Joy Reid says Trump presidency gave Roseanne Barr ‘broad sense of permission’ to be racist
Roseanne Barr's racist tweet against former President Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, who is black, led to a social media storm, forcing ABC to cancel their record-breaking, highest rated show.
While Roseanne's racism hadn't explicitly reared its ugly head until Tuesday's tweet, many of us knew the sentiments she harbored towards the "others."
She has always been supportive of the Trump presidency and seemed to more or less be the celebrity mascot of the pro-Trumpers.
Now that she has gone a bit too far with her "jokes" -- by basically calling Valerie, an African-American woman, a mix of “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes"-- it has become quite apparent that today's political climate gives people like Roseanne the opportunity to put their bigotry out into the world.
As MSNBC anchor Joy Reid explains, “It’s fraught, because for a lot of Roseanne’s fans, who now are in a big Venn Diagram with Trump fans, they see this as no big deal. That’s part of the problem, is that you have a certain set of people who feel you should be able to speak this way.”
During a Tuesday interview on 'Andrea Mitchell Reports', she explained how the current president of the United States has given people the right to be as politically and racially insensitive as they want to be.
Joy, who was in Philadelphia to co-host a town hall on Everyday Racism in America, also said, “We have a president at the moment who is kind of giving a broad sense of permission to not be political correct, to speak the way you want, to offend who you want and people shouldn’t say anything about it."
Reid also opined that the question to be asked in this watershed moment is whether the millions of people who support president Trump as much as they love 'Roseanne' and follow the show, think they are more valuable than the people who were offended by Roseanne's tweet.
Clearly ABC does not seem to think so, having not only sacked Roseanne, but cancelled the entire show – almost as if they knew this day was soon coming.