Satirist Samantha Bee is being compared to Roseanne Barr for insensitivity and crudeness. In the right-wing’s fervor to draw a false equivalency they conveniently left out, Roseanne, who is Jewish, used an anti-Semitic image, racism and conspiracy theories. Roseanne thought it funny to publish pictures of her in Hitler drag, putting cookies in an oven. Just recently her imagination has jumped to accusing Michelle Obama of pressuring ABC into firing her. Roseanne has made a recent living of targeting ethnic and racial groups for scorn and she has become dangerous. She supported the nutty, Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of a child sex ring propagated by the farthest of the far in the right wing. After months of this inane social media phenomenon, a gunman drove from North Carolina to Washington, DC to “liberate” the kids supposedly held in the basement of a pizza parlor.
I have been calling for a return to decency to our public discord for months, but I am not blind to the difference in outrage and baseless attacks. Samantha Bee made the decision to express outrage and chose the wrong words, Roseanne made the decision to express outrage and chose hatred. Yes, yes, they are both comics and the idea of comedy is to push the line to its breaking point but that does not include crude race-based analogies designed only for the purpose of humiliation and the perpetuation of superiority.
Where are we in America when comedians have become the barometers of moral turpitude?
The job of a comic is to observe and give a slant to political and societal absurdity. Now the roles have reversed. We now accept the absurdity of pols and are looking for and blaming comics for exposing it. I would never make the choice to use the words or phrasing of Samantha Bee to describe any woman because for me it is disrespectful. I am not equipped, have the comic timing or expertise and have not chosen to comment on life through humor. Roseanne once grabbed at her imaginary scrotum and spat on the ground after purposely butchering the National Anthem for comic relief and conservatives excoriated her for sullying a symbolic piece of cloth. Somehow that same outrage has not extended to her virtually spitting on the heritage of a real-life black woman. The grabbing of the crotch was an obvious send-up to the spitting, grabby ballplayers that you have seen at every baseball game. She understood the context, set-up, and execution, which is the essence of comedy but it failed miserably.
Samantha Bee made the same mistake, she understood the context, the set-up and failed to execute. The two women have now become this push and pull with a false bottom as its foundation. Let me give a little advice; I am a black man and if your white friends compare Samantha and Roseanne using tweets, photos or videos of Donald Trump compared to an orangutan they are lying to you. Anyone in America who pretends not to know the history of racial ridicule based on simian caricature and stereotyping is either a liar or willfully ignorant. Stop being entertained and dancing to the tune of melodramatic distraction. At the tip of this racially tipped spear in America is the current President of the United States. We have at best a sympathizer to bigotry and at worse a racist in the White House. Neither Samantha Bee nor Roseanne Barr can determine your future.
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