Saw this yesterday, before word had come down that she’d been fired.
Glad she lost her job; it’s time to start penalizing willful stupidity.
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Darwin, Schmarwin. The controversy over whether the primates need a bit of reclassification, and pongo, pan and gorilla should be hominoids, is currently live. Darwin didn’t know about DNA. My own biases lead me to believe that the reason they were not, in the first place, classified as hominoids was bound up with the mindset of Abrahamic religions, and that it’s time we got over it and admitted that they are people of a different species.
However…I completely agree with the rest of your observation.
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Obligatory…
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Excellent! Linnaeus ftw!
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Actually, I’m still against it – I think it legitamises it to some degree, suggesting that you were at least thinking it beforehand. Her ugliness isn’t manifest from her appearance.
So what? Most people watch porn, and it’s unfair to give people the scarlet letter because they have nude pictures online. Angela Merkel has nude pictures online; nobody cares. When they go low, we go high.
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Rare to see a trolley so self-aware as to identify as a trolley.
Oh, you meant @AcerPlatanoides …naah, you’re being considerably more trollish in this instance.
(Yeah, you said it’s worse, but you soft-pedaled it in a way that suggests it’s only the TINIEST bit worse. It’s seriously worse.)
There’s a history to white folks likening black folks to gorillas, but very little of that history has to do with the idea of Hyperborea. Yeah, that particular myth might have contributed somewhat, but I suspect its a minor influence on the many many comparisons of Michelle Obama to apes.
I think people need to decide for themselves how effective any insult is, and I’m not sure you’re the best person to try to adjudge that on behalf of black folks who are likened to apes.
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If only there was some way of not making horribly racist statements in a public forum.
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You don’t get to decide that, sorry.
Agreed.
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I never said you did, I said “we” meaning a good bit of (white) America. Not making that connection to racism means it gets overlooked and ignored, or not seen as very salient to the discussion. We down play it, because it doesn’t directly effect us.
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Hey look, it’s Free Publicity!
It doesn’t matter that it’s a bogus concept (race). They believe and employ language like that to dehumanize African Americans as less than human. They do it because they want to be able to justify to themselves being afraid of and hating black people.
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Why are our best racists so bad at grammar!?!?
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because their Morans
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What’s sordid about it? (asks the native Tennessean)
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I have not encountered any other explanations for it, ever. But that’s certainly not to say that there might not be any. Can you offer others?
Why I think it’s relevant is that white people are apes also, as are all humans - but the Hyperborea myth elucidates why some whites claim to be an exception to this. I think it’s weird that many people are eager to dismiss empirical refutation of one of the core tenets of modern racism. If something is agreed to be a problem, discussing the possible causes and mechanics of it might just be a bit helpful in deconstructing it and formulating a response.
Doesn’t that subjectivity go without saying? Saying that I may not be “the best” anything would frame this as a personal problem, and it is certainly not about me. Even when I am subjected to racism, I still consider it a societal rather than a personal problem. Because I know that people’s ill-formed categorizations don’t have anything to do with me, personally. It is the racists’ own pathology, not ours.
Consider how people approach this distinctly from being called “gay” or “pussy” as an intended insult. Of course it is hurtful that a person has the intention of insulting one’s self. But it quickly begs the question of “And what, exactly, is wrong with that?” Is the bigot so clueless as to assume that I consider homosexuality or femininity as badges of shame, rather than pride? Should I internalize their shame as a pretext for second-guessing my own self-worth? Of course that’s a decision that I and each of us need to make for ourselves, and I think it is an important decision. But yes, when both the insulter and insultee are, in fact, apes - I do think it is more easily dismissed because it is absurd. And again evokes “As if there was anything wrong with that!”
My “coping strategy” has been from an early age to have this axiom about labeling, name-calling, etc. If what people say is not true, then I do not allow myself to be upset about it, because it is their own misunderstanding. If what they say is true, then I might as well have some pride in it - or change it in myself if I think it is a character flaw. It works for me, so I think it is worth stating as a method which people can use, something in their toolbox if the need arises. But I am certainly not suggesting that this approach is in any way better for others. Honestly, I think it’s weird that I would even need to be called out to justify myself by stating this. Feeling empathy for oppressed people is not mutually exclusive from demanding more intellectual rigor from people who rationalize their mistreatment of others based upon pseudoscience.
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I do take your point and now I feel a little chastised.
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because their Morans what? Our local Morans are flooring contractors. Please don’t tar them with racism.
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I don’t think @AcerPlatanoides said anything about contractors… but about people writing racist thinks on the internet poorly. If your local contractor isn’t doing that, I doubt they were the one’s they meant?
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I agree completely. But I think that they find it effective because people buy into the idea of human exceptionism.
I see it analogous as to calling somebody “gay” being an insult because being gay is perceived as lacking basic dignity, which would IMO be missing the point entirely. An insultee who agrees that there is something wrong with being gay is going to handle the intended insult differently from somebody who knows that being gay is fine, and instead wrestles with the bigots problem in perceiving them that way. It can make the difference between blaming the insulter for being a bigoted callous ass, and the insultee subconsciously internalizing some of that blame themselves - which I think would be harmful. If one is a closeted ape (and most people seem to be), then a subconscious aversion to accepting this “unthinkable” could have negative health effects, just as with closeted gays or other oppressed groups. Yes - I know that my perspective upon this focuses upon the cognitive aspects, but that’s where I see both the problems and the solutions.
This is I think an intersection of the problems of both racism, as well as speciesism. Which probably annoys many people because racism is popularly perceived as a hot and personal social problem, while many seem reluctant to acknowledge that speciesism or human exceptionism are an actual phenomenon, or frame it as being somehow less immediate. But I think that the underlying mechanisms are the same. It is people being blind to their biased tribalism, only on different scales.
To me, just about anyone can be a “person”, whether they are a conservative, a bonobo, or a computer simulation of my parents’ consciousness.
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