The White Fantasy of Talking African Apes in the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game (con't): The Long Dangerous History and Present of Associating Black People With Primates

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We started this week by discussing the role-playing game Pathfinder and how the white racial frame, the white gaze, and how the fantasies of Whiteness intersect in its gaming universe. I want to return to the topic for a moment.

Pathfinder features talking apes in its version of "Africa". This is very problematic given the deep history of colonialism and white supremacy's political and social project of associating African-Americans, and black folks more generally, with apes and chimpanzees. In reading some of the responses to the original post, and the comments about it elsewhere, I was reminded that what we may take as a given, i.e. that depicting black people as primates is inherently racist, because of training, personal interest, or necessary survival skill, may not be self-evident to others.

Some of the denial is motivated by racism--colorblind and otherwise. A good amount may just be ignorance--willful or genuine.

Ultimately, the racist association between blacks and primates is so pernicious precisely because of how taken for granted it is.

The website Sociological Images has some great examples of the pseudo-scientific and popular propaganda in this genre of racist popular culture.

The following two examples are especially powerful.

The first links "Africans" to "primates" in the "Great Chain of Being" as the lowest form of human life:

Here we have an image of a "perfect" human being, who is of course white and European on the top, with the lower type, the African, and the chimpanzee below him.

When an idea becomes part of a culture, and the collective subconscious, it is especially dangerous because it motivates an individual's reasoning and decision-making processes in ways that they are not aware of.

The centuries old association between apes and black people was born of the need to dehumanize Africans in order to legitimate their murder and exploitation by American and European slave regimes. Those stereotypes, and its related psychological conditioning, continues to exist in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama. Cultural tropes do not die an easy death. Racism and white supremacy are ghosts and demons that have long lives and which continue to survive centuries after the death of their inventors.

As research in psychology has revealed, white jurors who are shown subliminal images of apes and monkeys are much more likely to vote for the death penalty for black defendants in murder cases.

Beyond the crudeness of how conservatives and the White Right have indulged their love of using racial stereotypes of Obama and his family as "monkeys" or "gorillas" since his election, the idea that those images could motivate someone to kill another person is no laughing matter. In fact, legal scholars have argued that the use of ape and primate imagery by Obama's enemies on the Right is actually priming them for violence against the country's first black president.

The White fantasy of talking "African apes" in the Pathfinder RPG game is one that is very hostile to black folks and comes with very pernicious psycho-historical baggage. It is not fun. Nor, is this fantasy innocent or benign. White Privilege does a good amount of harm by hiding behind deflections such as "I was just kidding" or "you are over-reacting, and I didn't mean it that way". Play is not value neutral. It reinforces (and can subvert) the values and norms of a given culture and society. Pathfinder and other role-playing games are not separate or apart from that dynamic.