Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

Non-European cultures are not seen as cultures but as catch basins of ignorance, useful at best for proving the impotence of inferior races, or attracting tourists, or giving holiday parties a decorative touch. But in the real garden of mestizo culture, indigenous and African roots flower with as much potency as their European counterparts. Their bountiful fruits can be plainly seen not only in high art but in arts scorned as handicrafts and in religions dismissed as superstition. Those roots, ignored but not ignorant, feed the daily lives of people of flesh and blood even if some don’t realize it or would rather not see it. They are alive in the languages that reveal who we are by what we say and what we keep silent, in our ways of eating and preparing what we eat, in the melodies that make us dance, the games that make us play, and the thousand and one secret or shared ceremonies that help us live.

For centuries the divinities that came from the American past and the coasts of Africa were outlawed and lived in hiding. Although they are still disdained today, many believing whites and mestizos pay them homage or acknowledge them and ask their favors. In the Andean countries, it’s not only Indians who tilt their glasses and allow the first swallow to spill so that Pachamama, goddess of the earth, may drink. On the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South America, it’s no longer only blacks who offer flowers and treats to Iemanyá, goddess of the sea. The days are over when Indian and black gods had to dress up as Christian saints in order to exist. Still, they remain objects of scorn by official culture. In our alienated societies, trained for centuries to spit in the mirror, it isn’t easy to accept that religions which originated in the Americas or came on slave ships from Africa are as worthy of respect as Christianity. Not more, but not a bit less. Religions? Those superstitions? Those pagan exaltations of nature, those dangerous celebrations of human passion? Picturesque, maybe even pleasant, but deep down what are they? Just expressions of ignorance and backwardness.

Justice

In 1997, an expensive new car with official plates traveled at a normal speed down a São Paulo avenue. Three men rode inside. At a corner they were stopped by a policeman who made them get out and stand against the car, hands in the air, for over an hour while he asked them again and again where they had stolen the car.

The three men were black. One of them, Edivaldo Brito, was the head of the São Paulo Justice Department. For Brito this was nothing new. In less than a year it had already happened five times.

The policeman who stopped them was also black.

Viewing blacks and their symbols of identity that way is a longstanding tradition. In 1937, to open the road to progress in the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered twenty-five thousand black Haitians cut to pieces with machetes. The generalissimo, a mulatto whose grandmother was Haitian, used to whiten his face with rice powder and he wanted to whiten the country, too. As an indemnity, the Dominican government paid $29 per body to Haiti. After lengthy negotiations, Trujillo admitted to eighteen thousands deaths, for a total of $522,000.

Meanwhile, far from there, Adolf Hitler was sterilizing Gypsies and the mulatto children of Senegalese soldiers who had come to Germany in French uniforms. The Nazi plan to achieve Aryan purity began with the sterilization of criminals and people with hereditary diseases and then moved on to the Jews.

The world’s first euthanasia law was approved in 1901 by the state of Indiana. By 1930, thirty U.S. states had legalized the sterilization of the retarded, dangerous murderers, rapists, and those who belonged to categories as fuzzy as “social perverts,” “alcoholics and other drug addicts,” and “sick and degenerate people.” Most of those sterilized were, of course, black. In Europe, Germany wasn’t alone in enacting laws inspired by dreams of social hygiene and racial purity. Sweden, for example, has recently admitted to sterilizing more than sixty thousand people under a 1930s law not repealed until 1976.

In the twenties and thirties the most prestigious educators in the Americas spoke of the need to “regenerate the race,” “improve the species,” or “change the biological quality of children.” When Peruvian dictator Augusto Leguía opened the Pan-American Children’s Congress in 1930, he emphasized “ethnic improvement,” echoing Peru’s recent National Conference on Children, which had raised the alarm about “child retards, degenerates, and criminals.” Six years earlier, when the congress was held in Chile, many speakers insisted on the necessity of “selecting the seeds to be sown, to avoid impure children,” while the Argentine daily La Nación editorialized about the need “to look out for the future of the race” and in Chile El Mercurio warned that Indian “habits and ignorance impede the adoption of certain modern customs and concepts.”

Points of View/4

In the East of the world, Western day is night.

In India, those in mourning wear white.

In ancient Europe, black, the color of the fertile earth, was the color of life, and white, the color of bones, was the color of death.

According to the wise old men of Colombia’s Chocó region, Adam and Eve were black, and so were their sons, Cain and Abel. When Cain killed his brother with one blow, God’s fury thundered across the heavens. Cringing before the Lord’s rage, the murderer turned so pale from guilt and fear that he stayed white until the end of his days. We whites are all children of Cain.

A leading participant in the congress in Chile, a socialist medical doctor named José Ingenieros, wrote in 1905 that blacks, “opprobrious scoriae,” merited enslavement for reasons “of purely biological reality.” The rights of man could not be extended to “these simian beings, who seem closer to anthropoid monkeys than to civilized whites.” According to Ingenieros — a guiding light of Argentine youth — neither should “these scraps of human flesh” aspire to be citizens, “because they shouldn’t be considered people in the juridical sense.” A few years earlier, another doctor, Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, had spoken in no less outrageous terms. This pioneer of anthropology in Brazil declared that “the study of inferior races has offered science well-observed examples of their organic cerebral incapacity.”

Most of the intellectuals of the Americas were convinced that “inferior races” blocked the road to progress. Nearly all governments held the same opinion. In the south of the United States mixed marriages were outlawed and blacks couldn’t get into schools, washrooms, or cemeteries reserved for whites. The blacks of Costa Rica couldn’t enter the city of San José without a permit. No black was allowed to cross the border into El Salvador. Indians weren’t allowed on the sidewalks of the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

But Latin America never had euthanasia laws, maybe because hunger and the police were already on the job. Today, indigenous children in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru are still dying like flies from hunger and curable diseases, and in Brazil eight out of every ten street kids murdered by death squads are black. The last U.S. euthanasia law was repealed in 1972 in Virginia, but in the United States the mortality rate of black infants is twice that of whites, and four out of every ten adults executed in the electric chair, by lethal injection, pills, firing squad, or hanging are black.

During the Second World War, while many black Americans lay dying on European battlefields, the U.S. Red Cross refused blood donations from blacks, lest the mixing outlawed in bedrooms occur by transfusion. Fear of contamination, as seen in some of William Faulkner’s literary marvels and in the many horrors of the hooded Ku Klux Klan, is a ghost that has not disappeared from the nightmares of North Americans. No one can deny the spectacular achievements of the civil rights movement over the past few decades. Yet blacks still face an unemployment rate twice that of whites, and more of them end up in jail than in college. One out of every four has been or is currently imprisoned. Three out of every four black residents of Washington, D.C., have been arrested at least once. In Los Angeles, blacks driving expensive cars are systematically stopped by police offering the usual humiliations and the occasional beating as well, like the one given to Rodney King in 1991, setting off an explosion of collective anger that made the city tremble. In 1995 Ambassador James Cheek of the United States flippantly dismissed Argentina’s patent law, a timid effort at independence, as “worthy of Burundi,” and he didn’t offend a soul, not in Argentina, the United States, or Burundi. By the way, Burundi was at war at the time, as was Yugoslavia. According to the news agencies, Burundi suffered tribal conflict, but in Yugoslavia the conflict was — take your pick — ethnic, national, or religious.