Название: Superior
Автор: Angela Saini
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: История
isbn: 9780008293840
isbn:
In another example around the same time as the Paris Exposition, a Congolese ‘pygmy’ named Ota Benga, who had been brought to the United States to be displayed at the St Louis World’s Fair, was put in the Monkey House at Bronx Zoo in New York, without shoes. Visitors loved him. ‘Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him,’ the New York Times reported. He was eventually rescued by African American ministers, who found him a place in an orphanage. Ten years later, in despair because he couldn’t return home to the Congo, he borrowed a revolver and shot himself through the heart.
As I stand among the weeds and crumbling former homes of Paris’s human zoo, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that the reason anyone pursued the scientific idea of race was not so much to understand the differences in our bodies, but to try to justify why we lead such different lives. Why else? Why would something as superficial as skin colour or body shape matter otherwise? What the scientists really wanted to know was why some people are enslaved and others free, why some prosper while others are poor, and why some civilisations have thrived while others haven’t. Imagining themselves to be looking objectively at human variation, they sought answers in our bodies to questions that existed far outside them. Race science had sat, always, at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference, it was a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.
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