Comedian and former ABC sitcom star Roseanne Barr became the latest social media casualty when the network canceled her show “Roseanne” after a tweet about Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, in which Barr compared Jarrett to a blend of the Muslim Brotherhood and the film “Planet of the Apes.” Nor was it the first time Barr referred to a black woman using the ape trope — in 2013, she wrote a similar tweet about Obama’s national security adviser Susan E. Rice. As president and first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama were subject to similar insults.

While Barr and others dismiss their association of people of African descent and apes as a mere joke, this racist trope has been used for centuries to condone slavery, segregation, even eugenics. The trope has its roots in 16th- and 17th-century European and American thought, when it was used to argue that Africans were subhuman, thereby justifying the enslavement and second-class citizen status of African peoples.

The dehumanization of African peoples is rooted in what scholar Anne McClintock has dubbed “the porno-tropic tradition.” For centuries, Europeans saw Africa as a site of sexual vice. European lore abounded with tales of the “monstrous sexuality of far-off lands where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes.” From the second century on, such figures as Ptolemy, Leo Africanus, Francis Bacon, John Ogilby and Edward Long envisioned the inhabitants of Africa as the most sexually promiscuous beings to inhabit the earth.

Englishmen began incursions into West Africa in the mid-16th century. These first explorers were informed by literary myths like those from the medieval era, which portrayed bestiaries of strange creatures who resembled humans. In 1607, for instance, “The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes” by Edward Topsell explicitly described the lustful disposition of apes, connecting them to devils, associations that would become common in England. The English began propagating their own myths based on supposed correlations between Africans and tailless apes called orang-outang. As historian Winthrop Jordan contended, characterizations about apes “revolved around evil and sexual sin; and rather tenuously connected apes with blackness.”

While some 17th-century commentators suggested Africans were descended from apes or that apes were descended from “blacks and some unknown African beast,” the notion that apes were fond of African women and inclined to rape them became widespread. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as John Atkins lent credence to these ideas, writing that “the Negroes have been suspected of Bestiality with them, apes and monkeys, and by the Boldness and Affection they are known under some circumstances to express to our females.” ...