And they say many members of the Tea Party aren't racist.
An altered photo depicting President Barack Obama as an ape (pictured below) with the caption, "Now you know why no birth certificate," was allegedly sent out by Marilyn Davenport, a Tea Party activist and Orange County representative, and then leaked to the media. When newspaper OC Weekly first broke the story and asked Davenport to respond, she said,"It was just an Internet joke," but then reportedly retorted, "You're not going to make a big deal about this are you?"
It's funny. Folks on both sides of the political aisle often agree that former President George W. Bush was one of the most incompetent commander-in-chiefs this country has ever had, but he was never disrespected (barring the shoe throwing incident by an Iraqi journalist) the way our incumbent president has been.
And this vitriol has continuously spilled over to the First Lady. Michelle Obama was depicted as an ape on the Internet back in 2009; when Googlers inputted "Michelle Obama," they were served with the offensive ape image as the top-search result. The website that hosted the photos removed the image and issued an apology.
Still, the shameful images of the First Lady resurfaced once again with the term "hail to the chimp," and a few months later, Glenn Beck thought it was clever to resurrect this age-old insult by calling President Obama's America a "planet of the apes."
What's the significance of equating black people with apes?
According to Assistant Professor of psychology Phillip Atiba Goff, this association -- both historically and currently -- makes it okay to abuse and or kill blacks.
New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas ironically brought this concept to life in his cartoon, where an ape is shown with two bullets and the words, "They'll have to find someone else to sign the next stimulus bill."
Once the cartoon was met with stiff backlash, the newspaper released a lukewarm apology, with the editors insisting that "sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon."
Goff's seven-year research on the "psychological phenomenon of dehumanization," though, reveals something much deeper. Participants in Goff's studies, which monitored how much of an association was made between blacks and apes and its consequences, tended to endorse police violence against blacks:
"In one study, participants who were made to think about apes were more likely to support police violence against black (but not white) criminal suspects. The association actually caused them to endorse anti-black violence."
Another study showed that in cases where black criminals were characterized in ape-like terms, they were more likely to receive the death penalty:
"Looking at a sample of death-eligible cases in Philadelphia from 1979 to 1999, the more that media coverage used ape-like metaphors to describe a murder trial (i.e. "urban jungle," "aping the suspects behavior," etc.) the more likely black suspects, but not white suspects, were to be put to death.Not surprisingly, black suspects were much more likely to be described in ape-like terms. And they were more frequently executed by the state."
Let's just let that settle.
We all know words and images are never just words and images. They shape and mold how we see ourselves and the way we see others. So if you can dehumanize someone by taking away their humanity and turn them into a beast, it makes it perfectly reasonable to abuse and kill that beast, because he was never really human after all.
Almost four years later, folks are still burning up about this nation's President and First Lady being black. I know four years doesn't compare to the 300-plus years of prejudice and social brainwashing that's occurred in this country, but it's time to really let this type of small-minded thinking go.
After all, with the GOP presenting no serious competition to the Democratic ticket in 2012, these haters would make better use of their time by humming to Young Jeezy's joint below:
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