Amid the furor over the abrupt cancellation of the American sitcom Roseanne because of the star’s racist tweet, it is easy to forget that in one particular episode, on Muslims, she aimed to teach, in her words, “tolerance and compassion.”

The seventh episode “Go Cubs” is devoted to Roseanne, played by Roseanne Barr, getting new Muslim neighbors. At first, Roseanne spends her time spying on the neighbors, insisting that their huge supply of fertilizer could mean they’re “a sleeper cell full of terrorists getting ready to blow up our neighborhood,” and suggesting that their Wi-Fi password would be “deathtoAmerica123.”

Roseanne is eventually forced to address the situation when she needs to visit the family and ask to borrow their Wi-Fi password for an important Skype call despite the fact that it is 2 am. She brings along a baseball bat for safety and is greeted by the father who is also holding a bat. Roseanne then sees the couple’s son at the door wearing a bulletproof vest and the mother explains he has been having nightmares because of racist threats that have forced him to start wearing the vest to sleep.

Barr apparently misjudged the family. The neighbors’ outsize fertilizer collection came thanks to an Amazon misunderstanding; their password is “go Cubs” for their favorite baseball team.

Barr later praised the neighbor’s wife, saying she had been “helping her fellow Syrians... for many years.” In the following scene, she defends the neighbor at the grocery store after the clerk jokes about her having a camel. “You’re ignorant. That woman is twice the person you’ll ever be, and she’s dealing with a lot of stuff that you don’t even know about,” Barr chides the clerk. “So next time she comes into the store, you keep your mouth shut.”

So, when Muslim neighbors move in, Roseanne thinks they’re terrorists. By the end of the episode, she’s crusading for tolerance. How do we square this with the Roseanne Barr tweet that did her and the show in?

The ABC television network determined that Barr’s racist Twitter about Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior adviser to former US President Barack Obama, was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values” and decided to cancel her show even though it had been a ratings winner. Donald Trump had even called a few months earlier to congratulate her personally on the show in which she is portrayed as one of his staunchest supporters. Barr apologized for her remark, saying it was a “bad joke,” and later blamed the offensive post on a sleeping pill, but it was too late.

The idea of Roseanne getting new Muslim neighbors came from Barr herself who apparently wanted to show her character getting “a comeuppance for her own bias.” It’s hard, thus, to rationalize that attitude with Barr being an outspoken right-wing conspiracy theorist for years, which helps explain her Twitter rant but not her newfound respect for Muslims.

The episode shows Roseanne learning tolerance. She recoils from her new Muslim neighbors before learning that they might just be people after all, and nice people at that. But the lesson is learnt only as far as with someone she personally knows. It’s easy to demonize an entire people if you don’t interact with them on an everyday, personal level. So that week, Roseanne learned that not all Muslims are bad. But she’s not defending Muslims everywhere; she only knows that at least this Muslim family is okay.

Removing Roseanne doesn’t erase the twin cultures that led to Barr’s racist tweets and Islamophobia that led to the episode’s idea. Despite Barr’s attempt to overcome her own biases, those cultures existed before the show and they exist now that it has been canceled.