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.