Penguin, what do you think of zoos?
Inasmuch as white people avoid zoos like the plague, there are no films, famous stories, or even fairy tales about zoos. No zoo “character” has been established. Zoo history is a great big blank slate, waiting for someone to come along, write the script, craft the characters, design the sets, tell the story, make himself some fame and fortune and go down in history books as a literary genius.
As a British penguin, cloaked in black and white feathers, one would think zoos were your iceberg to crack. How will you use your quills? Will you pick a white quill to tell the story of zoos, or flip the script and pick a black one?
While I am sorely tempted to post my comment without explanation, way too many people have no idea what zoos have to do with racism.
In a nutshell, when it comes to racism, zoos are more germane than slavery. Human zoos to be exact. Zoos that paid hunters to capture human beings. Zoos that displayed human beings in cages. Zoos where millions of white people brought their white children, and paid admission fees to see human beings exhibited in cages.
Thanks to technology you could weave the British roots in the early 1800s, into the epitome of zoo history in 1904 America.
I promise, you don’t need to break the internet with another Kim Kardashian butt. Come to my YMCA pool, and you can have your choice of hundreds of white butts who can play the role of Saartjie Baartman (aka The Hottentot Venus).
To see race reversal in the roles of British and French scientists would be nothing short of poetic justice. Imagine the psychic impact of watching black scientists, reporters and elites stick their noses six inches away from a naked white butt to examine it. Why people’s heads would explode. Race reversal in the first major historical play about zoos is genius. You’ll go down in history and win awards for daring alone.
Of course, the major storyline would revolve around The Largest Human Zoo in World History: The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The sheer scale boggles the mind. 19.7 MILLION VISITORS. 1,200 ACRES OF LAND.
President William McKinley said, “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress. They record the world's advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise, and intellect of the people; and quicken human genius. They go into the home. They broaden and brighten the daily life of the people. They open mighty storehouses of information to the student.”
The message of the fair was consigning the “savage” past to the future progress of “civilization.” The exhibits were designed “to domesticate the restive immigrant workers of St. Louis by turning them into white people” said one review.
At the 1904 human zoo, 10,000 conscripted people were placed in their “native habitat enclosures.” For the next seven months, 20 million white people flocked past the cages of conscripted humans on “display” which included Japanese, Native Americans (including Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker and children from Indian schools who danced), 1,102 Filipinos (many of whom died on the way, or in captivity during the fair), Africans (including Ota Benga who was later sent to the Bronx Zoo where he was featured in an exhibit alongside an orangutan and later committed suicide), Puerto Ricans, Andeans, and Alaskans.
The fair’s only other representation of African Americans was at the “Old Plantation,” where black actors tended a garden, staged a fake religious revival, sang minstrel songs, and cakewalked in an endless loop of white racial nostalgia.
The fair provided many opportunities for white people to mock and chuckle at the way other people in the world lived; they could even riot when people in cages refused to perform for them, as happened when the crowds threw rocks at the small houses in which Ota Benga and his fellows took shelter when the weather got cold.
Of course, the fair was segregated. Only white people only could eat at the World’s Fair.
Eugenicists invented racism and marketed it at the zoo. More than 100 years later, white people still don’t have the guts to talk about human zoos. Eugenics started in Britain, moved to France and finally landed in the U.S.A.
And so, I ask again, what do you think of zoos?
