In May 2018, the “Roseanne” sitcom was canceled by ABC after its star posted a racist tweet describing Valerie Jarrett, an African American woman and a former Obama advisor as the off-spring of “planet of the apes.” After ABC executives apologized to Jarrett, Donald Trump complained in a tweet that they never apologized to him, but he never condemned Barr’s “joke.”
Except racist tropes comparing humans to animals are never a joke. They were used by Nazis in Germany who described Jews as vermin to justify the extermination of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s. They were used in Rwanda where Tutsi were called cockroaches to justify genocide in the 1990s.
Racist tropes hit the news again when a Longwood, New York high school science teacher showed his class a PowerPoint he created that ended with a “photograph of a gorilla with the caption ‘Monkey See’” followed by a “picture of four black students from the class with the caption ‘Monkey Do.’” The Longwood Central School District called the PowerPoint “culturally insensitive” and a “lapse of judgment.” Parents of the four young men are suing the school district for tolerating a racist environment.
Depicting Africans in Africa and in the Americas as less than human, as ape-like, has been used to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery in the New World, Jim Crow laws after the Civil War, segregation in both the North and South, and lingering racism.
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision denying blacks the right to citizenship, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that when the Constitution of the United States was written people of African ancestry were “considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”
In the post-Civil War era Social Darwinists portrayed people of African decent as less human than white Europeans. In the 1910s, President Woodrow Wilson was an open racist and proponent of segregation who showed the movie Birth of a Nation in the White House. The movie included racist depictions of Blacks and defended the Klan and lynchings. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler compared his policies toward Jews with the treatment of Blacks in the United States.
White racism with ape-like depictions repeatedly reared its ugly head during the Obama presidency. In February 2009, a racist cartoon depicted President Obama as chimp-like and during his campaign for the Presidency some Republicans wore t-shirts that portrayed his children as monkeys.
Racist remarks, long pushed to the margins in the United States as unacceptable, emerged from the shadows because of the behavior of Donald Trump and complaints about bigotry are dismissed as political correctness by his rightwing supporters. In the 1990s, Trump launched a campaign demanding the execution of five Black teenagers accused of a vicious mugging in Central Park. Although the young men were later exonerated, Trump still refuses to apologize. During the Obama presidency, Trump championed a conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was ineligible for the Presidency because he was supposedly born in Africa. In his campaign for President and as President, Trump has described Mexicans as criminals and rapists, Muslims as terrorists, and Black communities in the United States as “rat and rodent infested.” He demanded that four women of color who serve in the United States Congress “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” although they are all United States citizens and three of the four were born in this country.
Racism remains pervasive in the United States. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, “fifty-eight percent of Americans believe “race relations in the U.S. are bad” and “few see them improving.” Fifty-six percent of respondents blamed President Trump for making “race relations worse.” Among African Americans surveyed, eighty percent believe the “legacy of slavery affects the position of black people in America today.”
Racist remarks by Donald Trump and the racial “joke” by the Longwood, New York scientist teacher are never a joke.
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