FLASH
Shkruar nga Kamali Melbourne
I never thought I would see a sitting president of the United States share a video containing such an overt and unquestionably racist image.
When I first saw the image of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as monkeys on social media, I thought it had to be fake.
I know that the American president and those around him have said and done deeply racist things before. But this? I couldn't believe it.
Before entering politics, Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, were sued in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Justice for refusing to rent apartments to black tenants. In the 1980s, Trump led calls for the death penalty for five young black men, known as the “Central Park Five,” who were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape. Even after they were proven innocent, he continued to claim they were guilty.
It was also Trump who promoted the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a legitimate president, claiming, falsely and loudly, that he was not born in the United States. This became known as the “birther conspiracy.”
However, even with all this history, and there are other examples, I couldn't believe what I was seeing when that image appeared before me on the screen.
I never thought I would see a sitting president of the United States share a video containing such an overt and unquestionably racist image.
The argument by some people that the video, if viewed in its entirety, is not racist, is laughable in its naivety and offensive in the assumption it makes about the audience that saw it.
The author of the video made a clear decision to portray the Obamas as monkeys. The person who shared the video also made a conscious decision to publish it on his platform.
It shouldn't need explaining, but the dehumanization of people of color in this way is a stereotype that dates back hundreds of years. For too long, it was relegated to the margins of history, even as it remained part of the language of white supremacists.
But something has changed.
Maybe it's social media, maybe it's something else, but the reality has changed. We now live in a time when, for more than 12 hours, the Trump White House considered such a thing acceptable.
As I got ready for the day, my five-year-old son ran around the house playing. Every time he passed my screen and that image was there, I had to move my laptop. I didn't want him to see it. I didn't want to have to explain it. I didn't want to have that conversation.
But I will have that conversation, just like my mother had with me.
Racist language and behavior online have increased, found an audience, and spread. It is difficult to accurately measure the scale of this phenomenon, as the platforms are numerous and diverse.
But the fact that this material was distributed and tolerated shows that boundaries have shifted. / Adapted from "Sky News"
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