The progressive newspaper De Morgen was accused of racism for the image along with an article it published just prior to Obama's visit to the Netherlands on Monday morning.
The image clearly depicts the couple as two apes-- an editorial decision that has been slammed as "stale racist drivel."
so photo of the Obama's as chimps in De Morgen of today is the paper's attempt at satire. I forgot to laugh #racist pic.twitter.com/jc7cW7cbgD
— chika unigwe (@chikaunigwe) March 22, 2014Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe tweeted a photo of the spread, shown above.
From The Huffington Post:
The article was reportedly a satirical piece that also joked about Obama selling marijuana. The newspaper packaged the photos as if they had been submitted by Russian president Vladimir Putin, Metro said Sunday.
The picture was joined by a message reading, “Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia. He sent us this attachment at our request, and chose to send pictures instead of text 'because he doesn't have a lot of time',” the Independent said.
While the article has many readers outraged, there are also readers who have come to the newspapers defense. "It was a joke," one Reddit user said.
"In their defense, there are tons upon tons of pictures and t-shirts with Bush drawn as an ape," another user wrote.
De Morgen apologized for the image in its Monday edition, admitting it was guilty of "bad taste."
"When you consider the fragment apart from its context, which is a properly worked out satirical section, then you don't see the joke but just a picture evoking sheer racism," the newspaper said. "We wrongly assumed that racism is no longer accepted, and that in this way it could be the subject of a joke."
Unigwe, who lives in Belgium, went on to tweet in depth about the controversial spread, noting that the fault lies with Belgian society moreso than De Morgen:
Black people in Belgum have no political voice, no economic voice, so in a way society forgets that we exist #Belgium
— chika unigwe (@chikaunigwe) March 24, 2014
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