On Friday, August 23, a TV anchor for KOCO-TV named Alex Housden (a white woman) apologized to her co-host Jason Hackett (a black man) for saying, during a broadcast on August 22, that a gorilla at the Oklahoma City Zoo “kind of looks like [him].” The apology was much more painful to watch than the insult.
The white woman:
I said something yesterday that was inconsiderate, it was inappropriate, and I hurt people… And I want you to know, I understand how much I hurt you out there and how much I’ve hurt you. I love you so much, and you have been one of my best friends for the past year and a half. And I would never do anything on purpose to hurt you. And I love our community and I want you all to know, from the bottom of my heart, I apologize for what I said. I know it was wrong and I am so sorry.
Watching the black man accept the apology was almost painful as watching the apology.
And now for my point: What exactly is wrong with being compared to the appearance of a gorilla?
We really need to get over ourselves. If god is in our image, then He is a super-ape. He, then, would be a member of the family of great apes. Jesus was a great ape. So was Moses. And Abraham. If you are human, then you share many genes and a recent (seven or so million years) common ancestor with chimps and gorillas. Some us of should indeed look like gorillas, and also chimps, and also bonobos, and also orangutans. But what is more surprising than Hackett’s explainable gorilla-ness is Alex Housden’s inexplicable face. It looks a lot like a capuchin monkey, and we are not even closely related to that primate, which lives in South America. Humans are essentially African apes.
However, what the capuchin monkey has in common with us is a rich sociality. The gorilla is not a very social animal. No city or complex culture of sexual perversions could ever emerge from the sociality of that particular sort of ape, the social circle not extending beyond a silverback, some mothers, and the children. The capuchin, also known as the organ grinder monkey, live in large groups (20 to 35 individuals) and have, like humans, weird ways of testing their complex social bonds. It’s called “eyeball poking”: One monkey sticks a finger into the other’s eyeball.
The finger goes deep into the socket, deep between eyelid and eye. The ball is almost popped out. The monkey with the finger in its eye makes no sudden moves. The fingernail in its socket is long and filthy. One wrong move and the fingernail could cut the eye and cause blindness or an infection that could kill it. The capuchin is frozen as the finger of its close friend goes deeper and deeper.
This may sound weird to you, but human romantic kissing—the business of opening and lip-locking slimy mouths—will look equally as bizarre to a capuchin. But this kind of kissing is, like eyeball poking, a bonding ritual. It says: I trust you, I believe in you, I open myself to you. (Admittedly, I could not stop looking at Alex Housden’s long fingers as she apologized to her co-host Jason Hackett; I wanted her to poke the black man in the eye.)
Anyway, I wrote all about this smooching and poking business some years ago, and you can read the whole thing here: “Why We Kiss.” The feature was inspired by a brief essay by the Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi, “The Testing of a Bond.”
