This week I will try to convey how singular examples can bring a point home, and sometimes pave the way to understand a larger pattern. At least they do so for me. often provoking thoughts about how we are repeating history in one way or another.

I will start with the case of Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy of the Mbuti tribe, who was bought by an American explorer from African slave traders in 1904. After having been displayed at the St Louis World Fair, he was brought to the Bronx zoo. Together with his pet chimpanzee he was locked in the Orangutan cage and exhibited to visitors as a kind of animal, his teeth filed to sharp pints by the zoo keepers and with bones added to the cage to hint at cannibalism.

Clergy eventually protested and had him moved to an orphanage for non-white children. By 1910 he was forced to work at a tobacco company in Lynchburg, VA where he later killed himself, having built his own pyre beforehand, with a stolen gun.

https://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/consider-the-monkey

Treating someone who looks different from the white norm as subhuman has not stopped, even if we don’t put exemplars in the zoo these days. We still put them behind bars, in large numbers, caging them for the purported fear of their wild, dangerous impulses. We call them animal names – remember George Allen, Republican Senator from Virginia, who called Indians at his rallies Macaques? Or Roseanne Barr decrying Valerie Jarrett as the child of an ape? Or he who shall not be named calling Omarosa Manigault a dog?? And if you are a soccer fan you’ll know about the 1000s of European fans making monkey noises in stadiums when the scoring opposing-team player is a black person.

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

http://theconversation.com/the-slippery-slope-of-dehumanizing-language-97512

One of the ways we try to expose the past and help overcome it, is by creating museum exhibits that show the consequences of racist behavior. Case in point is the The Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice , a public memorial of the lynching of Black people in Alabama. By all reports – I have not been there – it is an astoundingly emotional site that brings the relevant points home. At a cost, though, that few of us probably considered.

The disturbing article attached below talks about the re-opening of wounds for those who lost family members to lynching. More generally, it describes how watching the exhibits can become itself a kind of voyeurism, or entertainment for those taking selfies with the displays. “This memorial, intentionally or not, reproduces the opportunity for white onlookers to engage in the spectacle of lynching.”

When a Lynching Memorial Becomes a Photo Opportunity

It makes you really wonder, what can be done to provoke change. One thing we can start with, I think, is to watch our own language and eradicate the spontaneous use of animal terms during denigrating fits – myself included.

Photographs today from Annapolis, Maryland, where a memorial celebrates the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

And Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, in commemoration of the lynchings.