NEWS FLASHES PART 1:

Apes and Racism

While sampling recent news, I was struck by how a couple of stories were connected to human culture and history. In this post, I’ll comment on the horrible video shared by His Trumpliness, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House has now blamed this on a staffer, perhaps one named Ima Scapegoat.

It is the latest outbreak of a long-running racist trope: that those of African ancestry are less evolved, and therefore closer to primates, than Whites. When the Obamas were still occupying the White House, Michelle once wore a sleeveless dress. and various online trolls commented that her arms were “apelike.”

As an unintended development from Darwin’s theory of human evolution, the Eugenics movement argued for improving our species by discouraging intermarriage, and even sterilizing those of races other than white. It gained traction in the late 19^th century in UK, US, Canada, and Europe, influencing policies like immigration restrictions and marriage laws. Of course, it also inspired the Nazi concept of the “Master race.” Even now, in our supposedly more accepting world, soccer fans in Spain throw bananas onto the field near Black players, and shout racist terms at them.

Full body reconstruction by paleoartist John Gurche of adult female Australopithecus afarensis “Lucy.” Image via Smithsonian Institution Human Origins Initiative

This belief that one race of human has evolved further away from apes than others is nonsense. Anthropolgists have found skeletal evidence that indicates a species called Australopithecus afarensis, alive about 3.5 million years, was the earliest hominid known to walk upright, and therefore the ancestor of all of us – of whatever race. In 1974, American anthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray found bones in the Afar region of Ethiopia that they identified as coming from a female about four feet tall, whom they named Lucy. “Johanson and White placed afarensis at the base of a tree of ancestry that led to more recent species, such as Homo erectus and later the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. From this perspective, Lucy was the mother of humanity,” as Robin McKie wrote in The Guardian.

This particular recurrence of the “ape” trope also has personal resonance for me, For the past few years, I have been collaborating on a book – working title now A Savoury Blend: Talking through Racial and Cultural Differences – with Dr. Francine Jennings, a proud Black performer and professor from Atlanta. We tell the story of our surprising late-life romance (which, sadly, didn’t survive the Pandemic’s stresses) and offer suggestions about how people of different races can learn from meaningful conversations with each other, without getting mad or changing the topic. We include transcripts of our actual conversations.

While in Washington, DC, we visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History together. There was a particular display that Francine later told me she was apprehensive about viewing, but she didn’t say anything at the time. She knew that, coming from a family where both parents had science degrees, I would be intrigued by the room about evolution. Here’s a sample from a conversation in our manuscript:

“F: No, no, NO! I didn’t come from any kind of ape. And you know those ideas (evolution and creation) are diametrically opposed, but it just goes against my grain. Not so much because I don’t respect your way of looking at things, it’s more the way it has been twisted to make people think that Black people are more akin to animals than to people. We don’t take too kindly to that. So, it’s hard for a lot of us to embrace the idea that this is how we evolved.

J: I get that.

F: And people are still calling us monkeys and apes: “You ugly ape!” It happens all the time in 2025. It’s not that different from what it used to be.

J: No, it isn’t. But to me, we’re all descended from monkeys and apes. You’re no more ape-like than I am. It’s part of our human past. But I don’t see any point in trying to change your view. That’s just who we are. It doesn’t mean we can’t like each other and talk to each other.”

We will soon be proposing our book to publishers, and I will give updates here when appropriate.