On Facebook, Gloria Purvis writes:

Racist caricatures have always circulated in American life. What makes this a crisis is that it came from the presidency—the office that symbolically represents the entire nation. When a private citizen posts a racist meme, it reveals individual sin. When the President does it, it functions as a signal from the state itself about who belongs and who doesn’t. The office carries a teaching authority analogous to what Catholics understand about the magisterium—it shapes the moral imagination of the nation whether it intends to or not.

This was not directed at an abstraction. It was directed at the first Black President and First Lady—the living embodiment of the possibility that the American promise might actually extend to everyone. To dehumanize them specifically is to send a message not just about two individuals but about every Black American’s claim to full citizenship and dignity. It retroactively attacks the democratic achievement their election represented.

What is required is not a clarification, not a walkback through a spokesperson, not a deflection to an unnamed staffer—but a direct, personal, public apology from the President to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, accompanied by an unequivocal affirmation that the Obamas are distinguished Americans who have served this nation with honor and whose dignity is beyond question. The harm was public, so the repair must be public. The harm was personal, so the repair must be personal. The refusal to apologize is not a failure of manners—it is a continuation of the original act. Every day that passes without an apology is another day the President tells the nation that what happened is acceptable.

Black History Month exists precisely to honor and promote the dignity, contribution, and greatness of Black Americans. It exists as a matter of justice—repair the harm inflicted upon the American people by centuries of deliberate anti-Black racist lies. Lies that deform the conscience and destabilize the nation. To post this image during Black History Month is either breathtaking ignorance or deliberate provocation. Either possibility constitutes a crisis—one of competence, the other of malice.

What does the ape caricature make possible next? History teaches us—with terrible specificity—where the normalization of dehumanization leads. The moral emergency is not only about what has happened but about what is being made possible.