It has long been opined that King Kong is a movie franchise full of racist metaphors, that it portrays blacks as uncivilized subhumans, especially in the 1933 original where the black natives of Skull Island are almost cartoonishly monkey-like in their portrayal. The 2005 remake by Peter Jackson portrays them much better in a terrifying scene of primal, ecstatic Dionysian fear where the white woman is offered up for sacrifice. In both versions, though, there is the huge black ape, King Kong, who is allegedly either expressive of white people's fears of the proverbial "scary black man" or as a sexual metaphor intended to scare white land owners into thinking their big, muscular black farm hands are after their pristine white daughters.

Despite Obama's noble efforts to elevate his candidacy above race, it inevitably has raised it's ugly, hairy head during the campaign in the sickening form of comparing blacks to a lesser evolved, subhuman species. Many people have said that Barack Obama looks like a monkey because he is black and has big ears. In June 2008 a white couple in Utah was criticized for making and selling Barack Obama dolls made in the likeness of the popular fictional monkey, Curious George. Controversy also ensued in April 2008 when Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, a Latino woman in Carpentersville, Illinois-- who was also actually a Barack Obama delegate-- was forced to resign from her position after shouting out to a group of black neighbor children next door who were playing in a tree, "Hey! Get down from that tree and quit acting like a bunch of monkeys!"

Since Ramirez-Slawinski was a Latino it got me thinking of the regretful fact that Blacks and Latinos are often said to not get along. And I recalled the hideous "monkey-head transplants" of Dr. Robert White in the 70's. I remembered ghastly images from the footage I'd seen of one of those poor monkeys getting his head cut off by Dr. White and placed upon another decapitated monkey's body, only to die soon after as bodily rejection set in. I then began to have horrible dreams that haunted me for days in which I saw Reverend Wright in his church with vials of "Hot Sauce of Hope", injecting it into gorillas and Latinos in hopes of doing head transplants between the two in an effort to turn this hate into love, conflating the ideas of King Kong, monkey head transplants and the incident with Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski in my mind until I awoke one night in a pool of sweat and screamed "Enough already! All of this hate and racism must stop!" As Barack says, it is time to turn the page on the old racist and xenophobic ideas of divisiveness; and as a symbol of this hope and unity, at the bottom of this painting, you see Barack and his lovely wife, Michelle Obama, getting married and smiling as they both rise above it all. It is time to move beyond all this monkey business and get beyond race!

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