U.S. Rep. Al Green was booted from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night after waving a sign reading, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” as the president made his entrance down the aisle.

The Houston Democrat stood near the front of the chamber holding the sign above his head as Trump greeted lawmakers and shook hands. Gasps and boos quickly spread across the room as members on both sides reacted to the sudden disruption.

Fellow Texan Troy Nehls appeared to exchange heated words with Green before throwing his hands up and returning to his seat. Within moments, the sergeant-at-arms moved in.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I had to laugh at watching little Mikey Johnson pretending to be wringing his hands over Democrats boycotting the SOTU (oh, the CIVILITY!), and he just cannot fucking help himself because he knows who he is doing this little performance for, and it’s not normal Americans:

    He says:

    We’ve never done that. It doesn’t matter if there’s a Democrat (sic) president, you go and respect the office, you respect the decorum, the institution, the tradition of having had this speech made.

    These little weasels simply refuse to get the name of the party right. They do it all the time, and the Murc’s Law media never calls them on it. They quote little Mikey and don’t even put the sic in there as they should.

    So the guy is pretending to be claiming that the SOTU is all about coming together, let’s have some civility here, etc., and even in the process of doing that, he does the little Republicunt insult that all of them do, constantly.

    Civility. He can kiss my red rosy.

  • negativenull@piefed.world
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    20 hours ago

    Look at this picture:

    Caption:

    Nicole Malliotakis laughing and pointing towards the exit and she jeers a somber Al Green

    It’s like those civil rights pictures of people yelling at black people sitting in a cafe.

  • Asafum@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Gasps and boos quickly spread across the room as members on both sides reacted to the sudden disruption.

    … holding a sign is a “sudden disruption?” Ffs…

    Remind me, were MTG or Bobert booted from the SOTU when they literally yelled at Biden?

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      6 hours ago

      Republicans are more scandalized that someone called the president out for doing something incredibly racist than they are that the president did something incredibly racist.

      Also, they have no room to talk about decorum…

    • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      This feels like a “read the room” kind of comment.

      All humans are biologically considered animals, and there are many times when I feel that viewing human behavior through that lens genuinely encourages compassion and understanding, and yet: there is a long history of people being called “animals” as a dehumanizing measure in order to justify doing the same horrible things to them that humans routinely do to non-human animals. This is particularly true for historically marginalized groups.

      Likewise, there is a long, racist history of white people calling Black people “apes” or “monkeys” to justify racist systems and treat Black people the way they view monkeys and non-human apes, as resembling humans but not fully human.

      This representative is specifically responding to a video shared by Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior, in which the Obamas were depicted as distinctly non-human apes (I cannot recall the specific ape and cannot readily look it up. Gorillas, I think?), echoing that racist trope.

      When someone responds to Trump trafficking in racist tropes with “Black people aren’t apes,” they are not getting into the nitty gritty of taxonomical clades, they’re countering that trope. “Well, actually”-ing about humans technically being apes is undercutting the focus on countering Trump’s racism. Time and place.

      • moody@lemmings.world
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        7 hours ago

        It wasn’t meant as a serious statement, more so like another commenter put it, we’re not not apes.

        I know what he meant, and it’s why I specifically mentioned that it’s not a question of race.

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOP
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      16 hours ago

      Yes. Unfortunately, racists deny that little technicality and think they’re the superior other. So their usage of “apes” is offensive in this context.

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      Came here to say this. I get what he’s trying to say, but we are all definitely apes. And that’s pretty cool - apes are awesome.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae:

      The Hominidae (/hɒˈmɪnɪdiː/; hominids /ˈhɒmɪnɪdz/), whose members are known as the great apes,[note 1] are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans (Homo sapiens) remain.[1]

    • MutantTailThing@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Ackschually, that’s a common misconception. Humans and apes merely share a common ancestor

      Edit: sure is reddit in here