> It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier, and it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist.
It might be useful to understand why it's offensive... Likening black people to apes/gorillas/monkeys is a racist trope with a long history. It's part of casting black people as less than human, which has been used to justify their enslavement and denial of human rights.
I think it's very likely the classifier was not constructed to be racist, but once you see that it is producing racist tropes, it is racist to continue to let it do so.
It might be useful to understand why it's offensive... Likening black people to apes/gorillas/monkeys is a racist trope with a long history. It's part of casting black people as less than human, which has been used to justify their enslavement and denial of human rights.
I think it's very likely the classifier was not constructed to be racist, but once you see that it is producing racist tropes, it is racist to continue to let it do so.