Orange County, California may be known as "Reagan Country" for it's large conservative voting base but give OC Weekly journalist R. Scott Moxley credit for calling out the GOP's growing tolerance of overtly racist ideology within it's leadership ranks.A recent e-mail sent by Republican Party central committee member (and Tea Party activist) Marilyn Davenport has outraged even GOP members from her own party who have called for her to resign. The image (pictured left) is basically a photo-shopped image of the President's face on a baby chimp that suggests his parents were Apes - the image was accompanied by the words "Now You Know Why No Birth Certificate."
Davenport's callous use of the image and her stubborn denial to even acknowledge that it is in fact, racist shows just how ingrained the dehumanizing, warped image is in the global sub-conscious.
Depicting peoples of African descent as apes, gorillas or monkeys actually predates the United States and goes back to the earliest European encounters with Africans in the 16th and 17th century. In drawings and writings, European explorers and "scientists" first promoted the "Negro-Ape metaphor" to explain away differences in skin tone, facial characteristics and hairstyle and soon thereafter, justify the enslavement of Africans and their forced entry into the global financial juggernaut that was the slave trade.
A long line of people, from French philosophers, to Popes, to scholars have entwined bogus scientific theories with warped images of blacks to present them as sub-human savages and justify pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority.
So people like Marilyn Davenport, who use these images, do so for a very simple reason; to promote centuries-old stereotypes of peoples of African descent as savage animals, devoid of Judeo-Christian values and justify an extremist ideology that treats non-whites (including the President of the United States) as less-than-human. Can you imagine the GOP e-mails that we DON'T see?
No comments:
Post a Comment