Is the Woodland Park Zoo’s “Masai Journey” Exhibit Inherently Racist?

One of Seattle’s local NPR affiliates hosted a great discussion yesterday on the racial implications of the “Masai Journey” exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo.

The “Masai Journey” program features four Masai cultural interpreters from rural Kenya, where local people are heavily involved in conservations efforts to protect the animal life that their ancestors have coexisted with for so long. Some Seattle intellectuals find the program racist. They’re offended by the discussion of African human life alongside African animal life. They say that it sends children a confusing and potentially damaging message about black people.

At first, I doubted that kids would have any problem parsing the distinction between the human beings who are presenting their culture and conservation efforts and the animals in the exhibits. But during the KUOW discussion, the UW’s Dr. Stephanie Camp shared that her own three year-old daughter asked her why there are Africans in the zoo. The fact that kids are left wondering leads me to believe that the zoo needs to provide some additional context.

Nobody is saying that the zoo intended to be racist. But Seattle University’s Dr. Olúfémi Táíwò pointed out that American children don’t learn about African life and cultures in school. He says that the zoo should not be the only place that American children go to learn about human life in Africa. Not when the Western world has such a long tradition of looking at African people as animals.

I agree with Dr. Táíwò that we need to make world history and culture an essential part of American education. Americans have an attitude that we are the only people in the world that matter. It’s inappropriate that children get all their information about African people from the zoo. They need to get that information in school, at home, from books and from television.

But unlike Dr. Táíwò, I think that the zoo is an appropriate place to discuss human cultures and modes of existence — especially when we are discussing the interaction between humans and animals and how humans can preserve animal life. I don’t think it’s inherently racist to present information this way, especially when it’s properly contextualized.

There are a lot of things the zoo can do to clarify the human/animal divide for children. One major issue that comes to mind is their “This Close” advertising campaign. Here are two samples of ads from that campaign:

The second ad presents a problem for me. The ads feature beautiful photos that show the textures of the Masai area of Kenya. But they don’t make any distinction between human images and animal images. They somehow imply that getting close to a human being by learning how the Masai make beaded jewelry is the same as getting close to a wild animal.

I think that in an effort to provide greater context, the zoo should stop running the beads ad as part of the “This Close” campaign.

Do you agree with me? What else do you think the zoo should do to provide visitors with more context for the presence of their Masai guest presenters? Do you think there’s something racist about what the zoo is doing?