When a Chimpanzee Is Not Just a Chimpanzee

Protests and outrage abound today in response to the New York Post’s publication of Sean Delonas’ cartoon featuring two policemen shooting a chimpanzee.

In response, New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan denied the cartoon was racially charged and suggests that critiques of the piece are outlandish by associating protests with the “publicity opportunist,” Al Sharpton:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.

Allan’s defense of the cartoon, however, is specious at best, instead mostly reflecting the same racism and ignorance as Delonas’ drawing. By invoking Al Sharpton, the radical and presumably non-credible African-American civil rights figure, as the face of protestations against the cartoon, Allan rather blatantly suggests that anyone who thinks a chimpanzee is more than a chimpanzee is a lunatic.

But, in reality, Delonas’ cartoon represents at least two iconic, racially charged scenes:

* the depiction of African-Americans as ape-like, and
* images of white policemen beating/shooting/lynching African-American men

A Short History of the Representation of African-American’s as Apes

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cartoons and other imagery depicting African-Americans (as well as Irish and Italian immigrants) with ape-like characteristics became commonplace.

The root of the emergence of these images seems to be a direct response (and refiguring of a dominant, racist paradigm) to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) and other scientific theories of monogenism (the idea that races—balck, white, and others— have a common, rather than distinct, ancestral origins are thus part of the same race).

The image to the right lampoons, and thus reflects, popular white racial anxieties about apes as ancestors to human beings by joking that the ape would be embarrassed to have Darwin for a descendant.

Challenged by strong scientific evidence to the contrary, racist ideologies that presumed the superiority of whites over blacks and other on the basis of a literal differentiation of races (i.e., that blacks were not actually a part of the human race) gave way to new, evolutionary-friendly paradigms that place whites at the top rung of an evolutionary ladder.

As the cartoon to the right depicts, this new paradigm envisions white, heterosexual men as the pinnacle, exemplary figure of the human, with women, homosexuals, and other races such as blacks and the Irish positioned as less developed and thus closer to the ape origins of the species. In the early 1900s in particular, alongside the development of the theory of eugenics by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, such images of African-Americans with ape-like features were common.


Allan, the Post editor, seems to suggest that in 2009 a chimpanzee is just a chimpanzee and that, even if there is a legacy of representing African-Americans as monkeys, he and Delonas were unaware of it and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.

I believe, however, that such arguments are disingenuous if not outright lies. This racist imagery is an indelible part of the US cultural consciousness and historical legacy. It doesn’t matter whether or not Delonas was directly thinking about the history of the representation of African-Americans as apes when he drew the cartoon. We as viewers and citizens can only see his drawing in this cultural context.

And, given that we have a newly elected black president who was the leading proponent of the stimulus bill, reading Delonas’ cartoon as a racist depiction of the violent slaughter Barack Obama is anything but outlandish.

Crash: On the Likelihood of Outlier Events

A fascinating article on "Risk Management" in The New York Times has got me thinking.

The article traces the origins of a standard risk management models in the financial sector, known as Value-at-Risk (VaR), and why they failed to predict possibilities that caused the current economic crisis, such as bank under-capitalization and massive derivative losses due to sales of "insurance" on mortgage-backed securities (also known as credit-default swaps).

Would you fly on an airline that had a 99% track record of the flight arriving safely? What if only 1% of their flights crashed? The airline would be out of business. After all, 1% is just one out of a hundred, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not that rare at all, especially when there are millions of potential opportunities to hit that 1%.

So, what is an acceptable risk when we book a seat on an US carrier? Apparently it is somewhere around .000223% (or roughly 2 out of one million).

What seems apparent is that psychology has everything to do with how we perceive risk. As the author of the Times article sums it up: "People tend not to be able to anticipate a future they have never personally experienced."

People who live on the Gulf coast have experienced a lot of hurricanes. So, mostly, they likely feel like they know how to handle them. Until an outlier like Katrina arrives.

