>>In other words, when the media reports that monkey-like mock-up photos of Michelle Obama are racist, they’re tacitly highlighting society’s long-held view, fuelled by evolution, that blacks are less evolved than whites. Of course the mainstream media don’t dare put it so bluntly—it’s simply assumed<<
That is an assertion — there is no research behind it. Saying something don’t make it so. In this case, it is a total misapplication of two entire branches of science: anthropology and sociology.
It looks more to me that the author is the racist and assuming his/her conclusions are true for everyone else. This is called “projection” and is a bad thing.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
--Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871