Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
Humans as “animals,” then and now
by Ariel Dorfman
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Is it the punitive incarceration of millions, so many lives wasted? (Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)
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.
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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.
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/10/human-zoos-age-trump
