Racist Depiction of Blacks as Apes Has a Long History

Yesterday that contemptible little rag the New York Post, issued a half-apology for publishing one of the most vicious and racially hate filled cartoons in recent memory. No one is buying their mendacious cover story that the image was referring to some crazed chimp from Connecticut. In Wednesday’s edition of the paper, the page preceding the vile cartoon shows President Obama signing the very stimulus bill for which the monkey was shot dead, a clear and unmistakable association of the two.

This dehumanization of African Americans has a long, long history in this country, and was brilliantly commented upon by Dr. E. Franklin Frazier in his groundbreaking masterpiece Black Bourgeoisie, 1957.

What has erroneously been called the “rise of the poor whites” in the 1890’s inaugurated a period in the history of the Negro in the United States during which a studied campaign was carried out to prove that the Negro was subhuman, morally degenerate, and incapable of being educated.

While public opinion and the personal attitudes of the whites concerning the negro were being formed by the politicians and newspapers, there appeared in 1900 a book entitled The Negro as Beast, published by the American Book and Bible house…This book had a wide circulation, especially among the church-going whites, and help fix in their minds, as it was argued in the last chapter, that the Negro was not the son of Ham or even the descendant of Adam and Eve, but “simply a beast without a soul”

Moreover, in every representation of the Negro, he was pictured as a gorilla dressed up like a man

I have to agree with Sharpton on this one,

This recent cartoon from the New York Post is like an awful nightmare from the past, but the nation-wide outrage it has generated hopefully demonstrates the spirit of a new America, one that just put a man of African descent in the White House. I suspect that Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s owner, realizes the kind of deep stuff he’s in right now. You just can’t go around implying that the President of the United States is a murdered monkey and not pay a price for it, even if you are a billionaire.