Joy Reid Blames Trump for Roseanne Barr Tweets: He Gives ‘Permission to Offend Whoever You Want’

EXCERPT:

REID: "Well, I mean in the apology, I think the end her looks part is the part that stands out to me. Especially Roseanne is admitting the planet of the apes part of that joke, it wasn’t about her politics, it was about her appearance. It's sort of beastaliasing of black people. Look, we saw people making gorilla and ape jokes about Michelle Obama, the First Lady of the United States. It was common. It was googleable all over social media. It’s a place people go when talking about black people and it goes back centuries. I think that was a very telling part of the apology. You’ve seen Wanda Sykes walk away from the show, black comedian who was one of head writers on the show. It’s fraught because I think  for a lot of Roseanne’s fans who are in a big Venn diagram with Trump fans, they don’t see this as no big deal, that this is something you should be able to say. Why can't you say it. These are jut jokes. Why are people taking it to heart? That's part of the problem, is that you have a certain set of people who feel you should be able to speak this way. And unfortunately, you know, we have a president at the moment who's kind of giving a broad sense of permission to not be political correct. To speak the way you want, to offend who you want and people shouldn’t say anything about it. So, I'm not surprised. This is the kind of human that Roseanne does. The question is whether or not the fan base that she has now developed which is very, very much aligned with the president’s base, if it’s millions of people and still watching her show, the question is whether or not they are considered to be more valuable than the people upset and who are rightfully offended by her tweet. That’s the question that ABC has to answer."