Offense Archaeology
Imaginary Racist Dinosaurs Inside Imaginary Racist Museums

1,969 words

The release of the new Jurassic World: Rebirth this week reminded me of the time in 2015 when a previous movie in the franchise was laughably smeared as being racist against Pakistanis. Simply called Jurassic World, some of the main celluloid baddies in this one were from a species named Pachycephalosaurus, [1] called Pakis for short by the blockbuster’s human characters. American scriptwriters evidently didn’t realize the word “Paki” is a common racial insult in Great Britain, where panicked on-screen ejaculations like “The Pakis are out of containment!” just sounded like the Patel family had gone for a rare full-clan outing from Luton or Tower Hamlets one day.

Spying an opportunity to make mischief, British-born Pakistani comedian Guz Khan took to YouTube in the guise of his Mobeen character, a comically retarded Midlands Muslim (probably the result of all that cousin-intermarriage), to call for a boycott of the film as “racist”. Predictably, in our present geological era of hair-trigger racial oversensitivity, many believed Mobeen was a real man who was serious, with Universal Pictures being contacted for comment by The Hollywood Reporter.

Universal should have just replied back “Google which dinosaur had 500 teeth”, an Internet prank from the early 2020s, which gets you the following answer:

A type of sauropod herbivore (i.e., it eats weeds – or maybe smokes some), that is of course Nigersaurus with one ‘g’, not two; it was named after the nation of Niger, where it was discovered, not after the citizens of Chicago. [2] Nonetheless, asking black people to Google the multi-molared beast became “a sick stunt spread by racists”, in the words of one UK tabloid. Supposedly, this became a substitute code-word for “nigger” itself, with Klansmen allegedly insulting blacks by calling them things like, “You big fat dinosaur with 500 teeth!”, an allegation I find somewhat unlikely.

Even though the dinosaur was literally not named after a racial slur, but an obscure African country, still an online petition was got up to forcibly rename the thing anyway, in order to “improve society, [if only] even by a small amount” – an idea which certainly got only a “small amount” of signatures.

Just wait until the mad race-Marxists find out woolly mammoths were a type of Paki-derm, too.

Survival of the Shittest

Recently on Counter-Currents, I looked into how dinosaurs have been co-opted into becoming spurious symbols of queerness, but they have also been dragooned into evolving into anti-racist icons too. The basic idea is that, like the dinos, white racists (but never non-white racists – they are the scurrying rats who shall inherit the Earth) are primitive and old-fashioned creatures who are slated for looming demographic and social extinction, as in the following poster:

It’s a “pitty” you can’t spell, too. No wonder these people really think there’s a dinosaur out there called “Niggersaurus.”

A UK sort-of-charity, Create Not Hate, launched an entire advertising campaign around this theme, devised by what was termed “under-represented talent” in the form of two London youths called Jet Harris and Le’vaughn Smith, whom, to judge by their distinctly non-Linnaean genus-names, probably each had approximately 500 teeth themselves. This “tonally disruptive” operation consisted of several posters in which “people” (the word “white” is left unspoken) “with racist attitudes are depicted as dinosaurs under the tagline ‘Make racism extinct’.”

If racially aware white youths were asked by the British National Party to create an anti-black poster-campaign centered around ethnically dubious re-readings of King Kong as opposed to Jurassic Park, how long do you think they’d have until the State-launched hate-crime offense asteroid hit them?

These Spades Are Not For Digging

At least these are just rhetorical metaphors. Far more alarming is that various academics out there are seriously trying to rebrand the actual fossil-hunting science of paleontology into “pale-eontology”, an innately historically racist enterprise invented by pale-faced whiteys to oppress the real-life human Nigersauruses of this world.

In 2021, Cambridge Used-To-Be-A-University Press published the paper “Our Past Creates Our Present: A Brief Overview of Racism and Colonialism in Western Paleontology” which bemoaned at length how

Western paleontology and geology are intertwined with systematic practices of exclusion, oppression, and erasure that arose from their direct participation in the extraction of geological and biological resources at the expense of Black [sic], Indigenous [sic], and People of Color [sic].

By wiping out age-old native explanations for dinosaur bones, like legends they were the remains of dead dragons, and arrogantly replacing them with the simple biological truth instead, pale-eontologists were engaging in a form of cultural genocide only disguised as mere objective science.

Furthermore, paleontology was an innately “extractive” discipline, it was argued, raping the planet and despoiling stolen native land, often abusing co-opted natives to excavate the bones to boot. Unfortunately, the authors fail to explain precisely how future, less colonially “extractive” white scientists should henceforth go about obtaining their fossils without actually digging them up first.

A White At the Museum

Even more paranoid and self-hating in its contents was another 2021 paper, “Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum”, by Scott Magelsson, a Professor from the University of Washington – a Professor in Theater and Performance Studies, that is.

Magelsson’s basic thesis is that, “In so many words, dinosaurs are racist”, at least as mediated and embodied via their “performative representation in museological display.” White curators of the past may have thought they were simply placing jumbles of old bones on display in a neutral and educational manner, but actually pale-eontologists viewed “dinosaur others” in much the same way as they viewed black, Injun and Muslim “others”: as wild, foreign, alien species, in opposition to their much more highly civilized white discoverers, thereby causing dinosaur bones in museums to “have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other.”

