The History And Current Customs Of Associating Apes And Monkeys With Black People

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Overview and an excerpt of an online article about the history and current customs of associating Black people with apes and monkeys.

The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2026/01/delete-concerns-about-dave-and-avas.html for the related pancocojams post "Concerns About Dave And Ava's Nursery Rhymes And Baby Songs YouTube Channel Depicting Black Characters As Monkeys (Videos & Comments)."

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AI OVERVIEW (This write-up is the result of my January 30, 2026 question "Why have Black people been associated with monkeys and apes?"

"The association of Black people with monkeys and apes is a deeply rooted, racist trope originating in European colonialism, slavery, and scientific racism. It was designed to dehumanize people of African descent by placing them closer to animals on the "Great Chain of Being," justifying slavery and segregation as a "natural order" [13].

Key Historical Context and Origins

Colonialism and Slavery: Early European explorers and colonialists used these comparisons to portray Africans as savages or subhuman, creating a justification for enslavement and brutality.

"Scientific" Racism (18th-19th Century): Pro-slavery proponents and early scientists (e.g., in "Types of Mankind," 1854) manipulated biology, craniometry, and early evolutionary theories to create artificial racial hierarchies, placing Black people closer to apes [13].

Evolutionary Misconceptions: In the 19th century, misinterpretations of evolution, such as those by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, were used to argue that African people were a "link" between monkeys and white Europeans.

Evolution Of The Trope

The "Brute" Caricature: Post-Emancipation, white supremacists propagated the image of the "Black brute"—depicted as animalistic and driven by primal, violent impulses—to justify violence, lynching, and Jim Crow laws [14].

Pop Culture and Media: Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, advertisements, cartoons, and literature depicted Black people with ape-like features to ridicule them.

Sporting Events: The use of "monkey chants" and throwing items like bananas at Black athletes is a modern continuation of this dehumanizing tactic.

Modern Psychology/Bias: Research has shown that this association still exists subconsciously. Studies found that associating Black people with apes can lead to higher police violence and harsher judgments, as it makes observers less likely to perceive Black individuals as fully human [15].

This trope has been used for centuries to maintain power structures, dehumanize, and justify racial discrimination, with remnants of it appearing in contemporary society."

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A 2019 EXCERPT OF AN ONLINE ARTICLE ABOUT THIS SUBJECT
From https://www.slj.com/story/The-problem-with-picture-book-monkeys-racist-imagery-libraries "The Problem with Picture Book Monkeys: Racist imagery associating simians with Black people has a long history, by Edith Campbell, Dec 04, 2019

It seems that every other week there's another headline about a Black person being referred to as a monkey, ape, or gorilla, and associated racist imagery, causing an outcry. In May 2018, Roseanne Barr sent out a now-deleted Tweet equating Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman and former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, with an ape. After losing her role on a TV show, Barr apologized, calling the tweet a joke.

Later that year, Prada was forced to remove a $550 keychain from its global market amid cries of a boycott. The keychain contained the figure of a monkey with large lips suggesting blackface.

British radio show host Danny Baker was fired in 2019 after tweeting an image of a chimpanzee appearing to depart a hospital with the caption, "Royal baby leaves hospital." Offense was taken because the child’s mother, Duchess Meghan Markle, has mixed African American and Caucasian heritage.

Educators have also been included in these headlines. In January 2019, a Texas teacher was placed on administrative leave for calling students monkeys on Facebook. In 2018, teachers in Texas, New York, Florida, and Kentucky faced disciplinary action for referring to students as monkeys, apes, or gorillas. That same year, the organization Teaching Tolerance documented more than 20 instances of students using these words toward Black peers in its 2018 Hate At School report.

It makes you wonder: Why do so many people refer to Blacks in such a manner? Where did this false thinking originate, and how does it continue to spread?

In particular, I wonder about the role played by picture books with cartoon or anthropomorphic images of monkeys—that is, monkeys with human characteristics. At first glance, it looks like they’re just animals—no big deal. However, my research into the history surrounding these depictions reveals that there's much more to it.

