Roseanne as Saint Joan

Roseanne as Saint Joan
by David Benjamin

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it… I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”
— Trump

“Look at my African-American over here! Look at him!”
— Trump

MADISON, Wis. — Roseanne Barr has been become, thanks to her firing by a vindictive black woman at ABC-TV, the foremost martyr in the lost cause of white supremacy. In one fell swoop, she’s the Joan of Arc of race hatred.

She earned this exalted status by referring to not one but two classy African-American women — Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett — as “apes.” With this hackneyed slur, Roseanne articulated an ancient inhumanity that justified slavery, glorified ignorance, launched a bloodbath that killed 600,000 young men, lynched 5,000 innocent human beings, invented apartheid and — throughout history — denied the American dream to millions of true Americans yearning to breathe free.

As the victim of what Donald Trump calls “political correctness” (better expressed as “corporate prudence” or, more simply, “decency”), Roseanne will be consoled on Fox News, deified on talk radio, hailed by Sarah Palin, toasted by Steve Bannon, invited to the Oval Office and anointed as keynote speaker at next year’s CPAC reichsparteitag.

From black leaders like Valerie Jarrett, the response to Roseanne’s fateful tweet was muted. Jarret called the cancellation of “Roseanne” a “teaching moment.” Eddie Glaude, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton mentioned something about exploring our fears.

I wasn’t surprised that there seemed to be more sheer outrage against Roseanne from her fellow white people. During an MSNBC forum on “Everyday Racism,” for instance, author Tim Wise proceeded to rattle off a litany of “true crime” episodes in which fearful whites mobilized ill-trained and trigger-happy local cops against black people whose only apparent offense was to do ordinary white-people stuff — like playing in the park, moving in, moving out and shopping — that looks suspicious when niggers do it.

His voice rising and filling with anger, Wise said, “When John Crawford is called — the cops are called on him at the Walmart — and he’s standing there with an [unloaded] air rifle that he pulled off the shelf. At Walmart. He’s talking to his girlfriend… and the cops are called on him. They come. They shoot him. When you know that is what happened, what you are saying is that my [white] discomfort with you, right now, is worth more that the potential that your [black] life could be snuffed out in ten minutes.”

Another pissed-off white guy, Steve Schmidt, a former chief in the John McCain presidential campaign, appeared on a TV show hosted by Nicolle Wallace, who served as White House Director of Communications for George W. Bush. Waxing more furious than any of Wallace’s black guests, Republican Schmidt laid Roseanne’s obscenity at the feet of a bigoted president who has muscled onto the American scene the rebirth of Klanism.

Schmidt said this of Roseanne’s tweet, which she later dismissed as a “bad joke”: “It’s not a joke. It’s a stone-cold racist statement by one of the most prominent public supporters of a racist president who, time and time again, has shown us his true colors… We see the stirring of the race cauldron by this president, part of a very deliberate strategy to incite his base with conspiracy theories, with dishonesty, with lying, with race-baiting. He is stirring up the worst toxin that has been buried in the ground in this country and brought it back up. And he’s doing it on purpose.”

I identified with these frustrated guys. I share the dilemma of every white person who has spent his or her life despising and resisting the racist strain that has polluted every American institution since the first slave ship landed in Jamestown in 1619. (Yeah, I looked it up. We had black slaves before we had white Pilgrims.)

As Schmidt noted, black people have been treated as property, as three-fifths human and as second-class citizens from 1619 until right now — today — when you still have morons like Roseanne calling them “ape” and mainstream media like the New York Post depicting former president Obama as a deranged monkey.

This sort of crap bothers guys like Tim Wise and Steve Schmidt — and me — possibly even more than black observers like Valerie Jarrett and Eddie Glaude, who’ve been assailed with prejudice and grotesque insult every day, all their lives. I’m frustrated because I feel pressure from both sides. White bigots look at me and figure that must be one of them, because I’m the same coincidental color. They feel free to express every ugly thought and racist innuendo that crawls through their tiny brains.

Worse, they understand that I’m hesitant to dispute their brazen hatred, because of a natural human tendency against provoking confrontation. They establish their position atop a racist dungheap, from which they dare anyone — white or black — to climb the fetid slope and take them on. We both know that, as soiled as I might get in the battle, I will have wasted my energy. The bigot will remain as devoutly hateful as he was before I covered myself with shit trying to change his mind.

On the other hand, waging dubious battle against Trump’s army of yahoos gets me no sympathy at all from black people — nor do I deserve it. In one of my yet-unpublished novels, Summer of ’68, my 18-year-old protagonist, Franklin Roosevelt Cribbs (white despite his name), faces the futility of proving, to an offended black colleague —named Cliff — that he’s not a racist. Here’s part of Cribbsy’s cri de coeur:

“… A black guy had called me a racist, a declaration as irrevocable as a tattoo on my forehead. Once it’s said, that’s what you are. Insisting you’re not a racist makes it worse, because denial only proves that you’re a bigot blind to your own prejudice.

“Every white person is a racist at heart. If I learned anything from all that reading — Eldridge and Malcolm and Richard Wright — that was it. Racism is in my culture, in my psyche, in my blood and in my snow-white bones.

“It’s not that I want to be a racist. I’m trying not to be. I’m against prejudice, bigotry, discrimination and Jim Crow with all my heart and soul. But there it was. My racist instincts had stripped away my egalitarian gloss… I had treated Cliff like a field hand undeserving of even the rags on his back.

“I was a racist…

“… Cliff had sensibilities, cultivated in an alien universe, that I couldn’t understand, or even — I realized — accept. Yeah, so I was a smart kid, well-read and well-meaning. I harbored deep progressive convictions. I was overflowing with Christian compassion and I was desperate to learn. I was eager, above all, to be with-it, to be cool, subcultural, multicultural and countercultural. But here was Cliff, representing the coolest subculture in American life, telling me I didn’t get it.

“He was right.

“I’m a racist.”