> It's obvious to me that the "jokes" are about her being a black woman.

I think that depends on your perspective. I disagree about that, but neither of us can know what the poster was intending. I can't say for sure in individual cases, but what I'm trying to convey is a general attitude in the modern right. Extracting intent from text is always quite hard, especially text that is using metaphors that can be both racially charged and refer to someone being large and/or ugly.

> How do you know that? How can one distinguish between actual racism and nudge-nudge-wink-wink "mockery at left-leaning people", if they look the same?

I can't know it for sure, but I honestly believe that much of the discernment comes down to cultural perspective. The modern right and left are extremely culturally different when it comes to online behaviour and problems with cultural interaction and misinterpretation come into play. Consider a more extreme example of online culture: 4chan's mode of communication. Everyone calls each other "fags" and the n-word is thrown around like it's nothing. It might appear to outsiders to be a hub of extreme overty homophobia and racism, but anyone who's actively used 4chan for any period can tell you that these are cultural artifacts that arise from 4chan's values around humour, opposing social norms and in-group signalling.

I could flip the script on you (or more accurately, the modern left) on this one and call out the regular articles that often start "Dear White People" as being racist. The modern left claims these statements are not racist due to their core values and cultural interpretation, which I do not share, and thus we're prone to disagree.

> Aren't you the one attributing some kind of positive ironic/humorist twist to these comments, even when there's no objective evidence of such?

Yes I am, because that's all I can do - after all, I didn't write the comment in question. I can, however, give you insight into a pattern of language that the right uses now that you may see as "this is 100% undeniably racist". There are many many more examples that aren't as grating as referring to a black woman as "ape-y" - that's a particularly pointed example that I can't say for sure isn't a racial attack. But I'm not trying to play judge over internet comments - I'm trying to provide a tiny bit of insight into an issue that's tearing the nation apart.

> In programming terms, I think of racism as duck-typed, and these comments definitely "implement the interface", so to speak. I guess you must think of racism as somehow statically typed... But I'm at a loss to understand how anything could be racism, if this isn't.

Building off the metaphor you've constructed, I could say that many comments that the left and right hold in contention only partially implement the "racism" interface, and also implement some other interface such as "humour" or "criticism" or "mockery". The left's interface definition of racism has evolved over time to encompass more and more minute complaints to the point where the "racism" interface is basically a superset of many other interfaces. Political correctness and the definition of hate speech has grown to the point where it flags up many false positives and people lose their jobs over them. Hence people rebelling against political correctness.

> (Besides, I don't understand what Mrs Obama ever did to deserve this level of meanness. As far as public figures go, she was a model of grace and compassion.)

I think it's largely partisanship to be honest. Both sides could be fairly accused of attacking the other just because they're the other side. The propagation of "good vs bad" morality in politics is really quite cancerous.