Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy — Darwin's Racism and Colonialism

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The Rev. Dr. MacArthur Thinks the Exhibition Degrading

"The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African" said Dr. MacArthur "Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, he should be put in school for the development of such powers as God gave to him."

Dr. Gilbert said he had already decided that the exhibition was an outrage and that he and other pastors would join with Dr. MacArthur in seeing to it that the Bushman was released from the monkey cage and put elsewhere.41

The end result of all this inhuman treatment was Ota Benga's suicide. But here the problem was greater than that of one human being losing his life. This event was a clear example of the cruelty and savagery that Darwinist racism could mean in practice.

The Eskimos and The Implementation of Racism

he famous arctic researcher Robert Peary brought a group of Pole Eskimos to New York in 1897. The youngest of this group was a child called Minik. The group, which included Minik and his father, were exhibited for a long time at the American Museum of Natural History. During that time, Minik's father lost his life through sickness. Minik remained alone and unprotected in New York. And one day Minik saw that his father's skeleton was being exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History as "an example of the species." Although he asked for his father's body, the museum authorities turned the request down.

Another point worthy of note regarding Minik's life was Robert Peary, the researcher who brought the Eskimos to America, held racist views. Although he lived among the Eskimos, Peary openly thought that these people were not equal to him. According to Peary, Eskimos and Negroes were members of inferior races. Although they were strong, intelligent, and trustworthy people who provided for their families, they were not as good as the white man… One time he wrote the following piece of insolence: "I have often been asked: 'Of what use are Eskimos to the world? They are too far removed to be of any value for commercial enterprises; and, furthermore, they lack ambition. They value life only as does a fox, or a bear, purely by instinct."1 His purpose in bringing Eskimos to America was explained by a researcher on the subject: "What were Peary's reasons for bringing these six Eskimos to New York? …Perhaps these six Eskimos were just specimens, much like the skulls and skeletons he had collected earlier, but more interesting because blood still coursed in their veins. …He had also felt a morbid affinity for the bodies of other Eskimos he knew by name, which he had exhumed the year before from their fresh graves and carted off south to grace the halls of the museum."2

Minik, Ota Benga, and many other people whose names are not known, suffered inhuman treatment, in this and other ways, at the hands of so-called 'scientists" who looked on some races as "inferior."

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1 Ken Harper, Give Me My Father's Body, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont p. 8

2 Ken Harper, Give Me My Father's Body, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont p. 22

The Racist Mentality Still Exists, and Draws Strength from Darwin... Muslim News, November.2000