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West Virginia mayor resigns after racist Michelle Obama post

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The mayor of a tiny town in West Virginia has resigned and the director of a local government-funded nonprofit has lost her job over racist comments about Michelle Obama.

After Donald Trump’s election as president, Pamela Ramsey Taylor, director of the Clay County Development Corp., took to Facebook to comment on the upcoming shift from Obama to Melania Trump, reportedly writing: “It will be so refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady back in the White House.”

She added: “I’m tired of seeing a Ape in heels.”

NBC affiliate WSAZ reported that Clay Mayor Beverly Whaling then replied, “Just made my day Pam.”

The comments were later deleted – and both women’s Facebook pages were eventually removed, according to reports – but images of Taylor’s post and the mayor’s response have been shared widely on social media.

As of Tuesday morning, an online petition calling for the women’s terminations had garnered more than 100,000 signatures.

But by then, Taylor had lost her job: A representative of Clay County Development Corp., a nonprofit funded with state and federal money, said Monday that the board “removed” Taylor from her position as director and appointed Leslie McGlothlin to take her place. McGlothlin did not respond to a request for comment.

Whaling, the mayor of the small town outside of Charleston, apologized in a statement sent to The Washington Post.

“My comment was not intended to be racist at all,” she wrote. “I was referring to my day being made for change in the White House! I am truly sorry for any hard feeling this may have caused! Those who know me know that I’m not of any way racist!

“Again, I would like to apologize for this getting out of hand!”

Clay Town Councilman Jason Hubbard told the Charleston Gazette-Mail that town officials will address the incident at a previously scheduled council meeting Tuesday night.

Taylor could not be reached for comment, but WSAZ reported that she had issued an apology.

Taylor also told the news station that the public response had become a “hate crime against me,” explaining that she and her children had received death threats. She said she is planning to file a lawsuit against people who have slandered or libeled her, according to the news station.

The news station reported that Taylor said she understood why her post may have been interpreted as racist, but that was not her intention. She said she was referring to her own opinion about the first lady’s attractiveness, not about the color of her skin, according to the news station.

But there is a long and ugly history of comparing black people to primates.

“In the 19th century and well into the 20th, popular media from movies to fiction to political cartoons frequently portrayed blacks as more simian than human,” social psychologists Phillip Atiba Goff and Jennifer Eberhardt wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “It was an association that provided cover for slavery itself, as well as anti-black violence. Lynchings in the United States were often justified by relying on this dehumanizing association, and it surfaced in the Rodney King controversy in Los Angeles: LAPD Officer Laurence Powell had referred to a black couple as ‘something right out of “Gorillas in the Mist” ‘ moments before he was involved in the King beating.

“Like nooses, the ‘N-word’ and white sheets, referring to blacks as apelike is among the most violent and hurtful legacies of our nation’s difficult racial past.”

Racist primate memes have surfaced repeatedly around the Obamas. Several years ago, the Awl catalogued them in a piece called “Primate in Chief: A Guide to Racist Obama Monkey Photoshops.”

Two-tenths of 1 percent of Clay County’s residents are African American, according to census data. More than three-quarters of the presidential votes cast in the county went to Trump.