Donald Trump’s Ongoing Attacks on the Obama’s.

Hate Filled Invective and the Perverse and Ugly History of Racial Sterotpyes!

Pretty much anyone with a pulse is aware of President Donald Trump’s social media account where he shared a clip of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama’s heads transplanted on a monkey-like illustration, a virulently racist image. The roughly minute-long video, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” (posted on Truth Social late Feb. 5 and withdrawn about a day later) focused on discussing disproven voter fraud allegations in the 2020 presidential election before briefly flashing to the clip intended to portray the Obamas. It was cut from a longer doctored video of Democrats’ faces on various animals, and Trump’s face on a lion, calling him the “King of the Jungle.” Walking next to his lion body in the video is Pepe the Frog, a popular internet meme that was added to a White supremacist symbol database during the 2016 presidential election.

It was the latest in a long litany of the president promoting offensive imagery and negative commentary about Black Americans and others. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump said he only saw the beginning of the video. “I just looked at the first part, it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t see the whole thing.” He then tried to pass off responsibility, arguing that he had given the link to someone else to post. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters. He was ever defiant when asked if he should apologize. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.

Not surpassingly, bi-partisan outrage erupted. Senator Tim Scott is the only Black Republican senator, the Senate. Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, urged the president to remove the post and further commented that he was “praying” the video “was fake becauseit was the “most racist thing” he has seen from the Trump White House. Needless to say, Senator Scott’s prayers were in vain. Moreover, Scott should probably consider paying closer attention to Trump’s verbal tirades. Such retrograde rhetoric regularly flows from the commander-in-chief’s mouth in abundance. Although Trump’s latest expression of racial invective was far from surprising, it was still dramatically unsettling. Indeed, the image was so virulently racist that even some of Trump’s allies were emotionally rattled and disgusted. To add insult to injury, some MAGA allies have vowed retribution — against Republican politicians who dared criticized the vile post.

It would be disingenuous to refer this latest, sordid episode as a revelatory moment because there is no degree of sophistication with Trump. He has referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage,” ranted on about supposedly “shithole nations,” and referred to COVID-19 as the “kung flu.” He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by disgracefully attacking Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. He questioned Obama’s birth certificate and perversely ignited his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. The list of racist and xenophobic is notably lengthy and robust. The fact is that Donald Trump is hardly the first individual to brazenly employ disturbing racial invective in the public sphere, in particular, as it relates to Black people.

Truth be told, referring to Black Americans and people of African descent as monkeys, apes, and other primates has long, deeply etched, historical roots. From the time of our arrival to this nation, Black people were immediately and routinely characterized as a subhuman species. Correlations between Africans and apes without tails was a common myth and legend propagated by the English in the early 17th century. Equating Black people with animals was commonplace. Throughout the century, many writers did not hesitate to imply that Africans were the descendants of apes or unknown African beasts or vice versa.

Closer to home, on American shores, similar regressive ideas were commonplace as well. Founding father Thomas Jefferson, (yes that Thomas Jefferson) wrote without any degree of hesitation in “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black men were a lower species who lusted after White women. He did not hesitate to express his deep misgivings about interracial relationships. Mind you, this is the same Jefferson who would later produce a number of children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings (see Thomas-Jefferson-sally-Hemings-essential-facts. Such a level of rank and obscene hypocrisy speaks for itself! By the mid-19th century, equating Blacks with animals was par for the course. Even more chilling was the fact that the ideology of Darwinism emerged into the public sphere rearing its disturbing, derisive, and dangerous message. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Although revolutionary, the book did not disregard or discredit prior scientific racial literature. On the contrary, Darwinism would become just one more ingredient for eugenics-minded racists to weaponize in their bigoted arsenal to bolster and justify the retrograde rhetoric of White Supremacy.

It was due to such vile and negative rhetoric equating Black people (in particular, males) as vile, animalistic, savage beasts that resulted in centuries of degradation, denigration, denunciation and downright dehumanization for people of African descent. Such mistreatment manifested itself in the form of Jim Crow, chattel slavery, lynching, wanton violence, and other abominable forms of marginalization. The reductive 1915 film birth of a Nation, produced by D. W. Griffith, assisted in propagating this horrendous, intellectually dishonest mythology. Well into the 20th century, such attitudes continued to flourish during the civil rights movement when Black marchers and demonstrators were frequently referred to as monkeys, apes, baboons, and other sorts of primates by virulently violent White racists and segregationists. Often times, such verbal animus was accompanied with physical violence. In fact, a favorite nickname for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among many such mentally unhinged rabid bigots was “Martin Luther Coon.”

In our present day 21st-century culture, we have witnessed countless numbers of White people engage in and employ similarly vile rhetoric toward Black people. From law enforcement to academics to k–12 educators to attorneys to entertainers to politicians and so on. The already warm temperatures have only gotten hotter! There seems to be no cooling down in the forecast!

The undeniable fact is that the “Black person as monkey, ape, gorilla, animal” trope is very problematic. There is nothing “humorous or lighthearted” about it, despite what some misguided, mentally disturbed people believe. Such psychologically reductive commentary has/had devastating messages on Black people. Such rhetoric provides the false message that Black people are not fully human! Such sinister dialogue cannot be allowed to continue in a nation or diaspora that is becoming blacker and browner on a daily basis. Period!

Elwood Watson Ph.D. is a professor of history, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is a cultural critic, syndicated columnist, and author of the books,: Talkin’ To You, Bro!: Liberate Yourself from the Confusing, Ambiguous Messages of Contemporary Masculinity (Lasting Impact Press, 2021) and Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/K/bo40060337.html (University of Chicago Press 2019)