One wonders if the so-called racial divide might perhaps be like a scab in which the wound heals if the scab is left alone. However, there’s no shortage of people from all quarters of the political spectrum who want to keep picking the scab. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:
For Roseanne Barr, star of ABC’s hit show “Roseanne,” there would be no appeal. When her tweet hit, she was gone.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement, is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” declaimed Channing Dungey, the black president of ABC Entertainment.
Targeting Valerie Jarrett, a confidante and aide of President Barack Obama, Roseanne had tweeted: If the “muslim brotherhood & the planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Offensive, juvenile, crude, but was that not pretty much the job description ABC had in mind for the role of Roseanne in the show?
Roseanne also tweeted that George Soros, 87-year-old radical-liberal billionaire, had been a Nazi “who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps and stole their wealth.”
The Soros slur seems far more savage than the dumb racial joke about Jarrett, but it was the latter that got Roseanne canned.
Her firing came the same day that 175,000 employees of 8,000 Starbucks’s stores were undergoing four hours of instruction to heighten their racial sensitivities.
These training sessions, said The Washington Post, “marked the start of Starbucks’ years-long commitment to new diversity and sensitivity programs after two African-Americans were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12.”
The Philly Starbucks manager, a woman, had called the cops when the two black men she took to be loiterers refused to leave.
Rachel Siegel of the Post describes the four-hour session:
“At first the employees are prompted to find differences. They watched a video in which (Starbucks head) Howard Schultz talks about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected what a place of belonging means to them. And they examine their own biases.
“Each group viewed a documentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film people of color talk about experiences of being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House.”
To continue reading: Is America’s Racial Divide Permanent?
