The Velvet Rope

I never liked Roseanne Barr. I know she came to our attention as a working-class Everywoman, not the usual glamorous types we were used to seeing on small and big screens, but when I look at a screen, I don’t necessarily want to see Everywoman. That’s my problem, I guess. But even in the modern era, a little celebrity doesn’t give anyone the right to say just anything. I will amend that to say, they have the right, perhaps, but no immunity, as I have said many times, from consequences afterward.

What on Earth possessed Ms. Barr to fire off a racially offensive Tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett? It was mean and ugly, and while Ms. Barr later apologized and called it a joke, and even blamed Ambien use, there was nothing funny about it, which is required of a joke. ABC had absolutely no choice but to cancel her comeback.

There are some who think we are all basically racist. I go along with that, in the following sense: If all of a sudden, the world was a high school lunchroom, and we could sit with whomever we wanted, almost all of us would sit with members of our own tribe, our own color. If we are white, we might sit with an individual black or brown friend. But would we automatically think about looking for a seat at the black or brown table? We would probably not want to head for a table where we felt unwelcome. And they would reasonably feel the same way about our table.

There may be natural repulsions at work here, buried way more deeply than whatever we have absorbed from our culture. And I think allowances have to be made for them until they are naturally overcome, which takes time. Emancipation proclamations and civil rights laws do not by themselves make those feelings go away. Having said that, there are rules of the road, there are thoughts that we just don’t express, lines that we just don’t cross, in an enlightened society. On TV, I heard Sherrilyn Ifill talk about a “velvet rope,” like there used to be at movie theaters – we could easily cross it, but we just didn’t. Whatever license we think the Internet or President Trump himself may have issued to others who believe they have been freed to give voice to ugly sentiments, Barr jumped over that velvet rope. Or maybe crawled under it, is a better way to say it.

Racism has deep emotional and even sexual roots. We may have the fairest of minds, but our feelings don’t always catch up with them. I think that is eminently human.  But as individuals, the first step in the healing process is acknowledging those feelings in ourselves, making sure at the same time we are always keeping our minds open to new ways of looking at and hearing others. We are healed when our feelings catch up with our better angels, and we find out that we are all in this together.