The Enclosure We Built

On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old boy breached the enclosure fence and fell fifteen feet into the gorilla exhibit moat. Harambe — a 450-pound western lowland silverback — came down to investigate. Zoo officials watched for about ten minutes as he dragged the child across the concrete, the child's head making contact with the surface. The crowd screamed. He became increasingly agitated. They made the call. One shot to the head. The boy survived. The gorilla didn't.

The internet responded with what happens when collective distress has nowhere honest to go: maximum ironic intensity. "Dicks out for Harambe" became a kind of liturgy. His name appeared on presidential ballots as a write-in candidate. A year later the meme was still running. Vox called it 2016's meme of the year.

Here's what the meme was for: it let you feel something without being responsible for the feeling.

The irony layer is load-bearing. Strip it away and what's underneath is genuine distress about something complicated — a child who could have died, a gorilla who did, a split-second decision made under conditions nobody wanted. The direct version of that feeling asks questions you'd rather not sit with. The meme version gives you somewhere to put the feeling that costs nothing.

But the meme was covering for something specific.

Harambe wasn't in that moat because of an accident. He was there because we built a system — a zoo, an exhibit, an attraction — that placed a western lowland gorilla in close proximity to thousands of humans who paid to look at him. The enclosure is why the child had a fence to breach. The enclosure created the conditions under which a gorilla's protective instinct became a threat requiring lethal response.

We built the enclosure. The child fell in. Harambe did what his entire evolutionary history prepared him to do. The crowd screamed and made it worse. The zoo killed him because the system we built left no other option. Then we memefied it because feeling implicated is intolerable and irony is always available.

The criticism went toward the mother (who momentarily lost track of her child), the zoo (for fence design), the decision-makers (for the kill order). Primatologist Jane Goodall eventually said the zoo had no choice. An ethologist noted that a similar 1986 incident resolved without casualties because there were no guns and the crowd stayed quiet — the screaming, in that account, was what made Harambe dangerous. Some thought he was protecting the child.

We will never know. The meme was useful for that too — replacing the not-knowing with something portable enough to share.

Ten years on, Harambe is mostly a dated reference. The internet has moved to newer occasions for ironic grief. But the enclosure is still there — not just in Cincinnati. The whole architecture of it: systems that create casualties, irony deployed when the casualties arrive, blame aimed at individual failures so we don't have to examine the structure underneath.

The gorilla asked nothing of the arrangement.

That's the thing you know. The meme made it possible not to say.

i · sources

• Harambe — Wikipedia, 2016-05-28