Television
ABC cancels ‘Roseanne’ after Roseanne Barr tweets racist insult about Valerie Jarrett
Swift action was needed, but should it ever have come to this in the first place?
4:08 PMShould it ever have gotten this far in the first place?
ABC canceled the second season of its Roseanne reboot Monday after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted a racist insult about former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Barr called Jarrett the baby of “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.” She tweeted an apology Monday morning, calling the statement a “bad joke.”
Within hours, Wanda Sykes, who had been a consulting producer on the show and was reportedly slated to take over the writing room in the show’s second season, tweeted that she would not be returning, essentially announcing that she had quit.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC president Channing Dungey said in a one-sentence statement to the press shortly after Sykes’ tweet. Dungey is the first black woman to preside over a broadcast network.
On one hand, it’s easy to say this is exactly what should have happened. But I’m not so sure ABC should be applauded here. Barr made plenty of hateful quips on Twitter before the network hired her for the Roseanne reboot. What did they think was going to happen?
ABC has long branded itself as “America’s Network.” The decision to invest in a newly MAGA-fied Roseanne seemed to suggest that the network was accommodating a portion of the populace that has come to be associated with racialized violence, such as in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tuesday morning, in an essay on the third season of Queen Sugar, I took Dungey to task for giving Barr so much leeway while refusing to extend the same freedom to black-ish creator Kenya Barris. After all, it was under Dungey’s leadership that Barr’s show included a joke directed at fellow ABC sitcoms Fresh Off the Boat and black-ish, essentially reducing them to little more than Asian and black versions of “normal” white families.
At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, Barr’s pre-reboot tweeting prompted questions. After all, Barr had tweeted a story from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars site claiming that President Donald Trump would have won the popular vote had “5.7 Million Illegals” not voted in the 2016 presidential election. She called intersectionality a “degenerate pseudo philosophy of fake left” and shared multiple tweets best characterized as transphobic and Islamophobic, calling Muslim immigrants “savages.” She trafficked in the Seth Rich murder conspiracy.
When challenged, Barr and the rest of the writers and cast present, including showrunner Whitney Cummings, gamely laughed off her unhinged screeds. The problem wasn’t what Barr was saying, was the implication, but that she was saying it on Twitter. Barr informed the press at TCA that she and her children had found a solution: to take away her phone and change her Twitter password, as if that would somehow prevent Barr’s Islamophobia from seeping into the show. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.) In January, her bigotry was distasteful but it wasn’t disqualifying. Why not?
ABC spent months building anticipation for Roseanne’s return, and it worked. The show’s reboot debuted to an audience of 27.3 million viewers, absolutely gobsmacking numbers in our age of streaming, DVR and video-on-demand. The network quickly greenlit the now-canceled second season. But its all-too-predictable ugly collapse should leave the executives of America’s Network seriously asking themselves: Was it worth it?
HBCU Track And Field
Congratulations! This HBCU won its eighth NCAA outdoor track and field title
Lincoln University’s women’s team cruises to championship
12:25 PMCHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Lincoln University women’s track and field team and coach Victor “Poppy” Thomas had grown sick and tired of near misses in NCAA Division II national championships.
Thomas said the team has missed out on at least three national outdoor and indoor titles by a total of five points.
Thomas and the Blue Tigers left nothing to chance Saturday, building up an insurmountable lead and cruising to the team’s eighth national outdoor championship at Johnson C. Smith’s Irwin Belk Complex.
Lincoln was led by the quick feet of sophomore Rene Medley, who won the 200-meter dash, finished second in the 100-meter dash and teamed with Diana Cauldwell, Christine Moss and Shaian Vandenburg to win the 4×100 relay in 44.51 seconds.
Medley said she had extra incentive in the 200 meters because she wanted revenge on the runner who finished ahead of her in the semifinals.
“It was a great race,” Medley said. “In the prelims I came in second place and I got lane 3, and the girl who beat me got lane 4. So that really motivated me to just run her down, and I did just that.
