Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
Associated Press
When Donald Trump recently accused "illegal immigrants" of wanting to "pour
into and infest our country," there was an immediate outcry. After all, that
verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and
communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated.
Nobody, however, should have been surprised. The president has a long
history of excoriating people of color as animal-like. In 1989, for
instance, reacting to the rape of a white woman in New York's Central Park,
he took out full-page ads in four of the city's major papers (total cost:
$85,000) calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and decrying
"roving bands of wild criminals roaming our streets." He was, of course,
referring to the five black and Latino youngsters accused of that crime for
which they were convicted - and, 10 years late, exonerated when a serial
rapist and murderer finally confessed.
Trump never apologized for his rush to judgment or his hate-filled opinions,
which eventually became the template for his attacks on immigrants during
the 2016 election campaign and for his presidency. He has declared many
times that some people aren't actually human beings at all but animals,
pointing, in particular, to MS-13 gang members. At a rally in Tennessee at
the end of May, he doubled down on this sort of invective, goading a
frenzied crowd to enthusiastically shout that word - "Animals!" - back. In
that way, he made those present accomplices to his bigotry. Nor are his
insults and racial tirades mere rhetorical flourishes. They've had quite
real consequences. It's enough to look at the cages where undocumented
children separated from their families at or near the U.S.-Mexico border
have been held as if they were indeed animals - reporters and others
regularly described one of those detention areas as being like a "zoo" or a
"kennel" - not to mention their parents who are also trapped behind wire
barriers, even if arousing far less attention and protest.
A History of Caged Humans
All the president's furious contemporary rants and rallies, along with those
cages and detainee centers, have certainly brought Nazism to mind for some,
but it might be more illuminating to think of them as echoing an earlier
moment in history when comparing dark-skinned humans to animals would hardly
have caused a stir. It would have been considered part of normal discourse,
in both Europe and the United States.
Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of
Europeans and Americans considered it perfectly natural to treat certain
members of our species quite literally as if they were beasts. They were
unfazed, so the historical record suggests, by the idea of seeing such
"animals," such oddities, displayed in literal zoo cages at boisterous
public events. It may now be hard to believe, but our forebears once flocked
in staggering numbers to "human zoos," where thousands of natives kidnapped
from Asia, Africa, and Latin America were exposed to scrutiny, curiosity,
and derision, as well as, sometimes, undergoing scientific experimentation.
Today, such mindboggling violations of human rights have almost entirely
vanished from public memory. I had only vaguely heard of human zoos myself,
before I became obsessed with them when research for my latest novel,
Darwin's Ghosts, led me into the world of human menageries. I discovered
that the phenomenon had been launched in the most modest of ways.
One hundred and seventy years ago - 1848, a year of revolutions across the
globe - a Hamburg fishmonger, Claus Hagenbeck, decided to charge customers
to take a peek at some Arctic seals swimming in a large tub in the backyard
of his house. Soon enough, that first timid entrepreneurial step developed
into a highly lucrative family business exhibiting wild animals, while
feeding growing demands for wondrous beasts to populate circuses and fill
the private collections of monarchs and other wealthy individuals.
In the end, animals were not enough. By the early 1870s, in conjunction with
the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris and American impresarios like P.T.
Barnum, the Hagenbeck family started dabbling in displaying "savages" from
the farthest corners of the planet. The first victims of this desire to
bring exemplars from the rest of humanity to viewers in the West were
Laplanders, displayed in a setting meant to look like one of their villages.
(A similar urge gave birth to the dioramas that soon began to flourish at
museums of natural history.)
That first exhibition in Hamburg of "the little men and women" of Lapland
proved so sensational - tours were organized to Berlin, Leipzig, and other
German cities - that the desire to see more "primitive" humans soon became
insatiable. Scavengers who had previously specialized in locating and
bringing African and Asian wildlife to Europe and the United States were now
instructed to be on the lookout for similarly exotic human wildlife. They
should not be, it was quickly stipulated, so monstrous as to disgust
audiences, but neither should they be so beautiful as to cease to be
bizarre.
The Laplanders were followed by a multitude of indigenous inhabitants of the
planet forcibly removed from their habitats: Eskimos, Cingalese, Kalmuks,
Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Nubians from the Upper Nile, aboriginal
Australians, Zulu warriors, Mapuche Indians, Andaman Islanders from the
South Pacific, head-hunters from Borneo. The list went on and on, as those
human zoos spread from Germany to France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy,
and the United States, all of which - what a coincidence! - just happened to
be the globe's imperial powers of that era.
