I'm usually quite a rock on here, but some of the things said recently make me want to cry. They aren't just questioning the fact that we are women, they are questioning our humanity. Remember the little Black girl who was exhibited in Brussels? I think about her a lot.
Thread.
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Human zoos became quite popular around the world in the late 1800s. 'Exotic' human beings - usually Black or Brown - were exhibited to throngs of white people like animals in a zoo. They attracted huge audiences.
Jardin tropical in France exhibited plants and people from the country's vast colonial empire. They recreated indigenous villages from the colonies, right down to the construction of huts, and the display of live human beings. These people 'performed' nonstop for white audiences.
Eventually, their uprooting from their homes, the fact that they could not survive the climatic changes in their clothing that was meant for tropical weather (they were not given warm clothing), exhaustion, and European diseases caused their deaths.
They were buried in the gardens that they were imprisoned in; those gardens became their graves. Now the grounds lie abandoned.
In 1904, in the St. Louis World’s Fair, there were a number of living exhibits on display, including recreated Filipino villages. A 47 acre area contained and displayed more than 1000 Filipinos from multiple tribes.
I'm sure everyone knows the story of Ota Benga, the boy who was stolen from his home in the Congo and displayed in a North American zoo like an animal. After the St. Louis fair wrapped up, Ota was transported to the Bronx in New York City to become an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo.
He was displayed in the Monkey House. His teeth were filed to points the floor of his cage was littered with bones placed there by zookeepers to make him look more threatening.
He understood that he had to play a 'savage' and was moved to a cage with apes, a move championed by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, then secretary of the New York Zoological Society, and future prominent eugenicist.
The New York Times heralded the exhibit with the headline: “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.” In the body of the article, Benga was identified as “a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale."
He was popular. Thousands of people came to see him every day, flocking to his exhibit. The Bronx Zoo made a lot of money from displaying him.
A number of prominent Black pastors spoke out against this practice. Rev. James H. Gordon, was the most vocal opponent. “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”
Benga was released from captivity at the zoo and returned to Africa. But he no longer found comfort with his tribe. Feeling lost and alone, he returned to the US, where he found no comfort either. In 1916, he committed suicide.
It should have ended in Brussels, with the little Black girl being fed by white visitors. But it hasn't. It still persists, even today. The reclusive Jarawa Tribe live on India's Andaman Island, and are said to be in the stone age period.
Tours promise visitors to the Andaman Islands a look at their lives, even though the Indian government has said that the tribe is protected.
Another protected tribe, the Sentinelese, live on North Sentinel Island. In 2018 they murdered John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who illegally travelled to North Sentinel Island of India in an attempt to preach to them.
This othering of human beings HAS TO STOP. Now. It is beyond time. Look at the shameful history. Stop othering Black women. Stop telling us we are different, and that we are not real women. We are as real as any other woman.
I cannot believe I have to say this, now, in 2020, but Black women are women, and Black people are human.
