This was nothing new.
Before President Donald Trump released a video on his Truth Social account earlier this month that depicted Michelle and Barack Obama as apes, many were already well aware of his compulsive use of AI-generated deepfake content to disparage the former president. Many were also well aware of his tendency to employ dehumanizing rhetoric to describe people of color.
Unfortunately, this high-level bigotry has become a normalized phenomenon in the media cycle today. But it has deep roots in history throughout Western civilization.
While no apology was issued for the video, or for any of the president’s exhaustingly frequent social media posts, this particular video was removed within hours.
Of course, the blame for this “erroneous” post was redirected to an anonymous staffer, but Trump then proceeded to post several photos of himself alongside Black celebrities. This was clearly damage control.
Across the aisle, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries decried this imagery as vile. Others suggested the message was backpedaled because he felt the tides turning.
There is precedence. Throughout history, blatant associations of race and animality have been out of bounds because they diminish the humanity of people of color. Underlying this claim is another inference that is even worse: Humanity is a quality that has long been wielded against BIPOC folks. The human, as a social concept, depends on animalization, and dehumanization is human.
The term “dehumanization” implies a process by which one’s inherent humanness is discarded, leaving behind an absent reference. Enlightenment Era thinkers from Western Europe established a narrow conceptualization of the human that was measured, above all else, by the capacity to reason.
Decolonial philosopher, essayist, poet, and scholar, Sylvia Wynter, refers to this figure as “Man,” the benchmark by which one’s full humanity could be recognized. Jamaican-born Wynter, 97, argues that Eurocentric ideas about rationality and civility were inseparable from the racial hierarchy produced by the age of exploration and colonization.
In this culture, as many have been conditioned to perceive the animal as the opposite of the human, the history of the West reveals that animality is not the opposite of humanity—but its precursor. The human is a newer (and intrinsically better) model of the animal. Dehumanization, then, aligns certain humans alongside other nonhuman animals, who are deemed to lack those humanizing qualities.
One of the reasons why so many feel deeply unsettled by racist imagery that likens people of color to nonhuman animals is because it is a cruel reminder not only of a history of violent dehumanization but also because it forces a reckoning with a continuum (from least animal to most animal) that too many still buy into.
Human superiority was entrenched in abolitionist rhetoric from the 18th and 19th centuries. Abolitionist and British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, who recorded and published his observations from time spent in slave ships between 1782 and 1787, writes, “Nor do these unhappy beings, after they become the property of the Europeans (from whom, as a more civilized people, more humanity might naturally be expected), find their situation in the least amended.” Falconbridge appeals here to his audience’s civility, that which separates “Europeans” from the enslaved, “unhappy beings.”
During this time, Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus developed the binomial system of classification, a categorization system of living beings that codified and hierarchically distributed both race and species.
To justify these divisions, naturalists sought out differences that proved Human superiority—centered around language, art, and culture. The problem, as Amie Souza Reilly, Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University and author of the 2025 book Human/ Animal: A Bestiary In Essays, writes, isn’t “just that the White European naturalists assumed only human animals can reason, or that this reason makes them superior, but that they used this line of thinking to subjugate, enslave, display, and dehumanize people were not White Europeans by aligning nonwhite, nonmale, non-Europeans with animals, therefore pushing themselves to the top of the hierarchy they invented.”
Political scientist at the University of California-Irvine Claire Jean Kim refers to race and species as two interconnected “taxonomies of power.” These taxonomies lump and split nonwhite groups according to how close to nature they are perceived.
Her examination of this satirical drawing, published during the 1867 California gubernatorial race, demonstrates how these taxonomies work not as a set system but as a context-specific methodology used to justify all kinds of oppression—chattel slavery, theft of indigenous land, exploitation of migrant labor, and even industrial slaughter.
To be clear, the point is not to invalidate the harm caused by such dehumanizing discourse present day or historically. My position is in no way aligned with those who claim that Trump’s post has been taken out of context to manufacture controversy.
Claiming ignorance and hiding behind allegory does not dismiss the harm of racialization. However, it is important to recognize that racism like this is tethered to the very core of liberal humanism.
Charles Chesnutt, a Black novelist, essayist, and activist, understood this in 1889, when he published “Dave’s Neckliss.” The short story, alongside several other “Conjure Tales,” is narrated by John, an Ohioan farmer who purchases land in and relocates to North Carolina after the Civil War.
The stories center around interactions with Uncle Julius, a Black man whose anecdotes about the slave plantation are filtered through John’s rational lens. In this story, John’s observations reveal himself to be the arbiter of what constitutes the human: “But in the simple human feeling, and still more in the undertone of sadness, which pervaded his stories, I thought I could see a spark which, fanned by favoring breezes and fed by the memories of the past, might become in his children’s children a glowing flame of sensibility, alive to every thrill of human happiness or human woe.”
Rather than a biological fact or even an essential right, the human here is a marker of one’s place in the social order, and it can be given or taken away on a whim from those marked as other.
Sen. Tim Scott (R. SC) said he could only “pray” that the racist video post was a fake, because the alternative would mean grappling not just with the president’s racism but with his unassailable power to determine—like Linnaeus, like Falconbridge, like John—the relative value of all human—and nonhuman—life.
Akash Belsare is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
