AndrewMc : A Pictoral History of Racism in the United States
[The following is part of a series]
After the American Civil War, racial imagery came to be used as a tool of political and social oppression. Not that this wasn't the situation previously, but after the Civil War Africans had the legal right to vote. For racist whites this required new methods of intimidation, and imagery was as important as ever. Here we see an African American and an Irishman depicted as monkey-like, showing that in this early period the use of an ape to depict people of supposed"lower" racial orders wasn't confined to African Americans.
... And then we have this, regarding President Barack Obama, which is easy to parse in the context of several hundred years of racial imagery and intimidation...
Read entire article at Progressive Historians
After the American Civil War, racial imagery came to be used as a tool of political and social oppression. Not that this wasn't the situation previously, but after the Civil War Africans had the legal right to vote. For racist whites this required new methods of intimidation, and imagery was as important as ever. Here we see an African American and an Irishman depicted as monkey-like, showing that in this early period the use of an ape to depict people of supposed"lower" racial orders wasn't confined to African Americans.
... And then we have this, regarding President Barack Obama, which is easy to parse in the context of several hundred years of racial imagery and intimidation...
