Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (37 page)

How? Take MacDonald and Governor Jason Breck. Comparing their DNA would show no more than 0.2 percent difference between their individual genetic material. And as for the genetic makeup of the racial differences between them, that only amounts to 6 percent of that 0.2 percent. That means race accounts for about 0.012 percent of all human genetic material. And let's not forget the genetic comparison that would shock both Breck and Caesar, that ninety-nine percent of a chimpanzee's functionally important DNA is identical with that of a human. Look who's occupying the genus
Homo
now.

From a biological perspective then, racial classification tells us very little about the genetic diversity of humans. As the authors of
How Real Is Race?
explain about genetics research published the same year as the cinematic release of
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, the racial categories we've inherited based on geographical differences were not only “biologically virtually meaningless” when used for studying human genetic diversity; they also hampered efforts to further understand such variation. Racial categories are made up of recognizable markers that are only a very small part of visible biological variation in humans. And the greatest amount of human genetic variability is invisible to us as it occurs beneath the surface of human bodies. Just as Cornelius challenges the accepted, naturally occurring reality paradigm about humans as the backward, mute creatures the Almighty Ape always intended them to be, the biological reality of race is also something that shouldn't be taken as a naturally occurring, observable reality.

Not everyone agrees that racial categories have no biological basis. For example, Robin Andreasen has argued that there are breeding populations within the human race, each traceable to a distinct ancestral population, and that these breeding populations are races. One difficulty with this view, besides the fact that lots of interbreeding has gone on and still does, is that the identified breeding populations do not match recognized races. Thus, even if we defined race in this way, it would undermine, not support, our accepted racial categorizations. Moreover, defining race in this way would also undermine any expectation of shared race-wide traits, as each breeding population continued to diverge from its founding population.

Depending on which side of the twenty-first century you are on when reading that tagline from a poster for
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, you might've answered: For as long as there are sequels or prequels and reboots. But it's also suggestive of something more than a cynical answer.

What if it also means something half-human and half-ape, like a child born of interspecies sex? Would this new species pass for ape, or human, or neither? If you're a
Planet of the Apes
fan, you'll know that an ape-human hybrid character now exists in that universe full of other abandoned and unused ideas for the
Planet of the Apes
series that never made it into the finished movies. Because of the association of interspecies with interracial sex, the ape-human child was too controversial to risk losing the family film rating the studio wanted for
Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

After all, it'd been only three years before, in 1967 that the US Supreme Court had done away with anti-miscegenation laws. These were laws that made marriage illegal between whites and non-whites. That a fictitious, half-ape, half-human child would invoke fears about real interracial coupling and sexual relationships tells us something about the limits of what even the
Planet of the Apes
movies could show about US race relations. Then there are the ‘what ifs' had such a character been included. Would a child born of ape and human be ape enough to keep the ‘divine spark' that separates apes from humans? Or would the child be human enough for Governor Breck to grant it freedom from slavery?

But even without this symbolic child, the ape society of the movies reflects pretty much what anti-miscegenation laws were created to keep in place: a racial caste system. It's not so much that we don't get to see the ape version of the protection of ‘racial purity' with laws that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of children from apes and humans. What's being played out in the ape societies is a social order, where
who
gets to do
what
is based on the visible physical differences between apes. What if chimpanzees and orangutans, or gorillas and orangutans, had children? Would those “interracial” children be
enough like one of their parents to be permitted or prevented from entering the National Academy of Science? Deciding how dark or light an ape's skin or fur color has to be to pass as orangutan or chimpanzee, or determining if an ape of mixed parents is behaviorally more chimpanzee than gorilla to be an officer in the ape military, sound like more “humanizing” twists of ape society's racial politics.

But these ‘what ifs' are closer in kind to the questions about changes in ape nature and racial identity that
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
raises. After all, having brown fur and skin in one ape population could have the same ape regarded as ‘just black enough', or even as light-colored in another ape community. And even where an ape thought of herself as belonging to one caste, social enforcement of what counts as membership is a reminder that subjective or individual choices about racial identity collide with institutionalized racial categories. To ape race a bit more, apes visually test apes with parents of different ape castes to see who's more gorilla than chimpanzee. This is a good example of how the ontology of race is made up of social constructs such as laws, practices, and shared beliefs, rather than-biology. As
Battle
shows, the ontological makeup of race can and has changed for social reasons and will continue to change.

The original movie's iconic use of the Statue of Liberty brings to mind how racial categories in the US have changed. You might not think twice about Italian- and Irish-Americans today being as white as Charlton Heston, but as nineteenth-century immigrants, Irish and Italians were regarded by many Americans as not white. Likewise, someone categorized as black in the United States might be classified as brown, ‘colored', or even white in the Caribbean, South Africa, or Latin America, as Charles W. Mills has pointed out.

