History, Slurs, and Disinformation: a Fact-Check on Primate Tropes in Modern Online Culture
The association between racial minorities and non-human primates represents one of the oldest tropes in scientific racism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, colonial institutions and pro-slavery theorists in the United States and Europe manufactured racial hierarchies that placed Black people closer to apes than to white Europeans. This biological determinism sought to justify chattel slavery, legal segregation, and imperial conquests by stripping marginalized populations of their humanity.
In modern digital spaces, this pseudo-scientific ideology survives through digital linguistics and image macros. By substituting overt violence with mocking online primate tropes, modern agitators tap into historical prejudice without needing to articulate formal racist theory. When applied to scenes of public distress or anger, the imagery attempts to delegitimize Black political expression by reframing human emotion as wild, animalistic instinct.
