Mourners made Harambe trend on the 4th anniversary of his death, but some found it insensitive in light of protests roiling the US
- On May 28, 2016, a 400-pound western lowland silverback gorilla named Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure.
- Clips of the harrowing encounter went viral, gaining millions of views on YouTube within 24 hours.
- Thursday marked the fourth anniversary of Harambe's death, but some people complained that the memorials were insensitive given protests on race relations that were roiling the county.
Four years ago on May 28, a 400-pound western lowland silverback gorilla named Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden after a three-year-old boy climbed into his enclosure. The incident happened little before 4 pm on a Saturday. Having made his way over the barrier fence and through a thicket of bushes, the child fell 15 feet into a shallow moat, where his splashing attracted Harambe's attention.
The 10 minutes that followed — some of which was captured on camera by onlookers — instantly became the stuff of internet legend. In the most widely circulated clip of the incident, Harambe was seen dragging the child by his leg through the moat, ultimately leaving zookeepers no choice but to intervene.
Harambe became 2016's defining meme. Only a day before his death, Harambe celebrated his 17th birthday.
On the anniversary of his death, mourners and internet historians marked the loss on social media, but amid protests over the killing of black men by police and others, many criticized the trend as insensitive.
Harambe's death sparked a debate over a tragic choice.
The internet's obsession with Harambe was driven in part by real sadness and outrage.
After the shooting, animal rights activists questioned whether killing Harambe was the right decision, and the ethicality of keeping animals in zoos at all became a topic of national conversation. Experts and eyewitnesses were polled for their analysis of Harambe's behavior in the clips, turning the zookeepers' choice to preemptively kill Harambe into a subject of intense public scrutiny.
Some eyewitnesses said that, initially, Harambe appeared to be protecting the child, and only when onlookers started screaming did Harambe grow uneasy. #Justice4Harambe trended online, petitions were made and signed by thousands, and candlelight vigils and protests took place across the country. Mourners paid their respects to Harambe by leaving flowers and trinkets beside a bronze gorilla statue outside the zoo's Gorilla World exhibit.
At a news conference, Cincinnati Zoo director Thane Maynard said Harambe was "clearly disoriented" and "acting erratically." Harambe was the only gorilla in the enclosure that did not respond to zookeepers' special calls to clear the area. And a tranquilizer dart, he continued, could have taken up to 10 minutes to sedate Harambe and potentially caused additional panic.
"You can't take a risk with a silverback gorilla," Maynard said. "We're talking about animals that with one hand can take a coconut and crush it."
When the outrage died down two and a half months after the original news event, Harambe was reborn as a meme.
The internet has a dark and absurd sense of humor. Propelled by Instagram's black community and Weird Twitter, the internet exploded with over-the-top Harambe memorial posts.
These parody memorial memes, in turn, created a galaxy of sub-memes, song parodies, and slogans, including the infamous "dicks out for Harambe."
Harambe even earned a shout-out on Young Thug's 2016 JEFFREY album, on which every track is dedicated to one of the rapper's idols. Harambe's name appeared beside the likes of Rihanna, Kanye West, Wyclef Jean, and Floyd Mayweather.
The Harambe meme was co-opted by a number of online communities, but as Aja Romano observed for Vox, black social media users embraced it specifically "to comment ironically on the ways in which society tends to minimize and overlook the deaths of ordinary people of color." Harambe's death, memorably, occurred the same week 1,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and immigrate to Europe. But the loss was largely overshadowed by the Harambe hysteria — a response with racist and sexist implications, given that both the boy and his mother are black.
On the 4th anniversary of his death, "Harambe" once again trended on Twitter.
Some took the opportunity to unironically share cute photos of him.
Others paid homage with irreverent humor.
But looking back on Harambe's untimely death amid the ongoing pandemic and protests over the recent deaths of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery felt, for many, like a painful reminder of just how far we haven't come since 2016: the same year President Donald Trump was elected.
Similar criticism to that which sparked the meme resurfaced, with people suggesting that making Harambe trend while the country was having a national conversation about race relations was insensitive.
Other online communities, like the one centered around K-pop group Blackpink, are actively attempting to suppress trends to boost #BlackLivesMatter.
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