Roseanne Was Right

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Recently, one of the few network TV shows to promote a vaguely Right-of-center politics was taken off the air. The show was cut within hours of its lead actor sending out a tweet about senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett (“vj”). 

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It’s worth asking even the most racially unaware audience exactly why comparing the appearance of blacks to gorillas draws such ire.

And it’s worth following that question up with this one: if I compared the appearance of blacks to frogs, or to iguanas, or to elephants, would there be the same hostile reaction?

The obvious answer is: Of course not. Because blacks don’t look like frogs. They don’t look like iguanas. And they don’t look like elephants.

The claim would simply be too absurd to generate offense — and the reaction would be more like “what the hell is this guy talking about?” than “HOW DARE HE!!!” We generally experience more confusion than outrage when people make jokes or attempt to insult us with comparisons that simply aren’t apt or applicable at all.

In high school, if someone had made a “your momma’s so fat” joke when my mother was a triathlon-running bodybuilder who could have easily beat the whole lot of them up, it would have had no effect besides making the kid throwing the insult look like an idiot.

On the other hand, if she actually was obese and I was insecure about this and afraid she was going to die of a heart attack, I might have gotten angry enough to punch him in the face.

Blacks do visually resemble gorillas. It couldn’t be more obvious that the comparison hits a nerve because it’s true. All the amount of outrage directed at Roseanne indicates is how insecure people are over the fact that it’s true—that their mother actually is, in fact, obese.

How true is it that blacks visually resemble gorillas?

It’s so true that when the best artificial intelligence researchers at Google — one of the most diverse companies in the entire United States, hardly some bastion of white corporate power — designed a machine learning algorithm that works by inputting hundreds and thousands of example photographs until it “learns” how to recognize different objects, it began systematically misclassifying black people as gorillas. All by itself—with no human help whatsoever.

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To be clear: this has quite literally never happened with any other specific combination of human race and animal. We have never had a machine learning algorithm begin systematically misidentifying black people as panthers, or Hispanics as cockroaches, or white people as turnips. The one and only example of systematic misclassification of a specific race and a specific animal by an AI that has ever occurred in all of history is the misclassification of blacks with gorillas.

And we can easily pinpoint the specific features that blacks and gorillas tend to share on common (or more specifically, the direction in which they both deviate compared to other races of man).

For one example: wider nostrils.

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We know that the width of the nostril cavity is an evolutionary adaptation to the heat and humidity of the environment ^[5]. In cold and dry environments, humans evolved narrow nasal passages to increase the moisture and warmth of incoming air. In hot and humid environments, the opposite happens. Blacks and gorillas both have wider nostrils as an evolutionary adaptation to the hot and humid temperatures of jungle climates (like Africa’s).

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For another, the jaw tends to protrude rather significantly past the rest of the skull. And forensic scientists routinely use this knowledge in court to determine the ethnicity of deceased subjects from the structure of their skulls alone. ^[7]

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Do Asian men, for example, characteristically share either of these major traits in common with apes?

^[10]Obviously not.

Of course, all this is going farther than Roseanne herself ever did, given that she never compared all black people to gorillas in the first place. She compared a specific person — who for the record is half black and half Persian — to a specific (and quite notably super-intelligent ) ape creature played by Helena Bonham Carter in a specific movie.​​

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​If you don’t think there actually is similarity here, you’re just lying to yourself, and it’s that simple. There most certainly is as much resemblance here as there is between Donald Trump and a Cheeto.

The whole issue may seem trivial. After all, nothing of any direct meaningful consequence hinges on whether we can admit that the features of blacks tend to resemble those of gorillas. And white people are simply good-natured—most have little desire to keep joking about things that keep making other people upset. In the minds of most of us, the validity of that upset tends to come secondary to the fact that we just don’t want to be the kinds of people who laugh at others’ misfortune.

Furthermore, Roseanne herself has chalked the tweet up to Ambien use and asked her fans not to defend her ^[12].

Well, screw it—I’ll defend what I think is right and what I think is true whether I’m given permission to or not. Roseanne should never have apologized. What she should have done is pointed out that no living black person anywhere was harmed in the making of this tweet, and brought the subject back to its original context by asking why everyone is more concerned about this tripe than they are about the state secrets that were being discussed ^[13] in the discussion where her comment was made.

