On Michelle Obama's Relative Who Escaped From Zoo

“A prominent South Carolina Republican” needs lessons in evolutionary biology and damage control, as well as race relations:

A prominent South Carolina Republican killed his Facebook page Sunday after being caught likening the First Lady to an escaped gorilla.

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, “I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors – probably harmless.”

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, “I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest.”

Then he added, “The comment was hers, not mine,” claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

His response is not very helpful, and isn’t even accurate with regards to evolution. I bet Michelle never said such a thing because she has a better understanding of modern science than DePass. Humans and apes have a common ancestor. Humans did not descend from apes such as modern gorillas.

Beyond that biological error, it is true that Michelle Obama is related to apes. Of course so am I  and so is DePass, along with every other human in the world. This makes it impossible not to wonder, of all the humans in the world, why DePass used Michelle Obama as an example.

Meteor Blades has more on DePass' non-apology apology:

Clearly in jest. Clearly. Surely. Only humorless, hypersensitive, politically correct people would make a stink over something so harmless. How could anybody be offended by a joke that DePass probably heard the first version of from his grandfather who heard it from his grandfather?

No surprise there. In fact, the ape reference in relation to African Americans has a long history. But it's not just history. Some Americans, especially those of us raised in the South, grew up with it as standard fare, even in the classroom. While the crudest depictions of black people as apes have disappeared from American culture, for many there remains a mental association of African Americans with apes.

Not only is it not a jest, it is also not harmless prejudice. According to six cognitive studies put together by a team of psychologists led by  Professor Philip Atiba Goff, "participants’ basic cognitive processes ... significantly alter[ed] their judgments in criminal justice contexts."

Included in the team's studies - published as "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences" - was an archival look at hundreds of articles published in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979-1999. They discovered that blacks convicted of capital crimes were four times more likely than convicted whites to be described with "ape-relevant" language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild."[...]

Arriving in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I went on dozens of ridealongs in police cruisers as part of an effort to get acquainted with the gang phenomenon in the part of the city that was then called South Central, then predominately African American. Officers constantly would refer to a call as an N.H.I. I soon discovered this meant No Humans Involved.

I suppose Rusty DePass would find that pretty funny, too.