“It’s a great feeling to win the national championship with these great ladies. We came in third indoor in the nationals with just three girls, so this feels great.”
Cauldwell, a senior, also won the triple jump and was second in the long jump to help the Blue Tigers build a nearly insurmountable lead by midday.
“I just came out here to deliver, and do what my coach said I should do,” Caldwell said. “This is amazing; it is so amazing to win a national championship.”
Moss also helped pick up a third-place finish in the 4X400 relay, for which she teamed with Renea Ambersley, Segale Brown and Shanice Clarke.
“I think the girls did excellent,” said Thomas, Lincoln’s head track and field coach for 15 years. “We have three superstars, along with a supporting cast who did the job that they were supposed to do, and we were able to pull it off quite comfortably.”
Lincoln is a historically black university with an enrollment of 3,000-plus students in Jefferson City, Missouri. The Blue Tigers finished the meet with 60 points, followed by runners-up St. Augustine’s, which in typical fashion, climbed from 19th at the start of the day to second place at the end.
In fact, St. Augustine’s, whose men’s and women’s teams failed to achieve a 40th national championship for coach George Williams, was racing for second place in the final event and secured it when the Falcons’ Shannon Kalawan passed a Lincoln runner on the backstretch and cruised to the finish line for St. Aug’s victory in the 4X400 meter relay.
The Falcons finished with 48.5 points.
But Medley, Caldwell and Lincoln teammates had already been fitted for the crown.
Before that final event, Lincoln already had 54 points — 11.5 more than the next-closest competitor.
Angelo State (42.5 points), Grand Valley State (40.5) and Adams State (39) rounded out the top five.
For Lincoln, it was the school’s eighth national outdoor women’s championship to go with five indoor titles.
The Blue Tigers won five straight, from 2003 to 2007, and again in 2009 and 2014. Their national indoor titles came in 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2016.
For Williams, it’s back on the recruiting trail and back to trying to cajole St. Augustine’s administrators for more scholarship funds.
“We only had five girls, and Lincoln had quite a contingent,” Williams said. “We put up a good fight, we just ran out of bodies. Until we can be able to find scholarships to get some more student-athletes, that’s about the best we can do.”
Commentary
The irony of Trump’s Jack Johnson pardon
He freed the memory of one black man while his attorney general revives policies that lead to mass incarceration
4:20 PMIt took a white president to pardon Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, for having sex with white women.
Barack Obama wouldn’t touch it, to the dismay and puzzlement of many. Perhaps Johnson’s history was too messy. After winning the world title in 1908, Johnson flaunted his lust for money, clothes, cars, jewelry — and especially white women. In an America where black men could be lynched for a stray glance or remark, Johnson viciously beat at least one of his white girlfriends. Even though Johnson was wrongfully imprisoned under a Jim Crow law designed to police interracial sex, the first black president ignored pleas to exonerate the long-dead boxer. Instead, Obama focused his pardon power on living people unjustly imprisoned by the racially biased policies of mass incarceration.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump pardoned Johnson, who died in a car crash in 1946. “We righted a wrong,” Trump said in a ceremony attended by Johnson’s descendants, current heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder, former champ Lennox Lewis and Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone, who brought Johnson’s case to Trump’s attention.
There are many ironies in Trump’s decision, starting with the president being elected despite multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault. Add that Obama was handcuffed, to some extent, by a double standard that holds African-Americans accountable for all black sins while allowing whites to be judged as individuals. And Johnson’s gaudy lifestyle bears more similarities to Trump’s than to Obama’s.
But the saddest point is that while Obama used his pardons to free those victimized by mass incarceration, Trump’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is reviving policies on criminal charges that disastrously and disproportionately packed American prisons with blacks and Latinos.
Trump just freed the memory of one black man who died 72 years ago. How many living black men are now headed to the place where Jack Johnson never should have been?