The People who Trace the Vile Obama Imagery to Minstrelsy are Wrong. It dates back to Slavery.
The furor over the vile simian imagery of the Obamas is necessary, so much so that even Republicans, famed for their obsequious silence in the face of the long history of overt racism have felt compelled to speak up. The outcry over the AI images of the Obamas – Barack, the 44th President of the United States of America and the former First Lady Michelle – as apes is justified.
The white supremacist drive to position black people as subhuman has taken many forms across the West’s imperial history. There were those who went so far as to claim that black Africans were a separate species entirely from Europeans, and many more who claimed that they were at the bottom of a so-called tree of man constructed by and for white men, who of course always placed themselves at its pinnacle. But one of the most common and enduring historical tropes was to liken black people, in mind and in body (meaning biologically) to simians.
However, those who only trace this practice back to Blackface Minstrelsy have erased a much longer history. These racist ideals were imbedded through various western pseudoscience – alarmingly, at the time considered to be legitimate science – like phrenology, craniology, and eventually eugenics. Within each of these branches of supposedly scholarly inquiry, successions of white men, at first mainly European and eventually Euro-American (continental) lined up to provide evidence for the theories of white superiority which governed their disciplines and their own individual biases. By studying the size, lines, shapes, and volumes of bodies (especially skulls), they sought to prove that white men were the unquestioned human ideal. Within their biased scientific frameworks, white women (and all women) were of course inferior beings.
The tools which they seized upon to prove their fundamentally biased hypotheses were often visual. Many today, fail to recognize that what we now refer to as the colonial archive was not just a paper trail of documents, printed and manuscript, it was abundantly visual. It was prints, drawings, painting, sculpture, and eventually photography. Britain, Denmark and Norway, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands actively and deliberately used art and visual culture to fabricate the hierarchical idea of race, a biological fiction which sustained and justified their enslavement of black Africans across a four-hundred-year genocide called Transatlantic Slavery. It is not accidental that Europeans targeted black people as the only group that was always already “enslaveable”. According to the arguments produced across all domains including law, politics, culture, fine arts, and yes, medicine and science, black people and their descendants could be held in bondage in perpetuity because of their racial inferiority, an inferiority that was supposedly measurable through their proximity to simians.
So, this racist post is a page from a centuries-old colonial playbook. Older than the birth and dominance of the abhorrent nineteenth-century practice of Blackface Minstrelsy, it dates back to eighteenth-century western pseudoscience, a fact that should alarm everyone and alert us to the reality of the bottomlessness of this administration’s tactics when it comes to attacking black individuals, communities, cultures, and histories, and everyone who does not fit their narrow, racist worldview of citizen and human.