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If there is any reason Roseanne doesn’t deserve our sympathy, it’s for caving under pressure to hypocritical enemies who are more than happy to compare white people they dislike to apes all day and say “fuck you” to anyone who finds it offensive. Wanda Sykes has done it ^[15], Jimmy Kimmel has done it ^[16], The Huffington Post has done it ^[17], and on and on the list goes.

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Does this comparison really look more compelling to you than the ones posted earlier in this article? If you’re capable of being even slightly honest with yourself at all, you’re going to say “No.”

And in fact, this entire debate is really about whether you are capable of being honest with yourself. We know this, as a matter of fact, thanks to science. Research from 2008 by the psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff ^[19] has shown that every group of Americans—whether they’re white or not, whether they’re liberal or conservative, and from the most authoritarian to the most egalitarian—hold an unconscious association between black people and apes ^[19]. And that’s for the very plain and simple reason that the photographs above really do highlight cranial similarities between them—they really do in fact share a few visual traits in common.

The leading counter-argument, and defense of the hypocritical double standard whereby pundit after pundit comparing white politicians they dislike to apes is just fine and dandy, will of course be that comparing black people to apes has a uniquely “dark history” (as the Huffington Post argues here ^[20]). The response to this argument is threefold.

1. No black person alive has personally experienced this “dark history.” Ask any black person in the United States who found this joke offensive to actually provide concrete details of that history, and they will not be able to do it.  So they quite literally cannot even lay claim to being triggered by the comparison. No, the reason people call for blood when this comparison is made is not, as the Huffington Post argues ^[20], because there was a rape trial taking place in 1935 after the movie King Kong was released in 1933. Note, furthermore, that this is the best that the Huffington Post can do when asked to substantiate the details of that long and sordid history. After using this example, they move on and reference the fact that AIDS originated from blood to blood contact between a human and monkey in Africa. Well, all available evidence suggests that it really did ^[21]—wishful conspiracy theories about AIDS being part of a government program to kill black people aside ^[22]. What else have you got?

2. This is literally the “Hitler was a vegetarian” argument. Even if we grant that some bad people did notice the similarity of blacks to gorillas in the past, that doesn’t make it any less true—any more than the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian means that all vegetarians are evil Nazis today. “You can’t notice this because some bad people noticed it in the past” is an exactly identical argument to “You can’t be a vegetarian in 2018 because Hitler was a vegetarian in 1933.” And it’s ridiculous in both cases.

3. Even granting it were true that comparing blacks to apes has a long history—and if the Huffington Post article is the best the Left can do, it really is dubious—it would only raise the question: why blacks and apes in particular? Why not blacks and panthers? Why not white people and mayonnaise? Why not Hispanics and iguanas? The only conceivable answer would be that people have noticed that it actually is in fact true for a really long time.

Because it is. So the only thing that adding to the story of how long people have been noticing it does is prove how obviously true my point here really is.

There couldn’t be a more obvious demonstration of the fact that political correctness is a war on white people daring to notice what’s right in front of our faces. The one and only real difference between comparing whites and blacks to apes is that blacks actually do resemble them and whites do not (I again refer you to Bill Maher’s Trump/orangutan comparison above, and my photos selected off the front page of Google Images: which actually look more alike?).

And the real reason it’s socially acceptable to compare white people to apes and not blacks is because black emotions are treated as if they were sacrosanct, while white emotions aren’t. Nevermind that Valerie Jarrett really does literally have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.Nevermind that she really was a key player in the cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal (when Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about smuggling guns into Mexico so that they could be traced to drug cartels) ^[23] Nevermind her involvement in real estate fraud ^[24]. Those things don’t upset black peoples’ delicate feelings—so they aren’t the center of mass controversy and outrage. A one-off 2am tweet comparing a single individual to a single actor in a movie dominates the outrage culture of our airwaves instead.

As trivial as this particular case may seem, if we aren’t allowed to notice the trivial things, then we won’t be allowed to notice the important ones either—and that’s exactly what we see happening now across the entire Western world. The life-damaging punishment awaiting any white person who dares admit that they can see a visual similarity between even one black person and simian animal is part and parcel of the systematic gaslighting used to break down the white psyche, preventing us from trusting our own minds and senses. Resisting this programming requires balking against it when it’s used in a trivial case just as much as when it’s employed in more complex matters in academia. If they can get you to apologize for seeing what’s in front of you in trivial matters, they’ll be that much more ready to demand you do the same when we come to the things that actually matter. Shame on Roseanne Barr for handing our enemies that victory—but let’s not follow her cowering advice that we do the same.