When Muba made fun of me in terms of appearance and tone of voice, he was wrong to laugh at my ethnicity and cultural identity. But the moment I call him a monkey, I'm referring to a string of histories of oppression against people of color, even if it's like jokingly referring to my darker-skinned friend "Little Black." The biggest difference between Muba and my joke is the institutional injustice caused by the fault of history. Africans of color, whether in Europe or America, have historically been enslaved and oppressed. When their owners whipped them and called them monkeys, it represented the colonists' fundamental contempt for Africans of color and their dehumanizing abuse.
More seriously, these whatsapp database issues are still rooted in the institutions and stereotypes of Western society - being an African-American person of color means being treated differently and being disliked by others. The seemingly equal system of Western countries on the surface does not actually help the African people who have been oppressed in the past to truly turn over, such as uneven educational resources, police violence or public opinion oppression, these are still alive and bloody in 2020. fact. Imagine an
African-American child born in the suburbs of Paris, without resources or opportunities, how to "equally" compete with ordinary Parisian children? Even Asians have a history of being oppressed, but the extent to which these persecutions lead to today’s systemic problems with Asians is far less than that of Africans (imagine how police violence oppresses Africans in American society). Even if these oppressions are not the fault of our ancestors, banter like the monkey is a symbol of historical injustice and institutional oppression to African Americans.