OC Republican continues to reinforces racist stereotype

[bobalot]

I honestly cannot do not see what the point of contention is here.

Implying a black man descended from apes is an age old racist insult that has been used for centuries. It carries all those connotations and all that cultural baggage. Even the local Republican Chairman saw it for what it was immediately.

[Metahive]

Some other thing, what's with the Right Wing's obsession about Obama's ears? For one, his ears aren't that big, it's his hair that makes them look somewhat more pronounced, for two, when I think of a big eared animal, apes are rather far down the list, after Elephants ( ), donkeys ( ), rabbits, fennecs etc., so that excuse makes no sense.

Also, if someone had compared a jewish person to a plague rat, it would be the same sort of faux-pas, no matter if the person behind it were anti-semitic or not as likening Jews to plague-bearing vermin has a long, sordid history as well. I disagree vehemently with Alpha's argument that insults don't have to make sense. A degrading analogy that's completely unrelated to the person carries little oomph and just looks petty. Calling Obama a pedophile for example would be insulting but not carry any weight at the same time.

Bottom line, if you need to insult someone, it's worth to spend like two minutes on thinking about it to avoid backlash like the above. There's a wealth of non-loaded insults available and people like Obama give many openings to apply them, so going for the one that reflects worse on the insulter than the insultee will be pointed out as the poor form it is.

[The Yosemite Bear]

though technically speaking, we're all originally from Africa, and we are all descended from apes called Cro-mag, Homo-habilis, Neanderthal, etc...

just being clear, yeah it's a racist dipiction, but it applies to all humans actually....

[Knife]

though technically speaking, we're all originally from Africa, and we are all descended from apes called Cro-mag, Homo-habilis, Neanderthal, etc...

just being clear, yeah it's a racist dipiction, but it applies to all humans actually....

The funny thing is, if you watch some of these people being interviewed about evolution, they are violently opposed to the notion of being decedent from apes. It makes them very angry to even imply it.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, not getting angry about it requires a concept of the difference between "deep" and "shallow" time: the ability to tell the difference between "two million years ago" and "two thousand years ago" at a gut-deep level.

Those of us here will take that for granted, and we don't normally even think about the two timescales simultaneously: things that take centuries to happen occur instantaneously on the scale of millions of years, while changes that take millions of years appear like eternal constants on the scale of centuries.

But to someone for whom the line between history, hagiography, and mythology is blurry and unimportant, the psychological difference between "it happened two million years ago" and "it happened two hundred years ago" is quite narrow, since both numbers translate into their brains as "it happened in the Before Time, before anyone I've met can remember."

The American Revolution, Christopher Columbus, the birth of Christ, the dinosaurs- all those things happened in the Before Time. Sure, you're going to know that those events happened in a specific order, that dinosaurs were before Jesus, who was before Columbus, who was before George Washington.

But there's no real sense that any one of them is more or less relevant than the others, due to the vast gulf of time separating it from the present.

[Covenant]

It's indefensible, since the connotation between black people and monkeys is a long, long one that requires a hell of a lot more careful maneuvering than calling George Bush a chimp because he said his favorite book was a children's story and he liked to make funny faces and puff out his cheeks.

I remember my Dad telling me that when he was growing up in Nebraska he was told that black people had tails and that it wasn't until college that he even met any black people at all. He's the bluest of the blue liberals but his parents weren't, so when this woman says she didn't realize it was racist I could believe her insofar as she's so far into racism-land that she doesn't know what's acceptable and what's not.

And look, just because someone isn't racist doesn't mean they can't say something that's racist. If I passed on this same email it wouldn't stop being a racist email. Passing on code doesn't change the fact that it's racist code. I've got no trouble believing she meant nothing racially offensive by it, but I'm absolutely sure she wouldn't have forwarded this mail if she wasn't already a deeply insensitive possibly racist individual. Possibly just a non-reflective racist who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about why they think the way they think and assume it's just common knowledge and fact.