Because Bill Maher says Trump’s father is an Orangutan Republicans say it’s ok for Rosanne to call a Black person a monkey.
Right-wing pundits want revenge for Roseanne’s firing, and they’ve set their sights on, um, Bill Maher
https://news.avclub.com/the-far-right-wants-revenge-for-roseanne-s-firing-and-1826420117
Ignoring the history of calling Black people monkey. Not the same racists assholes.
FOR CENTURIES THE WEST HAS FOUND IT USEFUL TO COMPARE BLACK PEOPLE TO MONKEYS
In the history of European cultures, the comparison of humans to apes and monkeys was disparaging from its very beginning.
When Plato—by quoting Heraclitus—declared apes ugly in relation to humans and men apish in relation to gods, this was cold comfort for the apes. It transcendentally disconnected them from their human co-primates. The Fathers of the Church went one step further: Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Isidore of Seville compared pagans to monkeys.
In the Middle Ages, Christian discourse recognised simians as devilish figures and representatives of lustful and sinful behaviour. As women were subject to an analogous defamation, things proceeded as one would expect. In the 11th century, Cardinal Peter Damian gave an account of a monkey that was the lover of a countess from Liguria. The jealous simian killed her husband and fathered her child.
Hotbed of monsters
Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosiseven let one of Adam’s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair. She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.
From then on, the sexist manifestation of simianization was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. He characterized the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals.
The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.
A good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills.” His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.
In the following centuries, simianization would enter into different sciences and humanities. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields.
King Kong’s reel racism
Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue. It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. The climax was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood’s horror factory, King Kong.
At the time of King Kong’s production the public in the US was riveted by a rape trial. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. ‘Scottsboro Alabama’ carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses.
One of the 56 images showed the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline “Guilty Rape.” The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless white girl.
https://quartzy.qz.com/1179366/hm-m...k-people-been-compared-to-monkeys-by-racists/
1907
1862
Right-wing pundits want revenge for Roseanne’s firing, and they’ve set their sights on, um, Bill Maher
https://news.avclub.com/the-far-right-wants-revenge-for-roseanne-s-firing-and-1826420117
Ignoring the history of calling Black people monkey. Not the same racists assholes.
FOR CENTURIES THE WEST HAS FOUND IT USEFUL TO COMPARE BLACK PEOPLE TO MONKEYS
In the history of European cultures, the comparison of humans to apes and monkeys was disparaging from its very beginning.
When Plato—by quoting Heraclitus—declared apes ugly in relation to humans and men apish in relation to gods, this was cold comfort for the apes. It transcendentally disconnected them from their human co-primates. The Fathers of the Church went one step further: Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Isidore of Seville compared pagans to monkeys.
In the Middle Ages, Christian discourse recognised simians as devilish figures and representatives of lustful and sinful behaviour. As women were subject to an analogous defamation, things proceeded as one would expect. In the 11th century, Cardinal Peter Damian gave an account of a monkey that was the lover of a countess from Liguria. The jealous simian killed her husband and fathered her child.
Hotbed of monsters
Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosiseven let one of Adam’s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair. She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.
From then on, the sexist manifestation of simianization was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. He characterized the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals.
The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.
A good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills.” His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.
In the following centuries, simianization would enter into different sciences and humanities. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields.
King Kong’s reel racism
Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue. It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. The climax was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood’s horror factory, King Kong.
At the time of King Kong’s production the public in the US was riveted by a rape trial. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. ‘Scottsboro Alabama’ carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses.
One of the 56 images showed the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline “Guilty Rape.” The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless white girl.
https://quartzy.qz.com/1179366/hm-m...k-people-been-compared-to-monkeys-by-racists/
1907
1862
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