Kenya Barris isn’t holding his tongue about ABC’s complicity in Roseanne Barr’s recent racist rant.
At Variety’s Path to Parity summit, the Black-ish creator praised the network’s swift response to the debacle but questioned the hiring of the series namesake in the first place. “You hired a monster and then you asked why the monster was killing villagers,” Barris said, adding that ABC knew that Barr has a tendency to spew racist vitriol online. ABC is also home to Black-ish.
The producer even planned to protest the network when Barr first called former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett an ape.
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“I was literally coming out of the show and I was like f— this,” he recalled. “I was going to go crazy. I was going to call my agent and go on Don Lemon and other shows.”
He first dialed several TV executives to warn them, including ABC Entertainment president Channing D