The star of ABC’s Roseanne, actress Roseanne Barr, lost her job and much of the nation’s respect this morning when she decided to fire off a slew of racist tweets. One compared former Obama administration advisor Valerie Jarrett to an “ape,” while the other accused Chelsea Clinton of being a secret member of the George Soros family and repeated a long-debunked anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Soros collaborating with Nazis during the Second World War.
After the tweets went viral and the backlash started rolling in, Roseanne announced she would be leaving Twitter and apologized for the remarks.
I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter.
— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018
But in typical fashion, she couldn’t stay away – and instead has decided to go back on the offensive and “tweet through it,” as Twitter users have dubbed the decision to continue as if nothing was wrong after tweeting something profoundly offensive.
She didn’t even wait an entire day before jumping back in it and engaging with her loyal defenders online, who have been twisting themselves into knots in their incessant efforts to try to argue that somehow calling a woman of color an “ape” wasn’t racist.
Roseanne’s excuse? “I thought she was Saudi.”
Roseanne is back on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/9H5HQYdIAV
— Kate Aurthur (@KateAurthur) May 30, 2018
That did not go over well, and Barr returned to Twitter soon after to blame Ambien for her racist hostility (story here).
Peering through the rest of her timeline, we see her retweeting a veritable “who’s who” of right-wing propagandists and loyal chuds whipping out their digital calipers and trying to use race science to determine what order of “blackness” one must be in order for her comment to be racist.
https://twitter.com/RepStevenSmith/status/1001650562209902592
https://twitter.com/bbusa617/status/1001607427282915328
It is truly incredible to see so many people miss the point of the outrage this badly. Then again, they don’t see anything wrong with what Roseanne said, and think the only thing wrong with this whole situation is the fact that she has to face consequences for it.
