Freaks, Discrimination, and What This Says About Humanity

By Kaitlin Kelsch
One day while I was attending an American Civilization lecture, my Professor, Professor
Hoskisson, showed us a film in class that addressed the issues that America faced during the Progressive
Era, such as the Philippine War. However, the movie described one event that occurred during this time
that resonated with me more than any of the other events in the film.
It described the Midway Exhibits, a series of exhibits during the 1904 Worlds Fair in Saint Louis
that actually put people on display! These people, including Inuit tribes, Filipinos, and Apache Indians,
were brought from their homes and were dropped into scenery that supposedly represented the villages
and settlements of their native lands. They were then told to act natural while the visitors of the fair
observed them from afar as if they were zoo animals. As seemed to be the custom at the time, these
exhibits were heavily mired with the racial and ethnic attitudes of the day. They were billed as strange,
primitive folks from exotic lands, an once-in-a-lifetime experience to view the lesser peoples of the
world. No doubt these exhibits contributed to the false impression that the Anglo-Saxon race was
superior above all other races and was destined to conquer the world.
The reason this event resonated so deeply with me was because it eerily reminded me of a
reading assignment I had read in Human Origins. It was about the life of a woman named Sarah
Baartman, a woman from South Africa who, in the early 19th century, agreed to be put on display as part
of a traveling circus, just like those at the midway exhibits. She became quite famous among Europe
and was even hired by the rich to attend parties as entertainment. She was also good friends with a
French naturalist named Georges Cuvier, who studied her behavior in order to determine if she was, in
fact, fully human or if she was a subspecies of human. His conclusion, as revealed by his writings, was
that Sarah showed no reason why she, or her people, the Khoisan, should be classified as a subspecies of
human. In fact, he remarked that Sarah herself was highly intelligent and showed excellent manners.

He even performed an autopsy of her after her death and concluded that, anatomically, she was,
indeed, fully human.
Learning about these two events was interesting to me because it stagers me to think that
humans treated each other this way. Sarah Baartman showed in her words and actions that she was
just as human as the Europeans but the mere fact that she was black and from an exotic land warranted
study from Georges Cuvier. It all reminds me of the two main reasons why, I think, discrimination exists.
The first reason is that humans fear what they dont understand. People arent always going to
behave and act in a way that is similar to you. Does that mean that these people are living life wrong or
that they are lesser because of it? I dont think so. I believe that happiness is in the eye of the beholder
and as long as the ways that these individuals act allow them to live what they feel is a moral, fulfilling,
and happy life, nobody should be telling them how they ought to be.
The second reason is that humans tend to put each other into categories based on their similar
characteristics. While categorization does indeed help us to make sense of our world, the drawback is
that, over time, you tend to view that everyone who fits into that category has the same, basic traits. It
makes it easy to forget that people are unique and that they are independent of the categories they are
placed in.
If you were to comb back through history and examine the past events in which discrimination
was a factor, I bet you that one of these reasons was the catalyst behind it. Not only that, but these
reasons can come to inspire humans to have an intense hatred of members of their own kind and can
even inspire them to do something drastic.
For example, as I have learned in my Human Origins class, we know now that the concept of
race (a categorization of skin color) has been debunked through scientific research and a bit of common
sense. There are multiple genes that control skin color and because of this, every person has their own
distinctive shade of skin.

In addition, there are some people who come from different ethnic

backgrounds. You may look like you are white on the outside, but your mother could be from Brazil or
could have Brazilian ancestors. You can imagine how hard it would be to categorize everyone based on
race when no two shades of skin are exactly the same! And yet, despite this fact, discrimination,
slavery, and even holocausts and genocides have existed and continue to exist. Think of Jim Crow laws,
segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and a multitude of other events, even the recent events
involving Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Gardner.
This is the exact reason why humans need to make an effort to understand the points of view of
others and to realize that every human is extraordinary and special in their own way. In a world that can
get crazy and chaotic fast, humans need each other for support, companionship, and love. Driving
others away solves nothing and can prohibit you from seeking out new experiences; you wont only be
lonely, but you can become ignorant and narrow-minded.
One way to prevent this is from being brave and getting to know others who seem different
from you. It may be clich, but more often than not, you may find that you have more in common with
a person than you think. But another way that humanity, as a whole, can prevent this is analyze our
past mistakes. By taking the time to thoughtfully reflect on humanitys successes and failures, we can
take what we have learned from the past and apply it to our future so history doesnt repeat itself. And
considering how grave some of humanitys missteps can be, taking the time to bridge this gap is a goal
that everyone should have in mind.