Black people have always been called monkeys, intentionally or not. I taught in a K-8 Catholic school in Indianapolis where all the students were Black, but most of the teachers weren’t. Once a White teacher had her young students sing and perform "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed." When I pointed out the racism embedded in this song, it was clear she had no idea of the dynamics she created by asking Black children to act like monkeys and sing a tune whose original lyrics can be traced back to “Five little [n-words] jumping on the bed."

Consider the ever-popular Dr. Seuss books, which in total contain only two Black characters, both of whom are depicted as monkeys. Then there's “Curious George,” H.A. Rey’s series about a monkey that has grown into a global franchise. As Maya Terhune wrote in a Boston College publication, "[T]he series’ celebration of the oppression of an abducted monkey parallels the oppression of black Americans.”

If children's books socialize young people and teach them cultural values, what role do they play in extending the false equation between people of African descent and monkeys?

[An illustration from "Types of Mankind" (1854).]

Monkey comparisons have been used to dehumanize people around the globe, but the comparison to people of African descent is the most enduring. I've been able to trace these ideas to antiquity, when Christian and Muslim scholars viewed apes as demons. This metanarrative brought a spiritual dimension to apes, and eventually those likened to them, by rendering them as soulless and demonic, as Charles Mills wrote in the anthology Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class and Race (LIT Verlag, 2015).

Many researchers trace beliefs that people of African descent were more ape than human to the late 17th century, the age of Enlightenment. However, there was so much prior contact between Black Africans and Europeans that the idea probably originated earlier. Enlightenment-era political and economic developments would have spurred more widespread adoption of this untruth.

European naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus developed taxonomies ordering the European's scientific world by classifying different species of humans. This converged with Peter Camper's work on physiognomy, a pseudoscience using the shape and size of the head, face, and brain to determine character and intelligence, and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

These theories developed while European imperial powers pursued global colonization and sought cheap, unlimited labor to fuel growing economies. Scientific racism, which viewed Indigenous people in Africa and in the Americas as non-humans void of souls and humanity because they were likened to apes, justified enslaving these people not for a period of servitude, but in perpetuity, as chattel.

Understanding this history is important, because it explains why and how anti-Blackness has come to be.

The European press popularized these ideas with editorial comics that represented groups of people as animals. And it's those monkeys that we now find in children's books, movies, and TV shows.

When we see a black gorilla in the 2018 children's movie Sing dressed like a rapper, or when Francine, the monkey friend in the TV cartoon Arthur (based on the books by Marc Brown), is voiced by a Black actor, I believe we're observing the perpetuation of that message. It’s dehumanizing to Blacks because it removes their essential human capacities, such as intelligence and emotion. It also relieves others of moral obligation toward Black people along with any social or emotional connection.

One would wonder how children’s books with such racialized images get published. Stanford University psychology professors Jennifer Ebehart and Aneeta Rattan found that non-Black people can have an inattentional blindness that prevents them from processing the racism in images that are in front of them. When the creators don't know the history, are unaware of their own bias, and have never had monkey-based insults hurled at them, it's easy for them not to see the anti-Blackness. 

In the majority-White world of children's publishing, many people are still unaware of their own implicit bias. So when racist images are unwittingly created by one person or department, others may not see it.

[...]

Often, a simian's behavior portrays popular negative stereotypes of Blacks that inadvertently reinforce the association between monkeys and Black people. The animals are lazy and avoid work, have super strength, are good dancers, jokesters, and are not very intelligent. Julia Ostertag, a doctoral student in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, noticed when researching animals in children's picture books that cultural stereotypes and prejudices "often are more hidden when they’re inserted into a story about animals or animal form."

[...]

If we're reading these books to children or are placing them on shelves, we're complicit in the racism they promote unless we actively engage with the text through a lens of critical literacy addressing the representations of power. Children as young as four can perceive people as "other" and can discriminate based on that perception. This behavior is malleable in young children, but not so easily in adults. If we can reduce the sources of prejudice, we can participate in bringing about a more just society."...

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