A reviewer of the new documentary Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism poses some questions he hopes will be broadly discussed:
– How was it that people who considered themselves Christians could troop through exhibitions, such as at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and gawk at other groups of people exhibited like animals? Just because they came from more “primitive” cultures, such as the Philippines’?
– How could thousands of church-going New Yorkers, over several sold-out weeks, go to the Bronx Zoo to gawk at Ota Benga, an African pygmy kidnapped from his faraway home, and displayed in a cage with orangutans, as the “missing” link in evolution? (After protests from black clergymen, he was eventually released, but ten years later committed suicide.)
– How exactly did America’s intellectual elites, in the 1920s and 30s, fall in love with eugenics, and back laws in 13 states that forcibly sterilized thousands of Americans — just for flunking culturally biased IQ tests?
– How can the eugenics organization, Planned Parenthood, which sponsored those laws (soon emulated in Nazi Germany), still be a major force today, receiving hundreds of millions in federal funding? John Zmirak, “‘Human Zoos’ Exhibits the Racist Toll of Darwinism” at The Stream
He adds, “I didn’t use to believe it, but I’ve come to see that the single most powerful force for dissolving religious faith in the West was, and still is, Darwinism.”
The idea that someone has to be the subhuman is a powerful one and it probably motivates a lot of popular Darwinism.
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See also: J.R. Miller on Darwinism, racism, and human zoos
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In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history.