Frank wrote Yesterday at 8:42am:
Thats enough monkeying around.
Slavery has been universal until the British put an end to it. Lots of white Europeans were enslaved by Muslims.
Blacks were not enslaved by their own kind, then onsold to white and Muslim traders because they were ape-like. Do you think one African tribe raided another and sold them into slavery because they regarded them as inferior?
Obviously. Almost every ethicity regards its neighbuurs as inferior. The Greeks regarded everyone else as inferior, bestial barbarians who talked like dogs ( bar bar). The Romans, the original blond beasts, regarded the Greeks as venal and imoral.
It is ok to poke fun at blacks, muslims, jews, homos, vegans, trannies, fatsos as well as anyone else. As Mark Twain said,, we are all human and nothing is worse than that. Or as Hamlet said to Plonius, use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?
You're still doing the same dishonest thing, flattening history, power, and intent until everything becomes interchangeable and therefore meaningless.
Yes, slavery has existed across cultures. That fact is neither controversial nor relevant to the point you're desperately trying to avoid. What distinguishes modern anti-Black racism is not that slavery happened, but that an entire pseudo-scientific, legal, and cultural framework was constructed to define Black people as
sub-human.
Simianisation wasn't banter, it was justification. It was used to rationalise enslavement, colonial domination, segregation, medical experimentation, and exclusion from citizenship. That is why the ape comparison carries specific historical weight.
The fact that Africans participated in slavery does not rescue your argument. African societies did not develop global racial taxonomies, chattel slavery based on heredity, or centuries-long ideologies claiming Black people were biologically closer to animals. That architecture was built later, largely by Europeans, to morally launder what they were already doing.
Your pivot to "everyone insults everyone" is just cowardice posing as universalism. Jokes do not exist in a vacuum. Mockery aimed at groups who have not been systematically dehumanised by the state, law, and science does not function the same way as mockery aimed at groups who have. Pretending otherwise is not egalitarianism, it's wilful ignorance.
And quoting Twain and Shakespeare while casually listing slurs doesn't make you profound. It just highlights the contradiction, you want the aesthetics of humanism without the burden of understanding how power actually works.
This thread isn't about abstract anthropology or ancient history. It's about whether Trump posted a racist video in a contemporary context where that imagery has a very clear meaning.
Your refusal to acknowledge that context isn't intellectual rigour, it's the mental gymnastics required to defend something you know looks indefensible, it's Trump Derangement Syndrome.