Race and the ape image

By GottaLaff

This morning I opened my L.A. Times and found this op-ed piece. It was written by two social psychologists, and addresses what lies beneath the uproar over the New York Post chimp cartoon. What a disturbing eye-opener. The good news, if any? Awareness is the precursor to change:

Some racial associations are embedded so deeply that they are difficult to recognize, much less eradicate -- and they continue to shape our behavior and ideas. [...]

In the 19th century and well into the 20th, popular media from movies to fiction to political cartoons frequently portrayed blacks as more simian than human. It was an association that provided cover for slavery itself, as well as anti-black violence. Lynchings in the United States were often justified by relying on this dehumanizing association, and it surfaced in the Rodney King controversy in Los Angeles: LAPD Officer Laurence Powell had referred to a black couple as "something right out of 'Gorillas in the Mist' " moments before he was involved in the King beating. Like nooses, the "N-word" and white sheets, referring to blacks as apelike is among the most violent and hurtful legacies of our nation's difficult racial past.

The negative association -- this linking of two ideas in the human mind -- goes far beyond historical legacy. In multiple studies on ape and African American associations, using different experimental approaches with white and nonwhite subjects, we have found that the link persists and can be triggered in the most egalitarian of people. Our research also suggests a particularly disturbing consequence: When the association was called to mind, even in the absence of conscious awareness, participants in our laboratory experiments were more likely to endorse violence against African Americans.

[W]e tallied the number of ape-related metaphors that appeared in print -- things such as "an urban jungle" and "aping a victim's screams." Not only were black men and their crimes much more likely to be described in apelike terms, but the number of ape-related metaphors predicted the likelihood that a defendant would be sentenced to death.

It is important to note that in every study in which we measured people's racial attitudes, using varying techniques, those views about blacks did not influence the results. In other words, the measurable presence of anti-black prejudice did not dictate how strongly people associated blacks with apes.

Instead, we believe that even among people who aren't particularly prejudiced, the association between blacks and apes is still strong, held in place through "implicit knowledge," the result of a lifetime of conditioning, rooted in historical representations of blacks as less than human.

All of this suggests that it was not simple racism, or just a desire to liken the creation of the stimulus bill to an out-of-control chimp, that was reflected in the Post cartoon. It was a kind of racial programming, a legacy even something as progressive as Obama's election cannot obliterate.

We have a lot of undoing to do, or a lot of doing to undo. Whatev, please let's just start doing the undoing already.