There has been some discussion recently on the topic as to whether black history month is really necessary anymore now that we have a black president. Into this debate blunders the New York Post. Yesterday, the day after President Obama signed the stimulus bill, the paper ran a cartoon depicting the bill's author as a dead monkey, full of bullet holes and covered in blood after being shot by police. “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” says one of the cops. On the previous page of the paper was a photo of President Obama signing the stimulus package. It is reported that threats against the President’s life have been on the increase in recent days.
A firestorm of criticism did not dissuade the editor of the Rupert Murdoch owned Post from claiming that the cartoon has no racial undertones, that it's not about Obama, and that it was simply referencing an incident earlier this week when police shot a pet chimpanzee. Moreover the editor claimed that he was unaware that blacks had ever been portrayed as apes.
I find it astonishing that the editors of the New York Post would claim ignorance of the long and disgraceful history of cartoons both depicting and insinuating that all those who are not “white” are more closely related to apes than human beings. This practice may have begun as a convenient, if ignorant, misreading Darwin’s Origin of the Species, but the idea was quickly embraced by white supremacists and planters in the South to justify slavery. (Animals and beasts of burden do not require the rights of human beings.) Confederate cartoonist Adalbert Volck used simian features to depict not only blacks but political figures who favored emancipation. Abraham Lincoln was repeatedly drawn with pronounced simian features, and was frequently described by his detractors as “The Original Baboon.” (See Cartoon)
The recent New York Post cartoon, which bluntly asserts that the stimulus package must have been conceived by an ape is therefore doubly offensive given President Obama’s pronounced admiration for Lincoln. The claim that no racist aspersions were being directed at President Obama by asserting that the stimulus package had it’s origin in the mind of a gorilla does not bare scrutiny. The cartoon is a throwback to the worst kind of racism.
Through the 19th century it was common practice to portray anyone who was not white as Ape-like. Not only blacks, but Irish, Chinese and Jews were often categorized as subspecies of human beings inferior to Arians and White Ango-Saxons – as the cartoons amply demonstrate.
