Racism Fueled Outrage Over Cincinnati Gorilla Killing
In comparison with a hundred other news stories from around the world of social, political and human significance, the gorilla story was utterly insignificant. A kid's life was at stake, and the gorilla was killed. That is as it should be.
A sympathy card rests at the feet of a gorilla statue outside the Gorilla World exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden on May 29. (John Minchillo / AP)
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Why are people so outraged? Why don’t black lives matter, or refugee lives matter, or the lives of low-paid workers, drone attack victims, imprisoned migrants, death row exonerees and other humans matter as much as a gorilla in a zoo? Is it because those injustices are so huge and seemingly without solutions that we fixate instead on the easy outrage? We can wag our fingers at the parents whose supposed negligence cost the life of an animal, even though, as any honest parent will admit, there is no way to ensure a child is at all times 100 percent safe from harm.
It is a measure of privilege that we can feel outrage over the death of a gorilla at the expense of countless others whose lives we ignore. Animal rights groups claim they stand up for the rights of animals because no one else will. But such a position is easy to adopt when you have little direct experience of human suffering or have lived without having to witness injustice done to humans in your own family or community.
To care more for animals than humans is the ultimate privilege. I understand that the fate of animals—and all species of life on earth—is bound up with the fate of humans, but when there is human suffering on a scale as large as we currently experience, I have no tears left to cry over a gorilla’s life lost.
Today that gorilla was killed so the boy could live. Tomorrow that little black boy could grow up and be killed by a police officer who might see him as less than human, and then where will the #JusticeForHarambe crowd be?
I want to live in a world where black boys grow up never fearing for their lives, and their mothers don’t kiss them goodbye each day wondering if racism could rear its head and cause their children’s deaths that day. When all lives really do matter, then maybe a story about a gorilla being killed in a zoo will catch my attention—because it might actually be the worst outrage to emerge in my news feed.
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