A Note on Primate Imagery in the History of Racism

This blog and blogger are not insensitive to the historic use of primate imagery by delusional racists. However, the path to sustainable living may require us to get this "monkey" off of our backs. I apologize for being blunt, but "Black" people are no closer to non-human primates than are "White" people.



In fact, many apes and monkeys far more closely resemble "White" people than "Black" people. In general, the hair of nonhuman primates is far, far closer to that of "White" people than it is to that of "Black" people, for example. So, we all need to get beyond the perception of monkey and ape as racist code words. We need those words and concepts in our language because they help us to understand human nature and origins.



The delusional racist imagery of African people somehow being closer to apes or monkeys may have entered our culture, but it is false, pernicious and must be exposed and replaced by rational imagery. While it may thus be uncomfortable at first, for some people of various ancestries to work with the Divine Primates imagery, it may be vital to our survival. This may be a necessary step in the process of reclaiming human nature from the history of ignorance and ego that has led us to believe that humans are divided into races, and that any humans could be so superior to other humans or other species that they no longer need to respect the planet we live on, and to work to live sustainably within the ecosystem constraints of planet earth.



Indeed, racism may be one of the major reasons our culture has spun out of control. The discomfort with our primate nature, from the days of Darwin to the present time, may have caused human culture to deny evolution and to collude in attitudes indicating that humans are not really even animals. As comforting as these attitudes may be for some, we are seeing their disastrous impacts in our culture today.

