Roseanne And White Lives Matter

The country managed to survive without Roseanne for more than two decades. The question is will we survive now that the white-lives-matter show is back on the air?

I have my doubts, but hope persists.

ABC supposedly resurrected Roseanne, starring right-wing conspiracy nut and Tr-mper, Roseanne Barr, as part of its “Heartland Strategy After Tr-mp’s Victory,” to use the New York Times’ phrasing. The paper told us:

On the morning after the 2016 election, a group of nearly a dozen ABC executives gathered at their Burbank, Calif., headquarters to determine what Donald J. Trump’s victory meant for the network’s future.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘There’s a lot about this country we need to learn a lot more about, here on the coasts,’” Ben Sherwood, the president of Disney and ABC’s television group, said in an interview.

They began asking themselves which audiences they were not serving well and what they could do to better live up to the company name — the American Broadcasting Company. By the meeting’s end, they had in place the beginnings of a revised strategy that led the network to reboot a past hit centered on a struggling Midwestern family, a show that had a chance to appeal to the voters who had helped put Mr. Trump in the White House.

The rest is history, of course. Roseanne’s premiere this week was, in today’s shrinking old-school-broadcasting world, more popular, and lucrative, than ABC executives could have ever hoped for. In fact, the president of Disney (and, thus, ABC TV), Ben Sherwood, thought the Nielsen ratings were so high that there must have been some kind of mistake made. But there was no mistake. Just brilliant timing and marketing to, in many cases, a less-than-brilliant demographic.

All of that would be fine, I suppose, if it weren’t for some of the ridiculous comments people like Ben Sherwood have subsequently made. He simply could have said that Disney and ABC are in the business of making money and, well, there is money to be made by pandering to a group of white conservatives, among whom are many, like Roseanne, who believe in weird conspiracies and don’t like work-hungry immigrants all that much. But instead Sherwood said to the Times about the Roseanne clan:

People gather round and they see themselves in this family. It speaks to a large number of people in the country who don’t see themselves on television very often.

Are you effing kidding me? Has Mr. Sherwood ever turned on cable news? The champion of the Roseanne fans of the world is “on television” each and every day, sometimes each and every minute. And if Tr-mp himself isn’t on, the cable news networks often feature a group of “Tr-mp supporters” or “Tr-mp voters” who are endlessly questioned by a curious host as to whether those ignorant or bigoted or gullible folks have, as Tr-mp stumbles through the months, abandoned their ignorance or bigotry or gullibility. The answer, to no one’s surprise, is nope. They’re still happily culting away.

This morning, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski also said something ridiculous, which really isn’t new or news. But this morning she was part of a segment on Morning Joe that featured talk about the success of Roseanne and what that success might mean culturally and politically. Brzezinski said:

The Democrats definitely forgot about those 18 million people who watched Roseanne, for sure, and it’s a good lesson.

Forgot about them? Who is “them”? If by them one means working-class Americans, well, Democrats didn’t forget about them. In fact, the Democratic Party’s main message last election was designed around lifting up the working class beyond what Obama, who encountered fierce Republican opposition, managed to do. And Hillary Clinton got a majority of the working-class vote. Yes, you read that right. She did.

The real message folks like Ben Sherwood and Mika Brzezinski are sending is that Hollywood executives and Democratic politicians ought to pay more attention to white working-class Americans. Let me say that again in a way you can hear me: PAY ATTENTION TO WHITE FOLKS WITHOUT COLLEGE DEGREES! is the message. Its corollary is: STOP PAYING SO MUCH ATTENTION TO PEOPLE OF COLOR BECAUSE IT SCARES WHITE PEOPLE!

Well, this is a good time to remind everyone that despite Hillary Clinton’s many personal challenges and the Russia-Tr-mp conspiracy to poison the electorate with stolen emails and Facebook-fueled lies, she did win the popular vote decisively. And she only lost the Founder-rigged Electoral College game by a flimsy margin across a few key states. Clearly she failed, though. Clearly the Democratic Party failed, too. But that failure can’t be fixed by somehow telling Roseanne fans only what they want to hear. Because what too many of them want to hear is a validation of their prejudices and a stoking of their cultural fears, which are partly rooted in those prejudices. What some significant number of them want is a recognition that their color matters too. What some of them want the rest of us to recognize is that they are anxious about a future in which people who look like them won’t necessarily be privileged to run everything and call every shot.

In short, what that Roseanne folks want is to be identified as fed-up WHITE PEOPLE.

Well, how should Democrats handle these folks, these fellow Americans, if not by pandering to their faults? How should Democrats speak to people who seem to be holding the country hostage by sticking an AR-Tr-mp assault weapon in our faces? What can you say to people in so much identity pain that they think a disturbed white grifter is their salvation?

Well, Democrats do have a message, an economic and cultural message, and perhaps they can possibly talk some of those white voters into putting down the assault weapon that is Donald Tr-mp. The economic message is simple: Republicans always favor the rich and will conspire—a true conspiracy—to do everything they can to make the lives of the rich even better than it is. It’s simply who Republicans are and what they do. Democrats, flawed as they are, exist to make lives better for everyone else, no matter their color. And that’s where the Democrat Party’s cultural message comes in.

Anand Giridharadas, a writer and political analyst for NBC News, was on Morning Joe this morning and spoke during the Roseanne segment. Hear him:

I’m not a fan of Roseanne the person. I did enjoy that one episode. That may be the only one I watch, but I enjoyed it. And I think it raised a truth and a question. I think the truth that it illustrated is working-class white people may claim to be against identity politics, but they actually crave identity politics. They want to be part of it. They want to be seen and witnessed the way women and people of color are demanding representation. And part of what was great about the show—the apnea machine, Maxwell House coffee, prescription meds, insurance that doesn’t work, football-stitched kitchen towels—there was an effort to kind of pay respect and pay attention to the details of a certain demographic’s life. I hope those folks will understand that other people also want to be represented, and that’s what those demands and identity politics have been about.

I think the question the revival raises is: Is it only…demagogues like Donald Tr-mp and peddlers of conspiracy theories like Roseanne who can speak to these people? Can there be good, elevated, smart, thoughtful, future-oriented political leaders who can speak to these people, make them feel witnessed, seen, and understood, but actually elevate them and lead them to a better place instead of make them hate people and try to shut down the post-war global order?

In time we shall see if Democrats can raise up such leaders who can take the Democrats’ economic-cultural message to reachable scared white folks, and tell them that Democrats will have their backs so long as they don’t turn their backs on other folks who also want to be seen and heard and have their grievances addressed by the country and its culture.

Our ongoing experiment in democracy will only work if we quit experimenting with democracy and actually start practicing it.

Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 30, 2018

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/roseanne-and-white-lives-matter/