Considered in this light, dinosaurs are not “innocent” of white-perpetuated racism at all, then, but scaly Uncle Toms, happy to serve as subaltern prehistoric “perpetuators of the white racial frame, the hegemonic worldview that holds up the white subject as the protagonist of history”, acting like brown collaborators with the British in Raj-era India, for example. Therefore, dinosaurs are inherently “political forms of life”; as there is so much we still don’t know about dinos, this allowed whip-cracking white curators to exploit the “terrible lizards” as unwitting long-dead vehicles for their vile racist ideologies.

New York’s American Museum of Natural History was the first major institution to mount dinosaur bones together into the now-familiar full-bodied display-skeletons in the early 1900s, under the direction of leading pale-eontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn was a eugenicist who really was concerned that white people would one day go the way of Diplodocus, writing a preface to Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History, in 1916.

Thus, two competing possible interpretations of dinosaurs emerge from Osborn’s dioramas. On the one hand, the giant, majestic, all-conquering dinosaurs may have been whites from the Herrenvolk “Great Race” like him, about to be harried into extinction by interbreeding with, and outbreeding by, imported, inferior, scrabbling little foreign mammals like Africans and Asians. A giant flesh-eating theropod dinosaur may thereby become an admirable evolutionary “climax creature” like Teddy “T-Rex” Roosevelt, a real man of the superior white race, before things went downhill and we all started devolving into mixed-race herbivorous degenerates like Barack Obamasaur instead.

On the other hand, being presented as innately fierce, rapacious and flesh-eating, the predatory dinosaurs Osborn tended to enjoy displaying most may have stood in for voracious, merciless human carnivores like black street-muggers on the New York subway, or Muslim rape-gangs in the British Midlands, the primitive hordes who would one day eat us all alive. Here is a 1913 display from Osborn’s museum of two skeletal T-Rexes fighting over a delicious corpse, possibly of Bernie Goetz.

Subliminally, is that just two knife-wielding urban black men squabbling over the spoils of a stabbed Caucasian’s stolen wallet? Or two Pakistani Muslims tussling over who gets to rape a 12-year-old white English girl first? Or, you know … is it just some effing dinosaurs, doing dinosaur things, and competing over food?

The 1897 paleontological painting Leaping Laelaps; another typical imported non-white rapist takes his chance and pounces on YOUR sunbathing sister?

Reds in Tooth and Claw

That Magelsson presents two directly competing interpretations – that dinosaurs are whites and non-whites simultaneously – strongly suggests this is all little more than an extended exercise in compulsive left-wing political projection. The Constant Drama Professor also manages to layer “a cautionary tale against laissez-faire capitalism” onto them, for example: unregulated businesses, like unregulated megafauna, often go bust, apparently.

Far better, Magelsson implies, are modern-day curatorial presentations like one in today’s Royal Ontario Museum, which moves away from portraying dinosaurs as toxically masculine, capitalistic and violent white T-Rex bastards, towards displaying a far more peaceful side to dinosaur-kind in the shape of a feminine hadrosaur-housewife, depicted as “a good mother lizard.” Paleontological paintings showing giant ground sloths “working together peacefully”, like hairy communists, also seem much more acceptable to modern left-wing eyes.

If Henry Fairfield Osborn really did encode his own political fixations into his dino-dioramas, he’s got nothing on woke, left-wing curators today. Canada’s Pacific Museum of the Earth has a new display trying to link dinosaurs with climate change, its director Dr. Kirsten Hodge saying she hopes to persuade visitors that,

While the dinosaurs didn’t have the power to stop the asteroid and the ensuing [climate] disasters that happened, we have the power to – and agency to – take action and change and adapt to this current situation that we’re in.

In the hectoring words of her Life At the Edge exhibition’s online spiel, “This exhibit isn’t just about the past but about our future on Earth.” It certainly is; one of relentless and never-ending propagandizing.

Gays, meanwhile, are spoiled for choice when it comes to purportedly queer dinosaurs. At the UK’s Hastings Museum last year, a cast of an Iguanodon footprint suddenly gained the following hilarious (but quite genuine) caption: “We cannot comment on the sexuality of the dinosaur who made this footprint, but we do know that the 11-year-old boy who found it is now grown-up, happily married to his husband Greg, and living in a pink house in Hastings.”

The clearest example of the utterly misguided mental processes at work here comes from another UK institution, Leicester Museum, which managed to get a complete, but semi-fake, cast-metal sauropod skeleton out of a few scattered bone-fragments, something which then allowed the museum’s resident queers to argue the following: “Queer history is like this dinosaur skeleton. Only small fragments have survived, but with guesses, context and knowledge, we can put them together into something amazing.” For “amazing” there, please read “false” and “invented”.

Dinosaurs aren’t racist: or capitalist, communist, feminist, toxically masculine, gay, or Green. They’re just dinosaurs. What all this stuff reminds me of most are those hardline Christian Creationist Museums you get across America’s Bible-Belt, which display Genesis-friendly scenes of Adam and Eve living alongside Velociraptors, Plesiosaurs and cavemen, or Noah barring a distraught wet Triceratops from boarding his salvationary Ark. Leftists usually laugh like drains at those, but really, upon the above evidence, they have no right to do so, as they’re far worse when it comes to projecting delusional ideological fantasies onto innocent museum displays and dem dry, dry, ol’ bones. 

Proof, perhaps, that today’s wokeness really is a sublimated form of secular religion for many of its adherents after all. And this religion is absolutely everywhere now. The Pakis are not the only ones out of containment.

Notes

[1] Meaning “thick-headed lizard” – also an excellent description of Pakistani-heritage London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

[2] Several dinosaurs are christened after their countries of discovery. Amusingly, there is even one genuinely called Pakisaurus, originally found in Pakistan; Mobeen also thick-headedly complained about this in his YouTube video.