00:13President Donald Trump posted and then deleted a video that echoed false conspiracy theories
00:18about the 2020 election and included a racist caricature of former President Barack Obama
00:22and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
00:24The video received bipartisan backlash from both Democrats and prominent Republicans,
00:28including South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who is black.
00:41I did come across, and you probably have too, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, you know,
00:48basically saying, you know, he prays, hopes that it's a hoax, but it is without doubt the most
00:54disgusting or I think the most racist thing that he's seen out of this White House.
01:00And I think he'd probably include that for sort of Trump one.
01:10Nearly all of the 62 second video posted by the president appears to have been a repost from a conservative
01:16social media influencer who used artificial intelligence to create the racist images of Barack and Michelle Obama.
01:32White House press secretary Caroline Levitt dismissed criticism of the video and said that the video depicted President Trump as,
01:38quote,
01:39king of the jungle and Barack and Michelle Obama as characters from The Lion King, a movie that does not
01:43have any characters depicted as apes.
01:46There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating black people with animals, including apes,
01:51in demonstrably false and racist ways.
01:59And very, very powerfully used in the 19th century, both during slavery as a rationalization for the enslavement of people
02:11of African descent and essentially the rationalization of their dehumanization.
02:16But after legal emancipation in 1865, a generation thereafter, when you get this onslaught of racial violence towards black southerners,
02:29again, that depiction of people of African descent as being ape-like emerges in popular culture.
02:47If you can intellectually and culturally identify the other as being inferior, then, you know, you can do almost what
03:03you like to them, right, either in terms of depiction or in terms of physical violence.
03:16President Trump has long been criticized for making racist statements about the former President Barack Obama, including with the claim
03:22that he was not born in the United States.
03:30We both challenged these latest iterations of this racist, this old racist trope in American history, but at the same
03:40time, at the same time, don't take our eye off the prize, right, which is to sort of, you know,
03:47recognize that there are things which are not being discussed, things which are not being criticized,
03:52things which are not being analyzed, which really should be.
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