Linux Beach: Ron DeSantis' "monkey this up" comment has a racist history

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Ron DeSantis' "monkey this up" comment has a racist history

When Andrew Gillum became the first African-American candidate for governor of Florida in Tuesday's primary, his Republican opponent, Trump fanboy Ron Desantis, was quick to mobilize racism in the hope that by doing so he might win enough white racist support to turn the clock back to when America was racist before, and win the election by doing so. He did this by telling a Fox News host:

"The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state."

After mobilizing what has been a racist meme against African Americans for more than a century, his campaign tried to deny that he knew exactly what he was doing, and claimed it's "absurd" to say "monkey" is a racial dog whistle. Yesterday, DeSanti told Sean Hannity "It has zero to do with race, It has everything to do with whether we want Florida to go in a good direction." He is now claiming that the comment was about Gillum's "socialist policies." Only there are a few problems with that explanation. First, Gillum is not a socialist, although I wish he was. DeSanti is just using that as another smear. He doesn't have to tell people he is African-American. Second, there isn't a long history of a monkey meme for Marxists. Google "monkey Marx" images and you'll get a lot about the Marx brothers' film "Monkey Business" but not Karl Marx. Google "monkey Obama" images and you'll get literally hundreds of racism images. Maybe some of these images were posted on the racist facebook group Ron DeSantis administered until yesterday, when Media Matters staffer Natalie Martinez called him out.

Another admin/moderator for the racist, conspiracy Facebook group has also been promoting Ron DeSantis' campaign, and specifically named DeSantis as an admin, and said the Central Florida Post writer Taylor Foland was specifically brought on to promote DeSantis. pic.twitter.com/tXcqDmDrAX
— Natalie Martinez (@natijomartinez) August 28, 2018

Fox News' Shepard Smith asked "Was that racist or a figment of speech?"

I have composed this blog post to answer his question.

First some history:

The Coon Caricature: Blacks as Monkeys
A hateful association between Blacks and monkeys or apes was yet another way that the antebellum South justified slavery. Blacks were considered by some Whites to be more simian than human, and therefore had no self-evident rights, including freedom. After the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves, and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15 amendments to the Constitution, White bigots used the association to justify Jim Crow laws, and the use of violence, such as the lynching of Blacks who challenged or threatened the status quo.

This should make clear that what DeSanti's is promoting leads to genocide, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll let these images speak for themselves:

1900s Postcard

1907 Postcard

1900s Postcard

1907 The Little Nigs of Tiny Town comic strip

These images aren't just a part of America's racist past, as Ron DeSanti's reminds us, they are with us still. Skip forward a hundred and one years from the "Little Nigs of Tiny Town," and we are subjected to images like these, minus the N-word.