Black-ish Creator Kenya Barris Finally Speaks Out About Roseanne Barr's Firing

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.

“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 Dungey, Disney/ABC Television Group chief Ben Sherwood, and ABC Studios president Patrick Moran. But he never got a chance to execute his plan before ABC quickly pulled Barr’s reboot off air. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry guys’ and then I have to say, the response came in minutes.”

Though Barris was candid regarding ABC, he is currently rumored to be making a move to Netflix. However, he didn’t speak that or what happened to that political episode of black-ish that was pulled. Guess we’ll have to continue to wait on it.