Representatives of ethnic groups from all over the planet soon became an
expectable feature of then-popular World's Fair pavilions. Besides providing
entertainment for the whole family - they might be thought of as that
moment's equivalents of reality TV shows - those exhibitions were proclaimed
"educational" experiences by the enterprises cashing in on them. Such
tableaus of "prehistoric" people offered a way for affluent visitors to gawk
at and be amazed by the bizarre habits of the bizarre inhabitants of the
faraway lands that their countries were incorporating with great violence
into "civilization" via colonial dominion. In fact, that violence was such
that some of the native populations on display, like diverse groups of
Patagons from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Latin America, were
already then on the verge of becoming extinct. One of the draws of seeing
living specimens of those strange men, women, and children was to do so
before their last remnants, along with their languages and their cultures,
disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Even if you were among the millions of Americans and Europeans who couldn't
personally visit such folk displays, ethnic villages, and human zoos, you
could still inexpensively and vicariously experience those exotic others.
The images of the captives - who, of course, had been photographed without
their consent - were commercialized on an industrial scale. The postcards
upon which their faces and bodies were flaunted soon became an everyday
feature of domestic life, one more way that the human zoo was normalized,
whitewashed, and sent into the home with barely a thought about the horrors,
the suffering being visited on those captives or how their children,
husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, relatives, and friends, left behind, were
dealing with the trauma of having their loved ones torn from their midst.
Nor were such acts repudiated by the most illustrious members of those
"advanced" societies. Quite the opposite, many of the abductions had been
financed by scientific institutions eager to discover how such specimens
might fit into Darwin's theory of evolution. Their research, in turn, was
backed by government officials more than ready to show their respect and
support for scholars looking into the origins of humanity. Were those
Africans and South Americans entirely human or did they constitute missing
links in the great chain of beings that became our species? Eminent
naturalists and doctors debated just such matters, gave lectures on them,
wrote treatises about them, and (in what then passed for scientific
experimentation) poked at or into the bodies of those who had made the
mistake of being born far from the so-called civilized world.
The Ota Bengas of Today
Today, of course, human zoos and the medical experiments on live human
beings that went with them are inconceivable. The consciousness of humanity,
enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N.
70 years ago, has made such practices disgraceful and intolerable. Who today
could stomach the fate of Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo who was housed
with the primates at New York's Bronx Zoo in 1906 and committed suicide a
decade later when he realized that he would never be able to return to his
native land? Who among us would bring their children to gape at "missing
links" like Thai dwarfs, Amazonian Indians, or Sudanese villagers as if they
were freaks of nature, not human beings?
Unfortunately, congratulations are not (yet) in order, given how often the
same racist impulses resurface today, and not only in the president's
intemperate diatribes equating humans and animals (none of which have so far
provoked indignation in most of his followers). A similar dehumanization of
strangers with darker faces and skins appears to animate current
anti-immigrant sentiments in many lands, a desire to escape "infestation"
from abroad and maintain mythical versions of racial purity and national
identity. Are we really that removed from the spectators who watched their
fellow humans abused in zoo-like conditions a century or so ago without
blinking or being disturbed?
In retrospect, what's most sobering about the human zoos of an earlier time
is how oblivious those who participated in such degrading spectacles were to
the crimes being committed before their eyes. Many of them would have judged
themselves decent, enlightened citizens, shining advocates of progress,
science, and freedom. And yet, in Berlin in 1882, the police had to be
called in to quell a riot by visitors to an exhibition of 11 Kaweshkar
natives abducted from Tierra del Fuego. Thousands of customers, having
imbibed copious gallons of beer, began to stone the hostages, demanding that
they mate in public. Or consider the fate of two female Kaweshkar whose
sexual organs, after they died in captivity, were carved from their dead
bodies and sent to be examined by a prominent German researcher interested
in discovering how such creatures might be distinct from European women.
So many decades later, it's easy enough to condemn such offenses. More
difficult and painful is to ask what injustices are happening now that we
take to be as normal as human zoos (or the disempowerment of women and child
slavery) were just a few generations ago. Is it the thoughtless annihilation
of immeasurable species, the plundering of nature, the loss of wisdom stored
for millennia by ethnic groups that are fast disappearing? Is it the
punitive incarceration of millions, so many lives wasted? Is it our
incredibly counterproductive "war on drugs" that unnecessarily ravages
cities, nations, and lives? Or our inability to rid ourselves of the plague
of nuclear proliferation, the brutality of widespread hunger, America's
endless wars, the detention centers for immigrants and their children in
this country, the spectacle of undocumented minors shut up in cages and
crying for their parents, or the overflowing refugee camps elsewhere in the
world? And what of so many children displaced in their war-torn lands or
incarcerated in poverty? Where is the indignation about them? Who marches to
have them released from their structural captivity? And who even noticed the
10,000 children murdered or maimed in armed conflicts in 2017 alone, deaths
invisible to us if you didn't happen to catch a brief news item quickly
forgotten?
In reality, those human zoos of the not-so-distant past pose a terrifying
question for us: What everyday horrors of our world will our descendants
look back on with disgust in the future? How, they will wonder, could their
ancestors have been so blind as to condone such transgressions against
humaneness and humanity?
Ariel Dorfman / TomDispatch
