When I first saw the image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes come across my social media I thought it must have been fake.
I know the US president and those around him have said and done some despicably racist things in the past – but this?
Read more: Trump says he didn’t make a mistake over Obamas as apes video
Prior to being in office, Donald Trump and his father, Fred, were sued by the US Department of Justice in the 70s for refusing to rent apartments to black tenants.
He then, in the 80s, led calls for the death penalty for five young black men, who became known as the “Central Park Five”, who were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape.
And even when it became clear they were innocent, he continued to claim they were guilty.
And he was the one who led the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a legitimate president because, as Trump loudly and wrongly claimed, Obama wasn’t born in the US – that became known as the birther conspiracy.
But even with that history – and there are more examples – I still could not really believe what I was seeing when that image came across my timeline.
Never did I think I’d see a sitting president of the United States posting such a video containing such an overt, unquestionably racist image.
The argument made by some that this video, when played in full, isn’t racist, is laughable in its naivety and offensive in its assumption about the audience which saw it.
Its creator made a decision to depict the Obamas as apes. Its poster made a decision to share it on his platform.
Not that this should need explaining, but the dehumanisation of black people in this way is a trope dating back hundreds of years.
It’s something which had, for many years, been confined to the dustbin of history, while still very much a part of the vocabulary of white supremacists.
But something has changed.
Maybe it’s social media, maybe it’s something else, but something has changed. We are in a new reality where, for more than 12 hours, Trump’s White House thought this was OK.
As I was preparing for today, my five-year-old son was running around the house playing. Each time he passed my screen and that image was up, I had to move my laptop.
I didn’t want him to see it, to have to explain that, to have to have that conversation.
But have that conversation I will, as my mother had with me.
There has been an increase in racist language and behaviour online, where it’s found an audience and metastasised.
It’s hard to quantify how much it’s increased, as social sites are many and disparate.
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In the US, a study in the Journal of Epidemiology found in an analysis of 55 million tweets between 2011 and 2021, a 16% increase in racist language.
The New York Times reports antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate speech jumped by 919% and 422% respectively in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7 and the Israeli response.
And a study from Goldsmiths University here in the UK found 95% of minority groups see racist content online – 16% see it every day and 42% of those asked said it was damaging to their mental health.
So this sort of thing matters.
This will not be the last time something like this happens – the White House has taken it down, blaming a junior staffer – which is odd as we are told Trump does all his own posting and it went up at midnight – but at least it’s not up there anymore.
But the damage has been done, whatever mask there may have been has slipped.
The test for all of us now comes in how we respond the next time it happens.
Donald Trump has not apologised for the video, shared on his Truth Social account, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying “I didn’t make a mistake”.
The post was deleted around 12 hours after being shared.
The US president said “of course” he condemned the racist parts of the video.
In 1973, the Department of Justice sued Donald Trump and his father for alleged racial discrimination at Trump housing developments in New York. The case was settled two years later with no admission of guilt.
The five men wrongly convicted of raping a woman in Central Park have sued Donald Trump on accusations of making “false and defamatory” statements during a presidential debate against former vice president Kamala Harris in 2024.
Mr Trump has tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but has so far been unsuccessful.
