Roseanne Barr was just the latest.
The U.S. entertainment industry has a long, disturbing history of demeaning African-American people by depicting them with ape-like qualities.
ABC canceled its number one show, “Roseanne,” Tuesday after Barr implied in a tweet that Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor to President Obama, looked like a character from 1968’s “Planet of the Apes.” Jarrett is multi-ethnic with African-American heritage.
The comparison of black people to apes or primitive hominids comes out of racist interpretations of evolution. It amounts to equating black people with animals and projecting animal qualities upon them to justify denying them equal rights.
Where it began
The depiction of black people with ape-like features in cartoons began around 1900 with the Sambo caricature. By the 1930s, the ape became the “monster” in many horror films.
The gorilla was a natural movie monster — weighing up to 450 pounds, powerful enough to tear a man to pieces and having a mouth with four large lion-like fangs. But there was a second layer of horror with the gorilla that moviemakers tapped into in the early- to mid-20th century — white audiences’ fear of black people.
The gorilla became a repeating horror star across as many unrelated films as the werewolf or vampire in the golden age of horror. To this day, there have been at least 76 horror movies about apes and monkeys (including yetis and sasquatches).
The poster art for many of the golden age gorilla films featured a black gorilla with a white woman in his arms. The symbolism was clear and simple — the movies were sold on white people’s fear of black men raping white women. Filmmakers were selling the earliest form of pregnancy anxiety in horror, which would later become an explicit theme in “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Alien.”
The most famous ape film of all is 1933’s “King Kong.” It tells the story of a giant gorilla who is captured by white American men, taken to America and displayed in chains. Then he escapes, goes on a rampage in the capital of the white world and kidnaps a white woman. “King Kong” is the perfect metaphor for the enslavement of black people and the fear that African Americans would tear down the cities and kidnap white women.
'Planet of the Apes'
If there is one ape film that challenges Kong for his pop cultural throne, it is the one Barr invoked in her racial slur on Twitter: 1968’s “Planet of the Apes.”
With a script from Rod Serling (“The Twilight Zone”), the film flips the ape metaphor: Charlton Heston lands on a future Earth in which apes have taken over and humans live in the wild. The apes cage Heston’s character, hurl insults at him and spray him with a firehose like so many (mostly African American) civil rights marchers had experienced in the 1960s.
“The Planet of the Apes” came out only months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and during the peak of social unrest in America, due to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
The film (spoiler alert) ends with Heston’s character discovering the remains of the Statue of Liberty on the beach and crying out, “You maniacs! You blew it up!”
Today, about a hundred cast and crew members are looking at the charred remains of the biggest hit many of them will ever take part in, and they are certainly thinking the same thing about Barr: She blew it up.
Dustin Whitlock is a freelance writer for the Clarion Ledger and Scott County Times. He can be reached at l.dustin.whitlock@gmail.com.
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