Of Presidents and Primates

I know I’m way late to this party. Forgive me — for the past ten days American Exception has been a casualty of midterms, fellowship deadlines and black history month lectures — but I thought this was worth mentioning. Someone hit me with a question that, in light of the controversy over the NY Post’s chimp cartoon was probably being asked by a lot of other folk: at what point did black people come to be associated with apes?

I sent the following reply:

While there were probably folk racist conflations of black people with primates for years prior the earliest reference scientifically came from Charles White, an 18th century British naturist who believed in something called the “Great Chain of Being” in which all creatures arranged hierarchically led in a stair-step fashion from the lowest protozoan up to God. In his estimation, Africans were lodged between primates and whites. He used such arbitrary assessments as “inability to blush” in order to connect black people to apes. Of course he could also have used the fact that apes are quite hairy and Europeans on average have more body hair than Africans to as a means of making the opposite connection, but that escaped him.

There was another faulty line of connection between the two groups — the stereotype of African males having huge endowments, which directly contrasted the association with apes who have penises about 2 inches long. Based upon that random idea, of course European males would actually be the ” middle link” between primates and Africans.

Outside of that, imagery associating Africans with primates floated around in antiquity and it became thoroughly pronounced in the late 19th century as pseudo-science attempted to justify the rapidly evolving doctrine of social darwinism. In the post-Reconstruction United States you saw an increased emphasis of the “link” between black people and primates as the South attempted to justify the overt brutalities of lynching and mob violence as well as the institutional violence of incarceration (convict labor rapidly replaced slave labor in many places.)

Mismeasure of Man, by my fellow Jamaica High School alumnus the late Stephen J. Gould is a very good source on this.