Was Canceling Roseanne The Best We Could Do?

Though this is old news now because it happened last week,  Roseanne had the revival of her TV show cancelled because she wrote an insulting tweet that included a racist component to her message.  The reaction to her tweet was predictable: she was rightly condemned and then had her TV series cancelled.  And we need to ask whether such a response was necessary.

Now I am neither a fan of her TV show nor a fan of her politics. But I disagreed with her firing because of principle. That principle being that we should not respond to all intolerable messages and actions with punishment, especially the harshest punishment available.  For a TV entertainer, the canceling of one's own show is one of the harshest punishments one could receive.

Why oppose the canceling of her show because of a racist tweet? It isn't because racism should be tolerated, quite the opposite is the case. Rather, the question we should be asking is whether harshly punishing each instance of racism is the best way to respond to it.

Why punish racism? There are certainly times it should be. But sometimes punishing a certain act is done for appearances, it is done to make the person or party that punishes or calls for punishment look good. Such was the case when Martin Luther tried to convince his fellow Germans, both regular citizens and German princes, to punish the Jews for their their rejection of Christ. Back then, Martin Luther told his fellow Germans that if they did not punish the Jews as he suggested, then they would be guilty of being complicit with the unbelief of the Jews.

Now certainly the above comparison is not being made to say that the Jewish faith, with its rejection of Jesus Christ as the Messiah,  is comparable with the racism.  What is comparable here is that sometimes  attempts at punishing others, such as what Martin Luther told the Germans to do, is done for  reasons other than trying to correct a situation.  It is done to make the person punishing feel good, or at least less guilty, about the stand they were taking. And though what Luther instructed his fellow Germans to do is now rightly seen as horrific and intolerable, it was tragically seen as a righteous response back then to what was seen back then as something that was intolerable.

The problem being pointed to here is that using harsh punishment a first resort to an intolerable view or statement sometimes interferes with eliminating that view or statement. That is especially true with racism. If we mandate that every expression of racism be harshly punished. we will less likely be able to be honest about the racism that lurks in the hearts of so many of us. That fear of punishment will produce a conflict of interest in us when we are asked to examine ourselves. That fear of punishment will more likely cause us to deny having any racism in our thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs.

Now saying that punishment should not always be our first resort when responding to racism is in no way an effort to say that racism should be tolerated. Nor is it an effort to say that our first response to expressions of racism should never involve punishment. Rather,  what is being said is that our concern here should first be practical. But when we always resorting to punishment to racism, it interferes with our ability to admit and correct what is inside of us. And that sometimes punishing expressions of racism helps, but to always punish does not. Instead, always responding with punishment interferes with us correcting our views. Racism can't be tolerated, but it is most likely to be tolerated when our first concern is on avoiding punishment rather than correcting what is wrong with us.

Certainly any expression of racism is intolerable. And certainly we should sometimes immediately punish certain expressions of racism in word or deed. But when our first resort to reacting to all expressions of racism is always punishment, we all but guarantee that racism lives on in our minds and hearts.

I can't confidently say what the correct response to Roseanne's racist tweet should be. But it seems to me that inviting Roseanne to apologize and admit the wrongness of her tweet could have been a good start. That focusing on changing Roseanne's attitudes rather than trying to prove something about ourselves for the sake of appearances is preferable. And again, I write this as a person who is fan of neither her show nor her politics.