The level of negative stereotypes and attitudes tapped in polls and surveys may only reveal the most easily observable symptoms of the illness. A number of powerful psychological experiments show the extent to which blackness for Americans is intimately tied to images of violence and danger. Indeed, one of the most depressing lines of research suggests a core underlining psychological association of blackness with apes, an ugly, old racist trope from the age of the Great Chain of Being, in which the African was seen as closer to primitive animals in the hierarchy of species