They hope to get away with just sounding Woke:
New York City’s Bronx Zoo is apologizing for its racist past when the facility put Ota Benga, a central African man, on display in the Monkey House in 1906. “In the name of equality, transparency, and accountability, we must confront our organization’s historic role in promoting racial injustice as we advance our mission to save wildlife and wild places,” officials with the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement Wednesday.
Frank Miles, “Bronx Zoo officials apologize for putting African man on display in Monkey House in 1906” at Fox News
The protests of Black ministers put an end to the show but Benga ended up committing suicide in 2016.
David Klinghoffer commends the Zoo for finally owning up to and repudiating this disgusting stuff but,he notes:
What’s missing, and it’s not fine, is any mention of where these evil ideas came from. What was the nature, the content, of the “pseudoscientific racism” that motivated Ota Benga’s treatment? To be accurate, the racism wasn’t “eugenics-based” it was “evolution-based.” That is left out…
The truth is that placing a man in the Monkey House was intended as an education for the public in Darwinian evolution. As John West has said, Ota Benga was “only one of thousands of indigenous peoples who were put on display in America in the name of Darwinian evolution.”
Though its article yesterday forgets to mention it (“Racist Incident from Bronx Zoo’s Past Draws Apology”), the New York Times understood that clearly in 1906. Brushing aside protests from black clergymen that the African should be given an education not put in the cage, the newspaper explained:
“The suggestion that Benga should be placed in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”
In other words, “Listen to the science!” In fact, racial hierarchy was hailed as solid science at the time.
David Klinghoffer, “Something Is Missing from Bronx Zoo’s Apology” at Evolution News and Science Today
He recommends, again, John West’s Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism (see it before YouTube finds another reason to restrict it or maybe pull it):
As an alternative to Canceling itself, the New York Times will likely just find someone else to blame.