According to a report released last month, many Americans who consider themselves unprejudiced still subconsciously link blacks with apes. We nearly spit our banana all over our monitor at the news!

"Historical racist images and books dehumanizing African Americans in the 19th and early 20th century relied heavily on the Negro-ape metaphor, which was used to stereotype Blacks as lazy, dim and aggressive," said lead author Phillip Atiba Goff, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State. "Such dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"The images have disappeared from popular culture and from most people's memory," he added. "However, after completing six studies, we found strong evidence that Black-ape linkages still influence people subconsciously and impact their judgment particularly in the case of African American suspects and defendants."

In one study, researchers "primed" their test subjects by showing them subliminal images on a screen of either black or white male faces. They then showed them pictures of blurred apes. Their findings were that the subjects could identify blurry drawings of apes much faster after being primed with black faces than with white faces.

Another study looked into the language used in hundreds of Philadelphia Inquirer articles from 1979 to 1999 about people convicted of capital crimes. Black defendants were about four times more likely to be described with terms deemed "ape-relevant," like "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild."

Researchers say that as recently as last decade California state police would refer to cases involving black men as NHIs: No Humans Involved.