ishmael n. daro

Travis the chimpanzee, who savagely attacked a woman in Connecticut, has made himself a posthumous celebrity.

Having once starred in an Old Navy commercial, the 200-pound primate had not been seen publically until his attack sent someone to the hospital with grievous injuries. Travis himself was eventually shot and killed by police who arrived on scene. However, before the dust had settled on Travis’s outburst, a controversy had already erupted.

The New York Post ran an editorial cartoon Feb. 18 depicting two police officers shooting an ape to death while commenting, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The cartoon sparked almost immediate outrage from New Yorkers including Al Sharpton, who decried it racist to compare President Obama to a monkey. Meanwhile, the editor-in-chief Col Allan insisted the cartoon was aimed at the recent economic legislation and the government as a whole, not the president. He has since issued a qualified apology to people who misunderstood the cartoon as veiled racism. However, he main tained that for other people who were exploiting the situation to attack the conservative paper, “no apology is due.”

One could argue that the cartoonist Sean Delonas did indeed mean to target the economic stimulus bill but the monkey comparison is so potent, he would need to be an imbecile not to know its power. Furthermore, the artist has a history of drawing offensive cartoons, specifically in relation to gay rights. One of his infamous pieces depicts a man applying for a marriage license with a sheep under his arm. This was drawn after New Jersey allowed civil unions for same-sex couples, linking homosexuality with bestiality.

Depicting black people as monkeys is not a new phenomenon. The relation is meant to suggest black people are somehow subhuman or uncivilized. Particularly after the American Civil War, propagandists tried to establish that the newly freed slaves were not as human as whites and therefore not worthy of having the same rights as white people.

By contrast, during slavery black people were depicted as simple, childlike, groveling and generally harmless in order to justify control over them. However, once they were freed, the black caricature turned into the violent, animalistic brute that has sustained itself to present day among racists.

In 1867, Reverend Buckner H. Payne published The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status? and concluded that since black people were not descendents of Adam and Eve, they only gained passage onto Noah’sArk as “beasts” and not as fellow humans. More specifically, Payne suggested that one can “take up the monkey, and trace him … through his upward and advancing orders — baboon, ourang-outang and gorilla, up to the negro.”

This post-war depiction of black people as monkeys proved very influential. In 1900, Charles Carroll wrote the book The Negro is a Beast which made the connection much clearer: “If the White was created ‘in the image of God,’ then the Negro was made after some other model. And a glance at the Negro indicates the model; his very appearance suggests the ape.”

Racists have maintained the beastly depiction of black people since then. As recently as the 2008 presidential campaigns, t-shirts and stuffed animals depicting Obama as a monkey were available. At a rally for Sarah Palin, a man had taped an Obama sticker to the head of a monkey doll and displayed it proudly until he realized cameras were recording his racism.

The fact that people still feel comfortable making the monkey comparison in public suggests that everyone is still aware of it. So how could someone draw a cartoon that even mentions monkeys in relation to the American government without realizing the racist implications it would have for people?

To be fair to Delonas, the cartoon says some one else will have to “write” the next stimulus bill. American presidents do not write bills; they only sign them into law after Congress writes them.

But for a piece of legislation that Obama has been championing for months, it is impossible for the president not to be implicated.

Now that the story has exploded online, many people have commented on news sites to denounce the cartoon as racist while some have defended it on the grounds of free speech. After Obama’s election, many people talked about living in a post-racial world but whether that has happened is debatable.

If racism is on the decline it should be all right for a cartoonist to compare Obama to a monkey, just as many cartoonists depicted former President Bush as one. If such depictions still arouse public outrage, it could be that implied racism is in the eye of the beholder. What is racist to some is merely a neutral image to others who have not grown up with race as an important distinction among people.

Either way, as the so-called post-racial era continues, one can only hope that future readers will not even think of race when reading cartoons about monkeys. One comment on the website of the London Times seemed to be there already: “This cartoon is an insult to monkeys who played no part in drafting the stimulus bill.

Excerpt from The Negro: What is his Ethnological Status? on Google Books.