ABSTRACT
Recently, researchers have found a strong association in some white minds of ape images with images of black Americans. In one social science study, white and other non-black college students who were exposed to black faces were quicker in recognizing hazy drawings of apes than those not exposed to black faces. A second study discovered that whites subliminally primed with ape images later paid more attention to black faces than to white faces, while those not thus primed paid more attention to white faces. Even more dramatic was the finding that white students’ blacks-as-apes mental connections, primed by ape-related words, tended to shape their willingness to accept more police violence against a black criminal suspect than against a similar white suspect when these student subjects were shown videos of police violence. Such images of black Americans as apelike or ape-linked date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including as we saw in an earlier chapter (p. 59) back to Thomas Jefferson. Such ape imagery seems to be yet another way of symbolizing black Americans as animalistic and threatening to whites.1
