Member-only story
Caged Humanity: The Untold Stories of Human Zoos
We can’t undertake racial healing until we learn history
Most of us never learned this in school, but many countries had human zoos that kept Black people, Asians, indigenous peoples and others on display like wild animals.
Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Portugal all had these zoos.
As did America.
A familiar cast of countries that spent centuries wreaking havoc on people who weren’t white and Christian.
From the early 1800s all the way through 1958 (yeah, you read that correctly), people of color from around the world were put on display, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, oftentimes in “habitats” to make it look like people were in their homeland.
Some of the zoos allowed visitors to pet the humans. Or have their photographs taken with them for a fee.
One of the first human exhibitions was a blind and mostly paralyzed slave woman P.T. Barnum bought and put on display. He advertised her as the 160-year-old nurse of George Washington. She died in captivity a year later at age 80.
The Greatest Show on Earth, my ass.