From Minstrel Shows to Memes, America Is Still Drawing Black People the Same Way

By Stacy M. Brown

Senior Global Correspondent

In January 1993, Thurgood Marshall was dead, and Howard Stern found something to laugh about.

Marshall had spent his life forcing America to look at itself. He had argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, helped tear the legal foundation from beneath school segregation, and eventually took his seat on that same court as its first Black justice. He had walked into courtrooms carrying the proposition that Black people were not abstractions, problems, stereotypes, or property, but citizens to whom the Constitution owed its full promise.

Then Marshall died.

And on Stern’s radio show, the great jurist became material.

Stern and his staff aired a mocking routine about Marshall that critics regarded as racially offensive, part of the shock-jock machinery that made transgression profitable in American broadcasting.

There is something almost too perfect about the collision.

Marshall spent a lifetime demanding that America recognize the humanity of Black people. Popular culture needed only a microphone to reduce him again.

That is the old American argument.

It has been conducted with laws and lynch ropes, advertisements and cartoons, movie screens and television cameras. It has traveled from blackface stages to postcards, from lawn ornaments to political cartoons, and from radio studios to social media feeds.

The technology changes.

The joke survives.

And in 2026, the country is still arguing about whether it is merely a joke.

The history is older than Stern, older than television and older than the republic’s willingness to admit what its own images were designed to accomplish.

For generations, Black Americans were drawn, painted, performed, and sold as creatures rather than complicated human beings. The grinning servant. The mammy. The pickaninny. The brute. The hypersexual woman. The lazy fool. The ape.

These were not simply ugly pictures produced by ignorant people.

They were explanations.

If Black people could be made childish, slavery could masquerade as guardianship. If Black men could be made savage, terror could call itself protection. If Black women could be made sexually available, exploitation could be blamed on its victims. If Black people could be placed somewhere closer to animals than human beings, cruelty required less explanation.

The stereotype did not merely insult the person it depicted. It instructed everybody else how to see that person.

And once America had learned the lesson, the picture no longer needed a frame.

It could become instinct.

That is why the long history of anti-Black caricature matters when a president presses “share.”

In February, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account reposted a video that included an animated depiction of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama with the bodies of apes. The post was deleted after condemnation, including criticism from Republicans, and the White House later attributed its publication to a staff error.

But an image does not become historically innocent because somebody says the wrong person pushed the button.

Black people have been compared to apes for generations. The trope survives because its purpose has always been brutally simple. It pushes Black people outside the circle of people whose dignity must be respected.

The remarkable thing was not that Americans recognized the image.

The remarkable thing was how quickly they did.

No translation was necessary.

America already knew the language.

That is what makes racist imagery so durable. The picture may disappear from the screen, but the assumptions that made the picture intelligible can remain.

They can determine who appears dangerous before speaking. Who appears intelligent before answering a question. Who belongs in a neighborhood. Who deserves sympathy. Whose anger is threatening. Whose pain is credible. Who gets admitted through one hospital door instead of another.

A 2026 Johns Hopkins study offers a chilling example of how far the distance can be between equality on paper and equality in life.

Researchers examining Medicare claims from more than 2,000 hospitals found Black patients were disproportionately admitted to lower-quality hospitals even when they lived closer to higher-rated facilities. The researchers said residential segregation alone could not explain the difference and pointed to possible structural factors, including referral networks, intake practices, implicit bias, and institutional history.

“What we are seeing is segregation within the health care system itself, a sorting of patients of different races, in seen and unseen ways, even within the same neighborhood,” researcher Ellesse-Roselee Akré said.

Seen and unseen.

Those may be the most important words in this entire American story.

Because racism has never depended solely upon a racist announcing himself.

Occasionally it wears greasepaint.

Occasionally it wears a white hood.

Occasionally it wears a suit.

And sometimes nobody can point to the precise hand that moved a Black patient toward the lesser hospital.

The Johns Hopkins researchers found that a 10-percentage-point increase in their measure of local hospital segregation corresponded with a 79% greater likelihood that Black Medicare patients would be admitted to a one- or two-star hospital. Those facilities performed worse on measures including safety, timeliness, patient experience, efficiency, and readmissions.

The cartoon has become a pathway.

The caricature has become an assumption.

The assumption has become a system.

America has wrestled with the politics of the Black image so long that even its beauty contests tell the story.

In September 1968, the Miss America pageant was still one of the country’s great televised rituals, watched by tens of millions and selling an image of ideal American womanhood. On the Atlantic City Boardwalk, women’s liberation activists protested the pageant and its objectification of women.

