Ambien doesn't make you racist.

Roseanne Barr is the latest in the long line of public figures doing something appallingly racist and then making a shitty apology for it. We hear it all the time, "I made a mistake", "This isn't me", "I was drunk/high/emotional/Ambien posting". Whatever, so here's the thing. That's some bullshit right there.

The thing about most recreational and prescription drugs is that, assuming your brain chemistry isn't already fucked up somehow, they don't make you delusional, they don't implant racist beliefs in your brain, they don't suddenly turn a loving family man into a wife beater. They just remove the filters that keep you from showing it to the world. The man who is only abusive when drunk is still an abuser, the alcohol just lifts his own self-imposed restriction on hurting people, the woman who posts overtly racist Twitter comments while on Ambien is still racist, the Ambien just kept her from thinking about how bad an idea it is to be that racist in public.

If the tendency is then all it is looking for is an excuse and folks, people will find one, one way or another. They want to think of themselves as "good-except for the___" rather than "Worse when___". But make no mistake, they are still shitty people.

As far as public nonpologies go, the "That's not who I am" defense is among the more vile, it rejects any form of responsibility for their actions and then turns it around on the people mad at them "You can't blame me for just the one thing that happened when I was having a bad day!" They say, but yes, yes we can, and we should.

I have bad days now and again, my worst one was a couple years ago, I had just started my job at the pizza place, I had a fever probably around 100 degrees, but I didn't feel like I could call out because it was the first week and I didn't want to get a reputation, so I worked, I didn't have a work shirt yet because, well, they didn't have any in my size so I had a plain black T-shirt from home, I was sweating profusely and had mostly lost my voice, I looked exactly as bad as I felt and folks, I felt BAD. I have no idea how any customer who saw me managed to eat their lunch, but that is a digression. After my six hours or whatever it was, I had to go and get drug tested, this was before I had my drivers license and the testing place was in NW Portland, over an hour away from work by public transit, but I had to do it so I went, I couldn't find the place at first and walked probably an extra six or seven blocks, in circles, trying to figure it out, and let me tell you, when you feel like that walking even one block is not a fun time. I figured it out and made the place with fifteen minutes before they closed.

During that day I interacted with six or seven coworkers, a couple dozen customers, three bus drivers, a random person on the street I asked for directions from, and the dude at the testing place and you know what? I refrained from going on a racist or sexist, or any, tirade on anyone, this despite me having taken a fairly large dose of codeine cough syrup, which, it turns out, caused me to fail my drug test, but I digress. The point is there was no time during that day when I felt tempted to compare someone's ancestry to a great ape, sexually harass a woman, or even threaten to get someone with brown skin deported. Do you know why that is?

It isn't because I am a perfect person, or even a great one. It is because I am not a fucking asshole, I'm not racist, or sexist, or any form of -ist really, beyond the stupid stuff that society ingrains on me because I am a straight white male and therefore can't avoid but at least an be aware of. If anyone ever had an excuse it was me that day. Therefore I must conclude that the difference is that those who do use those excuses are in fact, huge liars who rightly deserve all the shame possible.

Dan Harmon, creator of community, and a few other funny things, had a former staff member a while back accuse him publicly of having habits in the workplace that made her unhappy and unsafe, basically he was doing the usual straight white male thing of casual sexism and entitlement, including straight up, no grey area, sexual harassment. His apology is perhaps the only good one I have seen for this kind of stuff. He specifically mentions "Not having to think about it", and that is pretty important. Roseanne is not thinking about it, or perhaps she is but not in the way she should be, the lawyer dude from a couple weeks ago is surely not thinking about it.

See, what people really are saying when they say "This isn't me" is usually "I don't want to believe this is me". Harmon surely didn't want to believe it, and it took years before someone forced him to confront it, and if we believe his apology(which you may or may not) he recognized that yes, this is who he is, and if he wants to not be like that he has to work on it. I like to think he is, but who the hell knows. Roseanne probably has no interest in working on it, she may literally be clinically insane and need more help than self reflection can give. Her "apology" such as it is, is probably the only thing she can say because she, like an increasingly large number of public figures, is proud of being racist and only barely kept under control by the public dislike for overt racism.

But others aren't, take the lawyer from a couple weeks ago, the dude who was hilariously caught on camera literally running away from reporters, and who the internet had sent a mariachi band to perform at his office. From what I have seen before much of his online presence was scrubbed, he was at least bilingual, Spanish being among his languages, and actively looked for cases in the minority community, odds are good he did some decent work for people who needed it at some point or another, and yet, he was caught on video, multiple times, being a gigantic asshole and threatening those in that very same community.
In theory, he and those like him could indeed benefit from self-reflection and go on to do good works, but to do that they would have to realize that yes, it is who they are, now perhaps they don't like that. I hope they don't like that! But it is them, They just don't have to think about it, or at least haven't been forced to yet.

This is why public shaming works, when you are forced to see the very real consequences to your actions, you have a bit more encouragement to change those actions, to realize that the hurt you are experiencing now is in direct response to the hurt you have inflicted on others. For some, many perhaps, they will only focus on the hurt they received and retreat further into their own prejudice, but for others, such as in Harmon's case(I hope) they can find a reason to examine themselves.

For the rest of us, I like a redemption story as much as the next guy, but if I can't get that, then at least I can console myself with the fact that an asshole lost their job over it. You take what you can get.