Finding Negro

A 19th Century Circus of Scientific Nonsense To Define "Blackness"

My brothers have this immense talent for ruining songs I love. Hijacking the sound system so the Hunchback classic “Out There” played a solid 25 times straight or creating new, horrifying lyrics that no one can forget are among their accomplishments.

Their greatest hit of all time was what they did to the song “This Is Me”. The movie theater was packed with theater kids the night we first saw “The Greatest Showman”. Accompanied by the Expat Australian siblings I had not seen forever, vibing out in those red, plush movie seats with rowdy theater teenagers felt heavenly.

In the weeks that followed, I memorized that soundtrack and the story beats of this one, incredible P.T. Barnum. I knew that it was loosely based on his actual story but as the movie picked up steam in the culture and we all collectively fell in love with the campy, romantic score and story, that fact started to recede.

It came crashing back when my brothers unbeknownst to me memorized alternate lyrics that had been written by a clever YouTuber, lyrics that included the actual history of P.T. Barnum and the people whose bodies he used to amass great riches and fame.

I did not want to hear it.

Who the heck wants to romanticize the exploitation of oppressed people through song and dance? My resistance to the truth of it all wasn’t even born out of this deep sense of personal, national, or social identity. I just liked the idea of the story I saw on the screen. It was cleaner, inspiring even. The discomfort alone had me wanting to cover my ears.

Now imagine your entire financial, social, and political standing rests on a very particular story or definition of yourself and the people who look like you. That’s exactly the dilemma that arose as scientists ran headlong into after finally catching and collecting all the so-called “exotic missing links” during the 19th century. As the world fairs, circuses, and ownership of captured people proliferated, the American public’s appetite grew to see the strange wonders of “primitive” beings that both repulsed and captivated them.

In chapter three of Medical Apartheid, Circus Africanus, researcher Harriet Washington shares the stories of some of the most famously captured and exploited “medical oddities”.

Joice Heth (Barnum’s fake "Mammy to George Washington”), Thomas Higgins ( a blind composer and concert pianist), Saartjie Baartman (a Khoi woman whose body was famously paraded and exploited for profit), Henry Moss (whose famous case of vitiligo and whitening skin captivated audiences) and others are examples in this chapter of the use of Black bodies on public display to “prove” and fabricate dubious and racist fictions that benefited people in power. This obsession with showing “what” made a Black person “Black” physically was necessary to create and consolidate a “valid” difference between them and the Black enslaved or freedmen class.

Cultural critic and writer Ta Nehisi Coates often in his writing uses the language of “people believed to be White” and “people believed to be Black”. This language illustrates what we know to be true, that “Blackness” and “Whiteness” are social constructions that are malleable. 17th and 18th-century scientists had - with no actual proof- decided to create “races” and look for physical differences that could “prove” moral, intellectual, and social inferiority of people whose body, land, and labor they needed to exploit and steal. In Washington’s careful examination of P.T. Barnum. Thomas Jefferson, and scientific racists of the day’s writings and ideas, we are shown this deep fear that society had that Black people could just be people and that the physical “defects” were actually common, untreated illnesses or genetic variations.

The St. Louis World Fair and The Brooklyn Zoo became cages for many unknown people who had been snatched from their colonized countries to be shoved into “enclosures” for people to gawk, stare at, and aggravate. By creating “monsters” and othering these people, White Supremacist ideas were kept intact. Major newspapers, doctors, academics, and clergy defended the caging of these people, as they had already determined that these people were physically and morally inferior to White people. Some even went so far as to say it would be torture for these people to NOT be in zoos, as what good would school or freedom be for them?

Now P.T. Barnum is just one of the more famous examples of men who owned or coerced Black people into becoming public spectacles. This practice of taking money for White people to touch, assault, hit, or gaze at naked or pained Black bodies was not out of the norm. And there were clergy and abolitionists who raged against it, which all the more furthered the deep hunt to find “what made a negro.” This swell of support for the humanity of Black people was considered quite threatening to White Supremacy. The entire system of White Supremacy and colonization rested on the justification found in Carl Linnaeus’ classification system. But “White Negros” flew directly in the face of this, and strengthened the few scientists’ and abolitionists’ case that there was only one human origin point.

Now some suffering from various illnesses or unknown conditions would weaponize this agenda in their own favor. Henry Moss took himself on tour, preferring the high prices he could charge people for telling his own story over the backbreaking physical labor that was far more likely for a Black man at the time. His gradually lightening skin due to the virtually unknown disease of vitiligo unsettled scientists. Add to this the discovery of albino Black people and the White looking children born to Black women (due to secret rape or in rare cases relationships), and this diversification and “lightening” of a supposedly “unsalvageable” people. The permeability of Whiteness was on display for the world to question. The medical experimentation of using Black bodies to cure White ones added a new layer, as Black bodies now had to be tested to prove that their “Blackness” was so deeply ingrained in their blood, organs, “humors”, bones, and skin. This culture, of both fantastical objectification and revulsion, lay the groundwork for the next step of theft and colonization. It was not enough to check the soundness of a Black body for work or for a cure, but to prove the superiority of Whites. The dissection of Black bodies for this aim was next.

I don’t think P.T. Barnum selling 1500 tickets to the public for Joice’s public dissection made it into the lyrics from my brother’s revised anthem of the man. Or that he took it upon himself to write her biography, changing the story he told and retold so many times when she was alive, fabricating whatever made him more money, and sold it to rabid crowds. But I can’t remember now. I think of how Joice was owned, in life and death, her bones never to find rest. And this kills something in me. There is no joy in learning that your home country and its legacy is bloodsoaked, like every other state. That no, the birth of this nation wasn’t a 9-track feel-good story from beginning to end. But to know it, truly, is the only way we’re going to get the kind of grip - on the truth and each other- that we need to navigate out of its legacy which warps our society today.

There’s another musical, about a guy who fails to come through for another person and loses her to a system much bigger than him. The kicker isn’t that he does that. We all do that. This entire march through this book is about how humans failed other humans for lesser things. The pain and the hope are both in the narrator telling us, the audience, that this story is sad, it’s painful, it’s shocking. But to know how it ends, and to tell it anyways, in the hope that by retelling it something might change and turn out different this time? That’s not nothing.

If you have time this weekend, take a look at the linked names of the people above and remember their names as their families called them, before they were put on display in both life and death. Tell someone their story. Maybe over time, the ways we learned to downplay the pain and suffering of people who do not like us, will be the one story that changes.