Philosophically, this gets us away from racial realism, which argues that racial differences reflect natural kinds of human differences, and into metaphysical thinking about race as socially constructed. For philosophers such as Charles W. Mills, Sally Haslanger, and Lucius Outlaw, race, racialism, and racial
identity are social phenomena. And arguing that such social phenomena don't exist independent of human beliefs isn't denying that race has an objective reality. The social ontology of race is very much bound up with social institutions, such as political, educational, and legal systems, as well as what has been inherited from human history. The basic social reality of such things, how they endure or get reproduced, challenged, and changed, stems from their objectivity outweighing what individuals think. Social objectivity is a shared or intersubjective construction. Mills sums up the social ontology of race, and some of what
Battle
tells us too, with three things that race isn't:

Race is not foundational: in different systems, race could have been constructed differently or indeed never have come into existence in the first place.

Race is not essentialist: the same individuals would be differently raced in different systems.

Race is not ‘metaphysical' in the deep sense of being eternal, unchanging, necessary, part of the basic furniture of the universe.

But reactions to the
Planet of the Apes
movies also show other aspects of the social ontology of race. For one thing, Hollywood is part of the social ontology of race. Mort Abrahams and Arthur P. Jacobs's cluelessness at Sammy Davis, Jr.'s challenging read of a movie where the only black guy doesn't even survive to buddy-up with the white male lead points to how Hollywood has, and mostly hasn't, contributed to the wider society's challenging of social exclusion of non-whites. In the
Journal of Personal and Social Psychology
, research into mental associations between Blacks and apes has been identified as symptomatic of American society's “broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human.”

Black comedian Paul Mooney flips white folks' long-standing racial association of apes with blacks by drawing on the social ontology of race. Mooney notes how the thin lips, straight hair and light skin of the chimpanzees and orangutans of the
Apes
movies look more like whites' interpretations of how blacks see them.

For philosophers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack, what comes out of arguing for the non-existence of race is the need to eliminate the use of racial references as labels for people because they're misleading about what is actually being referred to. Can the same argument be made for the
Planet of the Apes
films? “No More War” and “No More Arms Race” are slogans capturing the anti-war and anti-nuclear-war political messages of the first two films, but can the films also be said to say “No More Race”? Do they have something to say about what we ought to do with “race talk”? If the terms or concepts used to describe or refer to people as “Black,” “White,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian” don't refer to a natural kind or racial essence in the world, do the movies give us better terminology?

You mightn't have thought about the
Planet of the Apes
movies as having much to say about race. For one thing, it doesn't sound anything like what the films' racial politics was aiming at. The race war and annihilation of both apes and humans at the end of
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
makes it pretty clear that an end to the use of racial categories or types as a social solution in the real world is ruled out. But interrogating the movies is one way of seeing where we stand today on the social construction and implications of race.

To view the movies as racial allegory presents a problem if you're skeptical of race and racial identity in the first place. Racial skeptics like Appiah and Zack, who argue there's no reality behind the racial terms used to refer directly to racial phenomena in the world, wouldn't be so accepting of the
Planet of the Apes
films as a form of “race talk.” They'd see the movies as contributing to more of the racial concepts and terms that we ought to stop using. But for philosophers like Charles Mills, the social reality of race, both as racism and as a positive form of cultural racial identification by individuals, is very much at the heart of issues, such as social justice and social membership, that define human identities.

There's no denying that comedy and humor have given the original
Planet of the Apes
movies an afterlife. From
The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
to
Saturday Night Live
send-ups; from
The Simpsons
musical spoof to stand-up comedy, such as Dana Gould's alternate-world Americana involving the channeling of Maurice Evans's original Dr. Zaius doing Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain: (“When I was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, my comrades and I had but one goal: The destruction of the vile pestilence known as man . . . and to be a steamboatman”).

But leaving the films as “campy fun” forgets how they invoked race and racial politics when other science-fiction movies left such issues off the screen. The original
Planet of the Apes
movie with a black astronaut showed us how white the future was back in
2001: A Space Odyssey
(cue Gil Scott-Herron's “Whitey's On The Moon”), while in our year 2001, Tim Burton's remake has a simian Lincoln Memorial conjuring up past racist caricatures of Abraham Lincoln as “Abraham Africans I” and “the original orang-outang.”

Even the iconic ruins of Lady Liberty Forever remix the US history of immigration, anti-miscegenation, and racialism: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Just keep your dirty, stinking paws off our white women.” Or compare
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
with its black characters and simian replaying of black America and slavery with the question a
Village Voice
writer quoted from a young black kid taken to a screening of
Star Wars
when it was first released: “Where are all the black people?” The same could be asked of
Blade Runner
five years later.

The
Planet of the Apes
movies reflect Black America. And what better ape-philosophers of race than Caesar and Cornelius? They're Roman names, after all, from a time in human history when race as a category didn't exist.

S
HAUN
M
AY

           
A
n ape walks into a bar and orders a beer, passing the barman a $10 bill. The barman, thinking the ape wouldn't know how much change to expect, gives him $1 in return. “You know, we've never had an ape in here before”, says the barman. “I'm not surprised,” the ape replies, “At these prices you won't get any more!”

There are hundreds of jokes like this, featuring an animal that's more humanlike than the people around it expect. In
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, the central character Caesar slowly becomes humanlike—but what exactly does that mean?