As usual you're being disingenuous.
"Associating Black people with primates has origins in eugenics arguments that Black people were
biologically inferior or a lesser human. (
Eugenics theories have been widely debunked and denounced, especially after being used as justification in the Holocaust).
The message was also disseminated through what would have been considered entertainment at the time. In 1906, for example, the
Bronx zoo caged a Congolese man named Ota Benga in the primate house as an exhibit. The
New York Times coverage at the time read, "it is probably a good thing that Benga doesn't think very deeply," and speculated that uncomfortable zoogoers may not understand his race was not highly rated among humans.
"The development of the cultural myth of Black subhumanity served as the justification for Jim Crow segregation and acts of vigilante justice against Blacks in the form of lynching in the U.S. South," Gregory Parks and Danielle Heard wrote in a
2009 Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers publication about the dangers of racist jokes against Obama.
After the civil rights era, the monkey and gorilla imagery has continued to perpetuate stereotypes of Black people being brutish or beastly, they wrote.
This is not the first time the Obamas have been subjected to racist associations with primates. According to the Jim Crow Museum, in the 2008 presidential elections, Barack Obama was depicted as a monkey on
multiple occasions. A small West Virginia town struck controversy with a Facebook post that called Michelle Obama an "
ape in heels." In 2009, a
New York Post cartoon showed two cops shooting a chimpanzee with a conversation bubble, "they'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
President Donald Trump's Truth Social account shared, then deleted, a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Why is that imagery considered racist?
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