Недочеловечество

32-летний Ритчи Торрес из Бронкса вошел в историю в 2020, победив на выборах в Конгресс.

Ritchie Torres, a New York City Council member, won his US House race to represent the South Bronx, becoming the first black member of Congress who identifies as gay.
Torres, 32, overwhelmingly defeated Republican Patrick Delices in the district, one of the poorest and most Democratic in the country, after winning a 12-way Democratic primary in June.
"Tonight, we made history," he tweeted. "It is the honor of a lifetime to represent the essential borough, the Bronx."
In a recent interview, Torres portrayed the primary campaign between himself and a rival, Rev. Rubén Díaz Sr., as "essentially a struggle between good and evil." Díaz, a cowboy hat-wearing, 77-year-old, socially conservative City Council member with a history of homophobic remarks, has said that he is in favor of traditional family values and claims he has been attacked for espousing them
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/politics/ritchie-torres-house-win/index.html

Торрес - прогрессивный демократ, но по ряду вопросов расходится с Александрой Окасио-Кортес, коллегой из соседнего округа, в частности в своей безоговорочной поддержке Израиля. AOC поддерживала на праймериз другого кандидата, но промахнулась.



В округе Торреса находится Bronx Zoo, один из крупнейших зоопарков в Америке.

В далеком 1906 в этом зоопарке в вольере для обезьян для смеха показывали человека, пигмея из Африки. Когда поступили протесты (от черных пастырей), редакционная статья New York Times популярно разъяснила, что речь идёт о недочеловеке:

“We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter,” the paper said in an unsigned editorial. “Ota Benga, according to our information, is a normal specimen of his race or tribe, with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.”
The editorial said it was absurd to imagine Benga’s suffering or humiliation. “Pygmies,” it continued, “are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him … The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education of books is now far out of date.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/the-man-who-was-caged-in-a-zoo

Ota Benga—estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 23 years old—was “acquired” in the Belgian Congo, at the behest of the National Geographic Society, by a wannabe anthropologist and failed missionary named Samuel P. Verner, who saw him as an ideal candidate for an “educational” exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Verner arrived in the Congo in 1895, but he soon became more consumed with acquisition than conversion and began collecting everything from tribal masks and musical instruments to chimpanzees and, ultimately, Africans. Although he wished desperately to be taken seriously as an objective scientist, he celebrated the “invincible” onward march of the white race, a “marvel of modern times.”
Although Verner later claimed that he had saved Ota Benga from being eaten by cannibals, he may have bought him at a slave market. Having secured seven other young men and boys in addition to Ota Benga, Verner brought them all to St. Louis, where they were indeed displayed at the World’s Fair in a kind of ethnographic sideshow that included Ainu from northern Japan, Filipino tribesmen and American Indians, among them the Apache warrior Geronimo.
The noted Swiss-American scholar Franz Boas protested that such exhibitions degraded their subjects and were racist in their assumptions. But such “high-minded debates,” Ms. Newkirk writes, “were for the academic elite. For the general public, the sight of barely clad, presumably primitive people assembled across the fairgrounds was evidence enough of Caucasian superiority... The reality—that the delegation comprised captured African children—if considered at all, was understood merely as a means to a scientific end.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientific-racism-1433538610

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