maporsche wrote:It must be a generational thing.
Under 30 here, and if it's ok for a white guy to be a chimp, equal opportunity says it's ok for a black guy to be called a chimp.
No, it's a question of having even an inkling of historical awareness. I aint that older (36), and none of my friends would even think of it.
Drawing a cartoon picturing a Jew as a leech is also not the same as drawing Bush or Hillary as one. Why not? Because it is the very imaging and logic and view that was used to scorn and demonize Jews - into the concentration camps.
Same here. As GW said, while it is insulting to compare a white man to a chimp, to do so to black man is to recall a time of lynchings, Jim Crow and socially accepted racism. Black man = monkey / animal; that's the language of slavery, of segregation and lynching, where blacks are either or both child-like, ignorant animals that are better off under the white man's rule or dangerous primitive animals that should be feared and repressed. That endlessly repeated equation was instrumental in justifying slavery and Jim Crow and instilling racial disdain and fear through the generations.
Every American knows that, or bloody well should. I'm sure that pub owner down in Georgia knows. To make the blacks = monkeys equation even as you know that is a demonstration of complete dickness and yeah, racism. To not be aware of it is just ridiculous - dont you have history classes in school?
