[I wrote this during seminar today in response to a comment about the protesters who rioted in Baltimore. I intend this post to serve as an open letter of sorts.]

Since the early interactions of white Europeans and Black Africans, white people have questioned the humanity of black people. The belief that Black people were less than human, closer to monkeys than to people, is one of the factors that allowed Europeans and Euro-Americans to colonize, enslave, and commit acts of genocide against them. This belief, among others, was used to justify hundreds of years of slavery, lasting nearly a century more here in America than even in Europe. Though slavery and the treatment of Black Americans as property was legally ended 150 years ago, these prejudiced beliefs are far from dead. Obviously they also ‘justified’ a hundred years of legal segregation and the ongoing de facto segregation of schools, housing and most of the economy.

Even more significantly, these beliefs were at the core of the system that allowed lynching, that continues to allow, or at least neglects to punish, vigilante ‘justice’ against Black people, even vigilante death penalties, without evidence, trial, or jury. Teese killings have been doled out by civilians, as in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and by police, as in the more recent cases of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Even if you believe that these men may have been guilty of crimes, certainly you must also believe in the American imperative of a fair trial and fitting sentence, decided by an experienced professional judge, not a civilian or police officer. Even if you believe that police have been operating strictly in self-defense or according to procedure, surely you can understand that the disproportionate number of killings of young Black people is traumatizing for their communities and for Black Americans overall. Just as hundreds of years of lynchings were traumatizing. Just as enslavement and genocide were traumatizing. All of these communal traumas are implicit in the comparison of Black Americans to primates.

When you compare Black Americans to primates, regardless of their behavior, you are perpetuating that trauma, participating in that ongoing violence, sustaining the existence of hateful, incorrect beliefs. So…don’t do that.