Roseanne is a racist.

In an age where any dog whistle can be declared an innocent misunderstanding, there are probably only about four or five racist statements that can’t be explained away. One of them is comparing black people to apes. That’s because the comparison has a centuries-long racist history. It can be seen in countless instances, from King Kong imagery being used to attempt to demonstrate the lustful nature of black men, to throwing bananas in front of black sports players. It’s intended to denote that black people are not only other, but subhuman.

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So, Roseanne took a break from tweeting baseless conspiracy theories at Chelsea Clinton to declare that "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby" in reference to Valerie Jarrett, a black former aide to Obama. This isn’t the first time she’s done this. In 2013, she claimed that Susan Rice, the black National Security Advisor and ambassador to the UN had “big swinging ape balls.” In a surprising decision, despite the #1 ratings of her show, ABC canceled Roseanne declaring that, “Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

"The show’s revival was initially intended to appeal to Trump voters."



The show’s revival—part of a slew of nostalgia-based programs from Will and Grace to Fuller House—was initially intended to appeal to Trump voters.

There’s a great deal of sentiment that Trump’s America is full of mysterious creatures who ought to be studied and investigated. But it’s quite possible they aren’t really that complicated. Roseanne wasn’t a hit in spite of Roseanne's racism. It was a hit, at least in part, because of it.

There are a slew of people claiming that Roseanne was just joking:

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Roseanne wasn’t making a joke. Jokes have punch lines. The only way this reads as a joke is if your idea of joking is “expressing racist beliefs about people.” Claiming that Roseanne’s statement was somehow clever or pithy seems to indicate that people enjoyed it.

That’s because certain people did. Racism was linked to support for Trump, a man enough people voted for to elect President.

Comments like these among conservative voices aren’t new. Michelle Obama was called an “ape in heels” by an official expressing pleasure at how, with Melania Trump, we’d have a “classy beautiful dignified First Lady.”

It was said that she looked like a cast member of Planet of the Apes:

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Another woman exclaimed on Facebook, “Monkey face and poor ebonic English!!! There! I feel better and am still not racist!!! Just calling it like it is!”

There were a lot of people who felt those racist sentiments. They wanted someone on television who would “just call it like it is!” That’s not a complicated philosophy. That’s just a desire for a world where white people can say whatever they feel like and push around anyone who disagrees with them.

Many of the viewers of Roseanne reboot didn’t tune in because they loved the feminist commentary on the original show. They tuned in because they liked seeing someone who thought the way they did. They liked it when Roseanne dunked her granddaughter’s head underwater.

They liked her complaining to her daughter about how “Your generation made everything so PC” because she doesn’t want to hit her own kid. That was a massive reversal from the first version of the show in which the character declared, “Dan and I always felt that it was our responsibility as parents to improve the lives of our children by 50 percent over our own. And we did. We didn’t hit our children, as we were hit. We didn’t demand their unquestioning silence.” Oh well.

Viewers liked, too, seeing someone who would wonder if her muslim neighbors were, "a sleeper cell full of terrorists getting ready to blow up our neighborhood." They liked the character making belittling jokes about television shows featuring minorities front and center.

Roseanne dominated the ratings in areas that supported Trump, and conservatives claimed that “the rest of the country finally had a program they could watch without being spit on by the insufferable progressives that dominate entertainment.”

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They didn’t tune in for the original show. They tuned in for the Roseanne who showed herself very clearly on Twitter.

Certain people liked seeing a character who could be pretty awful and still be cheered on as a hero, because it gave them permission to be pretty awful and still regard themselves as heroes.

"It offers white Americans a safe space to pretend that the world hasn’t changed in 20 years."



And while a lot of nostalgia television doesn’t attempt to appeal to Trump voters as overtly as Roseanne did, all of it offers white Americans a safe space to pretend that the world hasn’t changed in 20 years. The concerns of gay people when Will and Grace was on the air in the '90s aren’t the same as those today, but the show is essentially unaltered. The same can be said of Fuller House, wherein a 30-year-old woman uses the same catch phrase she’s had since she was five. There’s an element of wanting to "Make America Great Again" in all these shows, indicated simply by the fact that people would rather see a rehash of something very old than try to embrace something new.

The fact is, great social commentary is today being made by shows like One Day At A Time which do reflect an America that is no longer as dominated by white people as it once was.

We can only hope that soon, when TV stations shape up their programming, they’ll look not towards the past, but to the future.