviser to President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, whom Roseanne had attacked in her insulting tweet, to assure her that there would be “zero tolerance” for these kinds of statements.
But, as much as I applaud when corporate America ignores the bottom line to fight racism, I can’t help but wonder when zero tolerance becomes intolerance. Jarrett described these events as a “teaching moment,” which means we need to figure out just what lesson we’re trying to teach and what the best way is to get that point across.
This is not in defense of Roseanne. There isn’t one. We give artists a lot of leeway when it comes to what some might deem offensive speech because that’s the point of free speech. She continues to have the right to say whatever she wants. But Disney and ABC are not obligated to suffer the consequences of popular outrage over her speech or offer tacit support of her dimwitted opinions by continuing to employ her.
In her original tweet, Roseanne said, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” In her apology, Roseanne claimed she was making a bad joke: “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”
The Bad-Taste Joke defense just doesn’t work in this case. You can’t have read a book or newspaper, watched a movie or a television show, or just lived in America for the past 200 years without knowing that any reference to an African-American and an ape is textbook racism. Also, her odd, inaccurate and deliberately inflammatory reference to the Muslim Brotherhood to her average Twitter follower will seem like a slam to all Muslims. Roseanne could claim ignorance of all this, but then her ignorance of facts, politics, news, history, art, social…