Millions use bridges or rely on levees every day to live in and move about their home region without much thought to their failure, despite decades of warnings about aging US infrastructure from the Army Corps of Engineers, until the Minnesota bridge collapsed and the New Orleans levees broke.

To a traveler who only takes two flights each year, a .000223% chance of crashing seems very likely to not occur, although every time the flight hits turbulence that traveler is probably thinking about the possibility of crashing. Even more so, the airline employees who schedule hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of flights each year know that an accident is a virtual inevitability-- though even they weren't fully prepared for an outlier like 9/11/2001.

Any mother who is told there is 1% chance her unborn child will have a serious genetic disease probably thinks that is way too much risk. A doctor who sees thousands of patients a year knows she will eventually have a patient who suffers from the rare disorder and is going to take a 1% risk seriously.

But apparently a 1% or so chance of a series of events that at some time in the future could cause serious economic carnage was routinely ignored as the financial industry made billions for years, assuming that housing prices only move one way: up. Granted, there would have been a high price for any corporate officer who warned of the possibility of huge losses in credit-default swaps, a concept hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham labels "career risk":

It’s what I call the Goldman Sachs Effect: Goldman increased its leverage and its profit margins shot into the stratosphere. Eager to keep up, other banks, with less talent and energy than Goldman, copied them with ultimately disastrous consequences. And woe betide the CEO who missed the game and looked like an old fuddy-duddy. The Board would simply kick him out, in the name of protecting the stockholders’ future profits.

Everybody else was doing it. And the VaR models continually affirmed little risk. In fact, significantly less risk than most other assets. Since, as the Times article lays out, most of the models only measured very short term risk and the long term models usually only drew on data from the previous two years, the more housing prices rose, the less likely the risk seemed that they would fall. In the end, the VaR models proved fairly useless in predicting the systemic collapse that occurred before it was too late.

Thus one insurance company, which is in the business that mastered the actuary table, managed to sell over $400 billion worth of un-hedged credit-default swaps (plus g-d knows what else) and has cost the US taxpayer over $150 billion. So far.

Let's not mention all the other financial institutions that have to date cost over $300 billion. Or the fact that none of the financial sectors' shareholders, employees, and managers will have to pay back the billions they pocketed over the past five years.

A Note on My Methodological Approach to Blogging

Having only recently begun this blog, I feel compelled to discuss my reasons for founding and writing in it. After all, with millions of blogs, news sources, and other sites available to readers (at least while net neutrality still exists), I am probably not alone in wondering what original content I have to offer.

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In considering this question, I looked at blogs I admire, such as FiveThirtyEight, and what I saw were clear and consistent methodological approaches to the topics they cover. FiveThirtyEight applies the skills of sports statistician fanatic Nate Silver to election polling/vote counting and other political topics. As such, what both blogs have in common is that the writers have particular skills and knowledge that they can combine with readily available information to produce unique and valuable perspectives on timely issues.

So the question then becomes, what particular skills and knowledge do I have to offer? This is a question I have been spending some time considering as I ponder new directions in my life. But no matter what, I want to bring to bear the skills and knowledge I have obtained from my academic training to whatever I choose to do.

I earned a PhD in the humanities from one of the top programs in the US. The value of humanities training tends to be widely underrated and undervalued, often due to its lack of reliance on quantitative analysis and empiricism (the traits most highly valued of the sciences and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences). But, of course, what the humanities do offer are methodologies for studying qualitative data and intangibles such as "media," "culture," and "texts."

Perhaps the most important, fundamental value I have internalized from my academic training is to never rely on what others have to say about a given "thing" (i.e., a film, a book, a speech). If I am interested in a topic, I want to go to the source (or "primary text") to find out details that others may not find to be significant as well as to learn more about the original context.

An obsession with primary texts. From Shakespeare to Darwin to Freud to Milton Friedman (and modern macro-economic policy). That is what I have to offer.

I can't promise to get everything or even get everything right, but hopefully it will be interesting and useful to someone.