Never understood why the whole “mpox” word is really that offensive. It was NEVER calling Africans monkeys, the disease name started with non-human primates such as Chimpanzees and Gorillas, most other primates are surprisingly empathic and intelligent beings, and finally? While I am definitely not going to call anyone else a monkey, I am a human being; humans of all skin colors, even white, and all origins, as in the entire Homo genus (even our extinct relatives), are great apes. All great apes are old world monkeys, and all old world monkeys AND all new world monkeys (as in, the species that evolved in the Americas, not the human Mesoamerican cultures who are of course human but came to the Americas from elsewhere some time after humans evolved in Africa) are - in scientific classification of taxonomy - monkeys.
I won’t deny it would be insulting to refer to someone with dark skin a monkey. I just feel denying our one universal shared trait when mentioning a disease that most primates can get is anything but respectful to ourselves as a species and to many species who we should not be thinking of as brutish or stupid, such as Gorillas or Bonobos. Monkeypox/“mpox” does not make you less human, to imply calling it monkeypox is insulting purely due to political correctness is like saying we shouldn’t take vaccines because the word “vaccine” comes from cowpox and that “cow” is offensive to female bovines because human women don’t like the term. Calling a woman a cow is insulting AND inaccurate, and calling someone a monkey a loaded word, but calling a human a victim of monkeypox is not the same as saying getting monkeypox makes you less human. The former is someone to care about, the latter is insulting AND inaccurate. Being a victim of monkeypox, if anything, should prove a person’s humanity.
Besides, while it’s a disease and has painful and awful symptoms, it can be treated. To say “monkeypox” is an insulting word is missing the point; it’s “pox”, a skin lesion caused by a more internal infection. Cowpox does the same to cows. As for the really scary one, smallpox? “Monkeys”, US, huamity, have nearly eradicated it. Nothing capable of perceiving a way to kill a viral disease is anything short of a species worthy of note, and no matter what, you cannot tell me that there haven’t been African or African-descendant persons who contributed to eliminating smallpox. They saved people with a medical procedure that neither Europeans nor Native Americans knew of: https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
I understand this is a topic with lethal and cruel historical baggage. Moving past something is not easy. Further, racism is still around. The issue is, giving a word that describes us all a taboo-ish reputation is a dangerous and, yes, racist precedent to set. What if it was COVID-19 people said was racist against Chinese people and we had to call it “VID-19”? Fact is, the CO goes with the V and has nothing to do with China in and of itself, it’s short for “Coronavirus” or “Crown-like-spiked Virus”, and yet YouTube banned that too. Hell, the Human Rhinovirus (common cold) is technically a non-issue coronavirus. So I just hope by this point people realize the only real dividing factor here is the one they choose to support by making ordinary words into taboo. You could probably find some “racist undertone” to just the word “taboo” if that’s all you look for, but as someone trying to stop himself from keeping making an assumption that everyone hates him, I think maybe the reason I needed to realize that is because we’re all far too guilty of it and my anger convinced me to stop taking the high road.
tl;dr: As a member of the human species, I take “offense” to the implication that I am NOT a monkey, because that implies I’m not taxonomically human.
