New York Post has gotta apologize over offensive chimpanzee cartoon

The New york post Wednesday called President Obama a chimpanzee.
That is sure how it seemed to many people who saw it.
And in Black History Month, no less. The stunningly offensive drawing springs from the chimp rampage in Connecticut that ended with police shooting the crazed creature dead.
The artist, Sean Delonas, depicts two cops standing over the chimp's bullet-riddled body, one with a smoking pistol.
"They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," the other cop says.
As any member of the species Homo sapiens knows, Obama championed the stimulus package. He may even be betting his presidency on it.
A photo of the President signing the stimulus bill appeared in Wednesday's Post, one page before the cartoon.
Readers who turned the page went right from Obama photo to the chimp drawing.
Really.
The cartoon's conscious intent may have been to say the stimulus bill as written by Congress is such a mess it could have been penned by a monkey.
But say "stimulus" to readers and they rightly think "Obama."
He is as much a personification of the package as FDR was of the New Deal. The Post's story even noted that no congressional leaders attended the bill-signing. It was all Obama.
Delonas, and whatever editor or editors saw the cartoon before it went in the paper, cannot be completely unaware of the long and repulsive history of white racists calling African-Americans "apes" and "monkeys" and, yes, "chimpanzees."
Any association between the chimp figure and Obama is made all the more offensive by the bullet holes. The big unspoken fear many of us share is that Obama's triumph over racism will end in violence. On first seeing the cartoon, I had the same reaction as the Rev. Al Sharpton, with whom I often disagree. He saw it at 5:30 a.m. on his way to the gym.
"I'm like, 'Maybe I'm missing something,'" he recalled. "I called 10 people and said, 'Tell me there's something I'm missing.'"
Many others besides Al and I had difficulty believing what they saw. More than a few considered it proof that racism was not vanquished as we hoped after Obama's election.
"Maybe that's why you have Al Sharpton," Al Sharpton said.
Ongoing studies by a prominent psychologist at Stanford University suggest that the racist association of African-Americans with apes is so ingrained in our history and culture that it persists subconsciously even in college kids born after the civil rights movement.
The study's results were summarized in the 2008 paper "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences."
"It was surprising to us how strong it was," the co-author, Stanford Associate Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt, said Wednesday of the persistent link. "It did give me cause for pause."
She did not need to see the Post to know the dehumanizing association is wired into many psyches.
"It's still with us," she said, "despite the election of the first black President."
We also have the first black attorney general, Eric Holder. He made a speech to Justice Department employees Wednesday marking Black History Month. He said we remain "essentially a nation of cowards," afraid to speak to each other about race.
"If we're going to ever make progress, we're going to have to have the guts, we have to have the determination, to be honest with each other," he added afterward. "It also means we have to be able to accept criticism where that is justified."
Holder was not speaking of the Post, but he might as well have been. Sharpton was and he was planning a demonstration. The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives was calling for advertisers to yank their ads. Readers were speaking of a boycott.
What the Post needs to do is apologize.