depotoirdemeslectures:

In a final study to hammer home that very point, the researchers found that newspaper articles had referred to black defendants in death penalty cases using ape-related words (ape, monkey, and gorilla) four times as often as they did when referring to white death penalty defendants. When the researchers looked deeper, they also found that the black defendants who were ultimately sentenced to death attracted twice as many ape-related descriptions as did the black defendants who were spared the death sentence. Unfortunately, we’re largely incapable of eliminating these hidden prejudices from our judgments. The United States has come a long way in the past century—not least in twice democratically electing Barack Obama to the highest seat in the land—but associations between black people, crime, and animalism still persist.