Disney Suspended Jemele Hill For Defending the First Amendment. What Will They Do to Roseanne Barr for Racism?

By Shane Ryan  |  May 29, 2018 | 1:58pm
Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty
Politics Features Roseanne Barr
Disney Suspended Jemele Hill For Defending the First Amendment. What Will They Do to Roseanne Barr for Racism?

By now, you’ve likely seen that Roseanne Barr, noted celebrity Republican and star of the rebooted ABC sitcom Roseanne, tweeted this about former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, a black woman:

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As you might imagine, the blatant racism of comparing a black person to an ape did not go over well. After initially defending the tweet as a “joke,” someone apparently talked sense into Barr, or at least threatened her with sufficient professional consequences—she deleted the original tweet and posted these two apologies:

It remains to be seen what action Disney, ABC’s parent company, will take…if any. But there’s an interesting point of comparison here. Jemele Hill, an ESPN employee (like ABC, ESPN is a Disney subsidiary), was suspended last October for a pair of social media posts that obviously rubbed her employers the wrong way. The first was a thread calling Trump a white supremacist:

And the second was endorsing the idea of a boycott after Cowboys owner Jerry Jones threatened to bench his players for exercising their right to protest by kneeling during the anthem:

Both are Disney employees, and incidents took place on Twitter, so we have a very simple question to ask:

If defending the first amendment and pointing out white supremacy on Twitter comes with a suspension, what penalty does overt racism incur?

And, if the answer isn’t “something worse,” here’s a follow-up: Why does Disney hypocritically cater to the ideology of its right-wing base? Or, alternatively, why does it fear them more?

UPDATE: This post officially has the shortest Internet shelf life of all time. Moments after publishing, this announcement came out:

 
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