The two comments are not even in the same ballpark. Samantha Bee went overboard in talking about the complicity of Ivanka Trump in her father’s cruel and inhumane policies against the voiceless, the defenseless, and the vulnerable. Samantha Bee is a white woman taking another white woman to task and on behalf of women-of-color and their children. Samantha Bee’s language was ill-advised but her motive was pure.
Rosanne Barr, motivated by malice and hate, tapped into long-held racist beliefs to attack a black woman, and by extension all black people. And no, this was no joke. The only people I’ve seen guffawing their heads off are like-minded racists on social media platforms.
I could go into detail about the brutal, pain-filled history that comes with depicting black people as monkeys and apes, but Charles Blow does it so much better than I ever could. Please give a listen to him as he drops some knowledge below.
Transcript
The bigger issue is that this is one of those subjects that is an across the line subject. It is an untouchable subject because the question...race question in America was for centuries not a question of race at all; it was a species question. Right? Actual scientists and doctors went to great lengths to try to prove that black people were, in fact, a subspecies of people closer to apes and monkeys… // That’s forty years after slavery was over. That’s a decade after Booker T. Washington delivers the Atlanta Compromise speech. Three years after W.E.B. Dubois publishes Souls Of Black Folk. And it was still happening!
The longer clip putting the above quote in context:
So let’s just stop with the comparison, already.