Bad Idea Jeans: German Zoo Named A Monkey Obama

Last March, The Dresden Zoo, in the German town of the same name, decided to name a newborn mandrill monkey Obama, in honor of the American president’s upcoming visit to Dresden, scheduled to take place in June. The monkey house at the zoo has a tradition of naming its animals in order of the alphabet and, this year, it was time for a name beginning with the letter “o.” But, the seemingly innocent gesture has been met with ire from some of the country’s officially black residents.:

“It’s a catastrophe,” director of the Initiative for Black Germans (ISD) Tahir Della said. “Black people continue to be confronted by associations with the animal kingdom and primitivity.”

Although the zookeepers who chose the name said that they were unaware of the history of using monkeys to caricature black people, the zoo was forced to rename little Obama to something less black. We remember being “schooled” in college by a white friend about the do’s and dont’s between blacks and whites. Something we were completely ignorant of since we came from a part of the country with very few of either. We wish we had never learned. It colored, (no pun), the way we saw things from then on. Maybe sometimes people need to chill the fuck out.

Zoo forced to rename primate called ‘Obama’ [The Local]