Black Tulane professor and MSNBC host called a ‘dirty ape’

12th May 2014   ·   0 Comments

Social media and talk shows across the U.S. were abuzz with outrage and disgust after a GOP candidate in New York posted a tweet in which he referred to Black MSNBC host and Tulane Univer­sity professor Melissa Harris-Perry as a “damned dirty ape.”

Jim Coughlan, the controller of Duchess County, NY and a GOP state Senate candidate, finds himself under fire after posting a tweet about Melissa Harris-Perry that read, “Keep your dirty stinking paws off my kid you damned dirty ape!”

Coughlin made the comment in response to comments made about children not being the private property of their parents or extensions of the people who gave birth to them. Harris-Perry, a working mother and the wife of Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center director James Perry, said children belong to the community.

The statement by Harris-Perry in an ad she created sparked anger among some conservatives who said they believe she was saying that children belong to the government.

While Coughlin made it clear that he strongly disagrees with Melissa Harris-Perry on the issue of how children should be raised and viewed by adults and communities, he also told New York Daily News that he had not seen an image of the MSNBC host and Tulane professor and did not know that she was Black.

Coughlin’s offensive remarks led to sharp criticism from elected officials on both sides of the political aisle.

“As an African-American wo­man, I find this very insulting and appalling,” Democratic Dutchess County legislator Gwen Johnson told the New York Daily News.

Johnson said she is not buying Coughlin’s claim that he did not know Harris-Perry was Black.

“You should know what you’re tweeting about and who you’re tweeting about,” Johnson said.

One Republican elected official spoke on the condition of anony­mity about Coughlin’s track record and how many in GOP circles feel his actions and words could prevent them from regaining a Senate seat they long-held up until two years ago.

“Jim Coughlin is toxic,” the unidentified Republican said. “The Democrats are dying to run against him in November because they know he’s the best chance they have of keeping this seat in Democratic hands.”

In addition to teaching political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she is the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South, Harris-Perry is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. Prior to taking her current post with Tulane, she taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

Melissa Harris-Perry created an add promoting a different strategy for raising and educating children that involved a collective effort on the part of adults and communities to make sure that all children have the things they need to succeed in school and beyond. In it, she argues that the well-being of children is the responsibility of everyone, not just individual children’s biological parents.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility,’” Harris-Perry says in the ad.

She acknowledged in the ad that her proposal remains controversial among conservatives.

“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities,” she said.

Coughlin’s entire tweet to Harris-Perry reads, “Unless you’re my wife don’t call them ‘our’ children. Keep your stinking paws off my kid, you damned dirty ape.”
While Coughlin has suspended his Twitter account after the storm of criticism about his controversial tweets, he remains defiant and unapologetic. Coughlin, who has been described as ultraconservative by some, balked at the attacks lodged at him, calling them, “A new low by the Albany insiders who are scared of my candidacy because they know I’m not going to be a patsy in the Senate. It’s despicable! They’re trying to get me to drop out.”

This article originally published in the May 12, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.