Racist e-mail

A few days ago a member of the Flordia state government began to get some harsh criticisim due to an e-mail she had forwarded to some of her consituants. The e-mail included a picture of President Obama with ape ears and in front of two apes who were dressed in human clothing. Underneath the picture was the caption "Now you know why no birth certificate". Since the e-mail was leaked and made public there has been a loud outcry both from the people and members of her own party to ask her to step down from her post. Yet she refuses to and does not see exactly what she has done wrong. She claims that the e-mail was just sent out as a joke and that there should not be this much controversy about it. She then goes on to defend her posistion by pointing out that when you google President Bush, monkey you get thousands of results of cartoons of him depicted with large ears. She seems to have missed the historical context of her image though. While depicting a white man with large ears and some what ape like is making fun of his charecter or physical charecteristics doing the same to a man of African American decent causes many new problems. First off the image is not just him having monkey ears, it is set up as if it is a family portraite, implying that President Obama is directly descendant from Apes. For hundreds of years people in America and other countries have used the idea that African people are directly descendant from apes as a racist reason to justify both slavery and foreign domination of the country.