Since when is monkey a racial slur?

It's cool, I'm bringing it back.

Since black people.

Always. 

I can see why someone would take it as a racial slur, its used as a racial slur by airheads around here.

Anything can be taken as racist I guess, it just depends on where youre from and the idiots your surrounded by.

Since Darwin's theory of evolution.

Since forever. The first thing that comes to mind is that song from Office Space.

Since slave owners justified themselves by claiming Africans were subhuman apes. Yeah, somewhere around then.

It's pretty much always been racist man.

I think it would only be racist if aimed at a black person and meant as a slur. People overreact about racism all the time.

I think it's time for

Monkey does in fact have a history of being a racial term. And not just in American but world-wide. The best example was the World Cup in Germany where racist fans threw bananas at one of the black soccer players from some other team. While I personally would not have thought you were being racist given the way you described it, I can also see anyone taking part in online gaming to assume that any mention of a term that has a racial history is coming from a racist.

You haven't heard the Phrase "Porch Monkey?" My favorite racial slur is Jigaboo because what the fuck does that even mean or stand for? 

"So I was playing a game of Halo: Reach "

" Monkey does in fact have a history of being a racial term. And not just in American but world-wide. The best example was the World Cup in Germany where racist fans threw bananas at one of the black soccer players from some other team. While I personally would not have thought you were being racist given the way you described it, I can also see anyone taking part in online gaming to assume that any mention of a term that has a racial history is coming from a racist. "

" @Belonpopo said:

"So I was playing a game of Halo: Reach "

I cracked the code. "

I was just having a conversion with someone over the weekend about Randall "bringing it back" in Clerks II. Love that movie!

I think monkey is a racial slur but only when specifically used against black people. If you use it against someone else - or someone you don't know is black - it's like saying "you're an idiot".

EDIT:Apparently it's my 1,111th post. Woohoo.

Monkey has always been a racial slur, especially here in the deep South.

At least since the early 80s. Howard Cosell got kicked off Monday Night Football after calling an athlete a monkey. There are plenty of terms that people find racist for one reason or another. For instance, I used to live next to a place called Spook Hill, so named because horses would get scared around there. Apparently, it can also be a derogatory term as well. After quite a bit of controversy, they not only stopped calling it Spook Hill, but actually removed the entire hill. It is now a flat piece of ground.

MONKEYS ARE PEOPLE TOO DAMN IT!

" I think it's time for

  

  

"

"

   "...reach over and plug their mics to attempt in intimate me."

"

All of you, racist.

"

    I believe the true racist are the people that accuse others of being one.

"

It's not a racial slur if you don't mean it that way. Context, people!

" Since black people. "

This thread is going to get cringe worthy pretty quick.

Recent developments in  the anthropological understanding both of  emotional life  (reviewed in 293)  and of  the relationship between language and sociocultural context (see 33,  67,  101,  52, 185, 231,  338,  372 for pertinent reviews) have caused many of the assumptions underlying structure-oriented linguistic  positions  on  affect  to  be  seen  as  problematic. Linguistic  anthropologists have demonstrated that the relationship between linguistic signs and reality is not a one-way mapping but rather a complex constitutive linkage (65, 70,  178, 207, 208, 222, 223, 232, 233). Ethnographic work on emotions has shown that the opposition between cognition and emotion is  a Western construct (5,  109,  243,  282,  287,  289,  290),  thereby casting doubt on  the validity of a referential-affective dichotomy. Similarly, attributing the ownership of meaning to the individual has proved considerably less useful in the analysis of the anthropological material than a "dialogic" position (207,  216) in which meaning is constructed in interactional processes"

" it opened a new vista on the notion of "lexical meaning," which has since been investigated by
concentrating on narrower problems. The area of the lexicon in which affect is the most salient comprises emotion words (cf  293  for a review), but many other lexical fields have clear affective dimensions of meaning. A rich domain for the investigation of  affect in  the lexicon would include descriptors for groups and individuals and the various strategies that can be used in addressing or referring to participants in communicative events. For example, van Dijk (435)  shows  that Dutch speakers' descriptive and not necessarily derogatory terms for immigrants are carriers and reinforcers of ethnic prejudice "

" @Belonpopo said:

"

    I believe the true racist are the people that accuse others of being one.

"

Wait what? So are you just pretending that racism isn't real and active or something?
Also perhaps George Allen would like to talk to you about monkey as a racial slur. "

Then the production company behind Robot Chicken is racist? Yikes.

To keep it video game related, there's a scene in Killer7 where a bunch of U.S. and Japanese diplomats are insulting each other over a game of Mahjong. The U.S. guys call the Japanese guys monkeys and the Japanese guys call the U.S. guys dogs. Of course, this game has a thing with symbolism (it's also completely crazy) but that's what I immediately thought of when I saw this topic.

I haven't heard monkey used as a racial slur, but I guess it doesn't surprise me. Judging from the majority of experience I've had online with random people, I would have figured they would immediately go for the more popular slurs. You know the ones. If someone started calling other people monkeys I wouldn't have made the connection until now.

" @beej said:

" @Belonpopo said:

"

    I believe the true racist are the people that accuse others of being one.

"

Wait what? So are you just pretending that racism isn't real and active or something?
Also perhaps George Allen would like to talk to you about monkey as a racial slur. "

I believe that true murderers are the people that accuse others of being murderers. "

I know it can be used as a racial slur for people of African decent. I've only ever seen it used in older movies.

Hey, at least they aren't a camel jockey (before someone gets hellbent...i'm Arab, so chill...I do not mean it in a racial way).

Since Darwin.

My dad is in his 70's. When he entered Basic for his tour of duty in the Army, his roomate, who had never met a black person before, asked to see his tail. When my dad informed him of how ridiculous an idea that way, the guy exlained that his father had always told him that black people were monkeys and that they had tails.

Pretty much everything is used by racists to degrade people they don't like. There's not a whole lot of defense in "I haven't heard of it, so it's stupid that someone would get offended by it!"

I truly feel sorry for your family. How can humanity progress if we can't look beyond the color of one's skin? 

In this kid's defense, he more than likely lives in a fairly white suburban neighborhood and rarely sees minorities.  It's fairly common with the kids in the suburbs now days who rarely go to the city.

I'm from Texas and I've never heard monkey used as a racial slur. I'm serious, this is really weird reading that everyone seems to know that it's used as a slur while I completely clueless. How is this possible?