By Lee A. Daniels

What twisted emotion would compel New York Post cartoonist – to use a respectable word – Sean Delonas to connect the horrible tragedy of an enraged chimpanzee attacking a woman in Connecticut and then being shot dead by local police to President Obama’s sponsorship of the Stimulus Bill?

We know what that emotion is, and some of us are not afraid to say so.

Spare me both the cynical and the self-delusional arguments about first-amendment principles, or freedom of the press. Likewise the assertions that Delonas was not using the monkey to refer to Obama.

What is most noteworthy about the tawdry drawing and the equally tawdry publication which has promoted it is what it reveals about Delonas and his institutional enablers. Delonas’ attempt to depict Obama as a primitive only serves to underscore his own compulsive attachment to the most primitive concepts of the white racist canon. From the first encounters of black Africans and white Europeans, some whites have sought to define blacks as sub-human so that they themselves could act in barbaric fashion. This was the inhuman gambit that produced and maintained Negro Slavery in the United States and the brutal apartheid that infected the nation for most of the following century. Delonas’ cartoon is in fact a self-portrait that shows him nosing about in the mire of civilization’s sewer.

But the even more interesting emotion that suffuses Delonas’ work is fear: the fear of black-American striving and success, and the resentment toward a black American using superior intellect and shrewdness and drive to achieve a prominent place in the society.

Lee Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.