A few years ago, medical residents at UCLA performed mocking roasts of their professors during an annual event. It is probably a common yearly send-off at UCLA, as it is at most medical schools and academic hospitals to lighten the mood in the pressure-packed environment.
It is one thing to mock in a playful fashion, leaving the subject of the mocking laughing hysterically with everyone else. It is yet another thing to insensitively mock in a way that infuriates the subject, while everyone is laughing at him or her.
It would be insensitive and cruel to mock someone whose close friend died on 9/11 with images from 9/11. It would be insensitive and anti-Semitic to mock a Jew who escaped Nazism with images concerning the Nazis. It would be insensitive and sexist to mock a victim of rape with images about rape. It would be insensitive and racist to mock an African-American with images relating him or her to a gorilla.
African-Americans were told for one hundred years in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century by the Western world’s leading scholars that we were a different, lower, species than White people, closer to the species of apes than that of (White) humans. In 1799, British physician Charles White asserted that, “in whatever respect the African differs from the European, the particularity brings him nearer to the ape.”
Then, Charles Darwin flipped the script. For several generations, well into the twentieth century, America’s leading scholars pioneered disciplines positioning people of African descent “nearer to the ape” in the scale of evolution. As Darwin wrote in Descent of Man in 1871, “the great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies” will in the future be “between man in a more civilized state” with “the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Relating Black people to gorillas was and still is the ultimate attack on Black people, on Black humanity. Calling us the “n-word” pales in comparison.