History remembers them as bra burners.

They did not burn bras.

Historian Micki McElya argues that the image was largely manufactured by newspapers before the demonstration, creating a caricature of the women’s movement before it could define itself.

But something else happened in Atlantic City that day, something that American memory proved much less capable of retaining.

Two blocks away, Black women held the first Miss Black America pageant.

The feminist protesters challenged the proposition that women needed to be judged beautiful.

The Black contestants confronted an entirely different proposition.

They lived in a country that had spent centuries insisting Black women were not beautiful at all.

McElya describes the confrontation as a struggle over beauty itself as a form of political power. In a white supremacist society, the Miss Black America organizers argued, simply having Black women publicly recognized as beautiful could itself be an act of resistance.

That difference matters.

America had made white femininity an ideal and Black femininity an exception, a fetish, a joke, or an absence.

Black women understood that liberation required acknowledging the wounds caused by exclusion from beauty.

And standing somewhere in the long historical shadow of that Atlantic City Boardwalk is Donald Trump.

Trump became deeply associated with Atlantic City in the 1980s through his casinos, attended Miss America pageants, became a pageant judge, and later owned the organization that included Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.

The boardwalk therefore offers an almost uncanny American timeline.

Women once marched there demanding freedom from the beauty ideal.

Black women gathered nearby, demanding admission into a definition of beauty that had excluded them.

Trump entered the world of pageants and spectacle there.

Decades later, he entered the White House.

And eventually his social media account circulated an image placing the nation’s first Black president and first lady onto the bodies of apes.

It would be comforting to describe all of this as a contradiction.

History suggests continuity may be the more troubling word.

The United States has changed enormously since Marshall argued before the Supreme Court. A Black man has been president. Black women have served on the Supreme Court and in the vice presidency. Black Americans lead universities, corporations, cities, newsrooms, and cultural institutions that once barred them from the door.

Yet representation and power have never been the same thing.

Human Rights Watch, in its 2026 assessment of the United States, said the Trump administration eliminated federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and weakened initiatives and institutions created to combat racial discrimination. The organization also pointed to continuing racial disparities in the criminal legal system, where Black people and Latinos remain disproportionately represented in prison populations.

This is where the discussion becomes more difficult than deciding whether an image is offensive.

Offense is personal.

Power is structural.

The real question is not whether a Black person feels insulted when Barack and Michelle Obama are depicted as apes.

The question is what happens to a society that repeatedly practices seeing Black people as less worthy, less innocent, less intelligent, less beautiful, less believable, or less fully human.

Because eventually somebody has to decide whom to stop.

Somebody decides whom to hire.

Somebody decides whom to fear.

Somebody decides which neighborhood deserves investment.

Somebody decides whose ballot requires another layer of scrutiny.

Somebody decides which patient gets sent to which hospital.

And almost none of those decisions come with a racist cartoon attached.

Perhaps that is why America so often prefers to argue about the picture.

Pictures can be deleted.

Posts can be removed.

Radio broadcasts end.

Apologies can be issued.

The harder work begins after the screen goes dark.

Howard Stern could turn Thurgood Marshall into entertainment in 1993 because America already possessed a vocabulary for diminishing Black greatness.

Trump did not invent the imagery that appeared on his social media account.

Neither did the cartoonists, advertisers, minstrel performers, and manufacturers who came before him.

Each inherited something.

Each passed something along.

And Black America has spent centuries answering.

Thurgood Marshall answered in court.

Black women answered on an Atlantic City stage.

Civil rights marchers answered with their feet.

Writers answered with their pens.

Voters answered at ballot boxes.

Parents answered every time they taught a Black child that the distorted image America handed them was not a mirror.

That may be the most enduring struggle beneath all the others.

A nation creates images of people before it creates policies for them. It tells itself who is beautiful and who is ugly, who is civilized and who is dangerous, who is deserving and who is disposable. Eventually those stories leave the theater, the radio studio, the television screen, and the social media feed.

They acquire addresses.

They acquire budgets.

They acquire badges.

They acquire hospital beds.

They acquire laws.

And that is why the distance between Howard Stern’s microphone and a Black Medicare patient being steered toward a lower-rated hospital may not be as great as it first appears.

One is a representation.

The other is a consequence.

America has become very skilled at condemning the representation.

The unfinished question, after all these years, is whether it is finally prepared to confront the consequences.