Re: Woman faces descrimination as police and media refuse to label her crime "rape".
Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2018 1:47 am
Roseanne's entire career and her entire public persona is built on her being a crude, uncouth loudmouth who says crude and outrageous things. She's literally been doing the same act longer than I've been alive. She dialed it back for her eponymous sitcom in the Nineties, but if that show was considered shockingly rude for its time (until it was topped by Married With Children and the floodgates for vulgar comedy in prime time opened).
Roseanne's claim was that she didn't even know Valerie Jarrett was African-American, which, is actually pretty believable if you ask me. First off, to probably 95% of Americans "Valerie Jarrett" is just a name from the nightly news and not someone they could ever actually put a face to. "Senior Advisor to the President" and "Director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs" aren't exactly offices that attract a lot of attention from the majority of people...
I mean, for crissakes, I'm a huge politics junkie who can rattle off the names of the current and the last five people who held the Senior Advisor to the President post -- Jared Kushner, David Axelrod, Barry Jackson, Valerie Jarrett, Karl Rove, Sid Blumenthal -- but I'll be damned if I could pick any of them out of a line up. Okay, maybe Kushner... although, honestly, he looks pretty much like every other middle-aged Yeshivot lawyer on the planet. Roseanne's tweet was mocking her appearance, so obviously she knew what Jarrett looked like... But did she think Jarrett looked African-American? She says she didn't, and honestly, I believe her. Jarrett has very fair skin and routinely self-identifies as "Iranian-American" or "Iranian" in interviews. A lot of people might assume she's Persian.
Valerie Jarrett is on the left (pun not intended).
Furthermore, both of her parents are apparently bi-racial themselves. Apparently, Jarrett was on a 2014 episode of PBS's show Finding Your Roots, which used DNA testing to show that Jarrett is of 49% European, 46% African, and 5% Native American. So if we're going to play stupid identity politics games, then Jarrett is actually more "white" than she is "black."
TL;DR: The whole shit storm unleashed was dumb.
Roseanne's claim was that she didn't even know Valerie Jarrett was African-American, which, is actually pretty believable if you ask me. First off, to probably 95% of Americans "Valerie Jarrett" is just a name from the nightly news and not someone they could ever actually put a face to. "Senior Advisor to the President" and "Director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs" aren't exactly offices that attract a lot of attention from the majority of people...
I mean, for crissakes, I'm a huge politics junkie who can rattle off the names of the current and the last five people who held the Senior Advisor to the President post -- Jared Kushner, David Axelrod, Barry Jackson, Valerie Jarrett, Karl Rove, Sid Blumenthal -- but I'll be damned if I could pick any of them out of a line up. Okay, maybe Kushner... although, honestly, he looks pretty much like every other middle-aged Yeshivot lawyer on the planet. Roseanne's tweet was mocking her appearance, so obviously she knew what Jarrett looked like... But did she think Jarrett looked African-American? She says she didn't, and honestly, I believe her. Jarrett has very fair skin and routinely self-identifies as "Iranian-American" or "Iranian" in interviews. A lot of people might assume she's Persian.
Valerie Jarrett is on the left (pun not intended).
Furthermore, both of her parents are apparently bi-racial themselves. Apparently, Jarrett was on a 2014 episode of PBS's show Finding Your Roots, which used DNA testing to show that Jarrett is of 49% European, 46% African, and 5% Native American. So if we're going to play stupid identity politics games, then Jarrett is actually more "white" than she is "black."
TL;DR: The whole shit storm unleashed was dumb.