{"id":4497,"date":"2011-06-20T19:41:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T03:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=4497"},"modified":"2011-07-01T11:08:02","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T19:08:02","slug":"revenge-of-the-nerd-part-4-presidents-as-chimps-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=4497","title":{"rendered":"Revenge of the Nerd Part 4: Presidents as Chimps, Past and Present."},"content":{"rendered":"

From MEDIAite<\/a> by Tommy Christopher, April, 2010: <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Defends Republican Official’s Obama Chimp Email<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Who knew the\u00a0Dilbert<\/em> guy,\u00a0Scott Adams<\/a>, was such a controversial figure? The cartoonist behind the hapless office drone (but not the one who inspiredOffice Space<\/em>. That was\u00a0Mike Judge\u2019s\u00a0Milton<\/em>) has found himself in hot water of late, first\u00a0for comparing women to<\/a> \u201cchildren and the mentally handicapped,\u201d and now, for\u00a0defending<\/a> Marilyn Davenport, the Republican official who sent emails depicting President Obama as\u00a0the offspring of chimpanzees<\/a>.<\/h4>\n

Ironically, Adams\u2019 defense of Davenport is embedded in a lengthy manifesto<\/a> about the deleterious PR effects of sticky internet rumors:\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same thing is happening today with a Republican official who emailed some friends a humorous photo of President Obama\u2019s face on a chimp and a punch line about his birth certificate. If your only context is what the Internet says about this story, you assume it\u2019s a typical racist act by a Republican who is already guilty by association. But if I add the context that Googling \u201cGeorge Bush monkey\u201d gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush\u2019s face is transposed on a monkey, you see what\u2019s really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn\u2019t set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even though Adams isn\u2019t the guy behind\u00a0Office Space<\/em>, and has some\u00a0strange ideas<\/a> about how to deal with angry ladies, he deserves to have this explained to him.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing.\u00a0President Bush<\/strong> was a white dude, so calling him a chimp, while not very nice, doesn\u2019t evoke dehumanizing racial stereotypes that have historically fueled murder, rape, and enslavement. President Obama is a black man, so picturing him as a chimpanzee\u00a0does<\/em> evoke dehumanizing racial stereotypes that have historically fueled murder, rape, and enslavement. Scott Adams can Google President Bush until Dilbert\u2019s tie straightens out, and he\u2019s never going to find a legitimate analog to this insult.<\/p>\n

Also, this isn\u2019t Davenport\u2019s first brush with racial email hijinks.\u00a0According to<\/a> former California Republican Party\u00a0Chairman\u00a0Michael Schroder<\/strong>, Davenport defended Los Alamitos Mayor\u00a0Dean Grose <\/strong>when he sent out this knee-slapper, a photo depicting a watermelon patch on the South Lawn of The White House:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While none of this necessarily makes Davenport a racist (she could just be extremely clueless about race), there\u2019s more than enough probable cause here to absolve \u201cDemocrats and advocates of civil rights\u201d of being wolf-crying opportunists.<\/p>\n

Speaking of stereotypes, though, what did Adams mean by \u201ctypical racist act by a Republican?\u201d He\u2019s either promoting, or acknowledging, a stereotype about white conservatives, which compounds his failure to recognize the same in Davenport\u2019s email.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From MEDIAite by Tommy Christopher, April, 2010: Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Defends Republican Official’s Obama Chimp Email<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[445,444,434,446,435,433,432],"class_list":["post-4497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-soapbox","category-uncategorized","tag-chimp-email-dilbert","tag-chimp-email-obama-scott-adams","tag-dilbert-creator","tag-republican-official-chimp-email","tag-scott-adams-lunatic","tag-scott-adams-obama","tag-scott-adams-racist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4497"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6317,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions\/6317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}