When Donald Trump posted a meme of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, he told us nothing about himself that we didn’t already know. But his choice of this particular slur, among all the horrific insults he’s hurled over the years, illuminates an ugly truth at the root of MAGA: The movement is grounded in White Americans’ fear of sharing their country with fellow citizens of other races. To understand why, one must recognise what Americans mean when they talk about monkeys.
For India, the land of Hanuman bhakts, Vijayanagar palaces, and langurs frolicking in commuter traffic, the entire symbolism of monkeydom means something different than it does in the US. America has no monkeys outside of a zoo, and our closest non-human relatives carry some hideous racial baggage. For a longer time than the US has existed as a nation, they’ve been the centrepiece of White racists’ attempt to deny the basic humanity of Black people.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, American pseudo-scientists posited hierarchies of race, with people from Africa often seen as closer to lower primates than to humans with paler skin. This canard was convenient for slave-holders and segregationists, and was barely questioned by most White Americans. In the early 20th century, the boxer Jack Johnson was denied a shot at the heavyweight title: Newspapers openly said it would be unfair to let a “gorilla” fight a White man; his victory, when he finally got his chance, sparked race riots across the country, and no other Black boxer was given a title match for a quarter-century.
White America desegregated its sports and entertainment industries before other professions for one simple reason: In these fields, merit is hard to deny. The better boxer will generally win a fair fight, the singer who more people like will generally sell more albums. One can tell oneself any racial fantasy one might wish, but the scoreboard and billboard don’t lie. White Americans adjusted — and shrugged off their diminution with racialised slights. How could anyone compete against a “beast” like Wilt Chamberlain? What White musician could stack up against rivals with “jungle rhythm?”
Very few of us are pro athletes or pop stars, so it doesn’t really hurt White America to share these professions. But what about everyone else? What about the office managers and teachers, the doctors and airline pilots? What about the politicians who make the important decisions for the country? What about the President?
That’s where we are right now. And why MAGA is going absolutely ape.
Get beat out by a Black classmate for a spot on the school football team? If you want a race-based excuse, you can chalk it up to his “raw animal” strength and speed. But what if a Black co-worker beats you out for a promotion? If you want a race-based excuse, you need a new angle.
Hence, MAGA’s obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) — that is, all efforts to bring people other than White men into schools, workplaces, and other formerly segregated spaces. In MAGA-world, no Black person ever fairly outcompetes a White person. If he or she wins, it’s because the contest was rigged. An ape might be stronger than a human, but it can never be smarter.
Over the past decade, the amount of blatantly racist imagery comparing monkeys to Black people has exploded in America. This is partially due to the rise of social media, which has enabled all types of memes to be circulated in a way never before possible. But it also coincides with the rise of MAGA.
Black women are targeted at least as often as Black men. Serena Williams, one of the greatest athletes in history and (in her spare time) a fashion model and entrepreneur, is frequently portrayed as a primate. Michelle Obama is depicted this way far more frequently than her husband: A graduate of Harvard and Princeton, a bestselling author, one of the most widely popular people in America — and in imagery circulated routinely throughout right-wing echo-chambers, a great ape.
It’s not just Black people who receive such treatment. My own half-desi son has been called a monkey by a schoolmate. Trump’s brutal effort to deport as many immigrants as possible has placed tens of thousands of Latinos in detention facilities barely fit to house livestock. But it’s no coincidence that African-Americans are more consistently dehumanised than any other group in the nation.
Until 1965, Black Americans were effectively denied the vote in most parts of the old Confederacy. Trump has referred to various groups of Black citizens as “garbage”, “leeches, and entitlement junkies” from “sh*t-hole countries” who should “go back to where they came from”. His entry into politics in 2015 began on the very same note. He falsely claimed that Obama had been born in Kenya rather than the US. America’s first Black president was not only unqualified to be president (the charge went), he wasn’t even truly an American.
The rest of us, in the US and across the world, need to understand why that group behaves the way it does: What it fears, why it hates, to what lengths it will go to hold on to its power. It’s no accident that MAGA portrays non-Whites as sub-human. Such a vision is central to MAGA’s vision of America: A place for them, and them alone.
Blank is the author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
