Appearing on Fox News pundit Sean Hannity’s show Thursday, shamed actress Roseanne Barr claimed the backlash over the widely condemned racist tweet which led to ABC canceling her show was a huge misunderstanding.
The tweet implied senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and an ape. Barr’s defense? She didn’t know Jarrett, who was born in Iran to American parents, was an African-American woman.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather when they said she was African-American,” Barr told Hannity of the moment when executives from ABC asked her to explain the posting. “I thought she was Middle Eastern.”
Which implies she did think it was OK to compare a person from a country in the Middle East to the offspring of an ape, another serious stereotype.
There was no discussion of the other time she called a black Obama official an ape: a 2013 tweet where she said former national security adviser Susan Rice was a man with the genitalia of an ape.
Barr insisted the Jarrett tweet was “political” not “racial” and was connected to Barr’s advocacy for Israel. But her clumsy explanations didn’t really address why she used such loaded language in the first place. The comic also claimed a recent video she released on YouTube, saying of Jarrett, “I thought the b**** was white,” was a joke.
“I made a mistake,” Barr said of the original tweet, after a bit of prodding from Hannity. “And I lost everything.”
Hannity devoted his entire, hour-long show Thursday to his talk with Barr. It was hyped as the superstar comic’s first TV interview after ABC dropped one of the highest-rated shows of the last TV season within hours of her posting back in May
