compersion & limerence

By the time of Hirschfeld’s visit to the Chicago fair [in 1893]. . .[there was] widespread dissemination of racist cartoons, which had begun to circulate in the 1860s and typically conflated “Negro” subjects with apes—even if, as Zakkiyah Jackson has argued, the apparently dehumanizing racist representations and discourses were fueled by the knowledge of the humanity of the enslaved.
This racist visual genre had gained momentum in British, American, and German contexts with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,...At the same time, however, the voices of abolitionist and antiracism campaigners such as [Frederick] Doug­lass and [Ida B.] Wells, who challenged not just legal and social discrimination but also the popular racism that propped up such practices, were increasingly, and widely, heard. Given the popularity of the abolitionist movement in the United States, Hirschfeld’s silence on the debates about the Chicago World’s Fair is all the more noticeable. It indicates both his own detachment from the abolitionist and antiracism struggle and the more insidious privilege of whiteness, which normalized and made invisible to him the racism of the Chicago World’s Fair and American society more widely. [emphasis mine]

-p 20, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture, Heike Bauer, PDF available upon request

The broader context for this is: Hirschfeld went as a journalist to the 1893 World's Fair, and failed to mention any of the discussion around (a) racist imagery at the fair or (b) the, you know, people-exhibits, in any of his reporting. An interesting addn'l note is that Douglass was originally pro-fair, as it would highlight African-American culture, until he heard about the actual content.
This excerpt particularly of note for me given the evolutionary biology reference, and the eternal misinterpretation of how natural selection works. Have we really been leveling the "my grandfather wasn't an ape" for that long?!


( whisperspace )