Upside Down

by Eduardo Galeano

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  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 Sweden, for example, has recently admitted to sterilizing more than sixty thousand people under a 1930s law not repealed until 1976.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.”

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  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.

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  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.

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  Thus It Is Proven That Indians Are Inferior

  (According to the Conquistadors of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

  The Indians of the Caribbean islands commit suicide? Because they are lazy and refuse to work.

  They go about naked, as if their entire bodies were faces? Because savages have no shame.

  They know nothing of the right of property, share everything, and have no desire for riches? Because they are closer to the apes than to man.

  They bathe with suspicious frequency? Because they are like the heretics of the sect of Mohammed, who burn well in the fires of the Inquisition.

  They believe in dreams and obey their voices? The influence of Satan or plain stupidity.

  Homosexuality is practiced freely? Virginity has no importance? Because they are promiscuous and live at hell’s door.

  They never hit their children and they let them run free? Because they are incapable of punishment or discipline.

  They eat when they are hungry and not at mealtimes? Because they are incapable of dominating their instincts.

  They adore nature, which they consider their mother, and believe she is sacred? Because they are incapable of religion and can profess only idolatry.

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  Thus It Is Proven That Blacks Are Inferior

  (According to the Thinkers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)

  Voltaire, anticlerical writer, advocate of tolerance and reason: Blacks are inferior to Europeans but superior to apes.

  Carolus Linnaeus, classifier of plants and animals: The black is a vagabond, lazy, negligent, indolent, and of dissolute morals.

  David Hume, master of human understanding: The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.

  Etienne Serres, sage of anatomy: Blacks are condemned to be primitive because of the short distance between
their belly buttons and their penises.

  Francis Galton, father of eugenics, the scientific method for impeding the propagation of the unfit: A crocodile will never become a gazelle, nor will a black ever become a member of the middle class.

  Louis Agassiz, prominent zoologist: The brain of the adult black is equivalent to that of a seven-month-old white fetus; the development of the brain is blocked because the black cranium closes much earlier than the white cranium.

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  Two hundred years ago, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who truly understood Spanish America, wrote that “lighter or darker skin determines the class a man occupies in society.” Those words continue to paint a fairly accurate picture not only of Spanish America but of all the Americas, from North to South, even though Bolivia recently had an Indian vice president and the United States can show off a well-known black general brimming with medals, some prominent black politicians, and successful black businessmen.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, the few Latin American mulattos who had become wealthy could buy certificados de blancura from the Spanish crown or cartas de branquidão from the Portuguese crown, testaments to a sudden change of skin color that bestowed a corresponding change in rights. Over the centuries, money continued to be capable of such alchemy. In exceptional cases, so could talent: the Brazilian Machado de Assis, the greatest Latin American writer of the nineteenth century, was mulatto but, as his compatriot Joaquim Nabuco liked to say, his literary talent turned him white. “Racial democracy” remains a social pyramid with a summit that is white or pretends to be.

  The situation of Indians in Canada is reasonably similar to that of blacks in the United States: they make up less than 5 percent of the population, but three out of every ten prisoners are Indian and their infant mortality rate is twice that of whites. In Mexico, the average wage for Indians is barely half the national average and the rate of malnutrition is double. Rarely are black-skinned Brazilians found in universities, on soap operas, or in advertisements. Official Brazilian statistics show many fewer blacks than there really are, and the followers of African religions are listed as Catholics. In the Dominican Republic, where for better or worse everyone has some black ancestor, identity documents register skin color but the word “black” is never used: “I don’t put down ‘black’ so they won’t be disgraced their whole lives,” an official explained to me.

  The Dominican border with Haiti, a black country, is called “the Bad Pass.” Throughout Latin America, classified ads that ask for “well-groomed employees” are really asking for light-skinned ones. A black lawyer in Lima told me judges are always confusing him with the defendant. In 1996, the mayor of São Paulo had to issue a decree to open elevators in private buildings to everyone. They had usually been off-limits to the poor, which is to say, to blacks and dark-skinned mulattos. At the end of that year, just before Christmas, the Nativity scene in the cathedral of Salta in northern Argentina caused a scandal. The shepherds and the three kings, the Virgin and Saint Joseph, even the baby Jesus were all Indians, with Indian clothes and features. Such a sacrilege could not last. After expressions of indignation from local high society and threats of arson, the Nativity scene was removed.

  At the time of the Conquest it was already clear that Indians would be condemned to servitude in this life and hell in the next. There was plenty of evidence of Satan’s reign in the Americas. Among the more irrefutable proofs: homosexuality was practiced freely in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In 1446, King Alfonso V ordered Portuguese homosexuals burned at the stake: “We order and dispose by general law that any man who commits such a sin under any guise shall be burned and reduced to dust by fire, so that memory of neither his body nor his burial shall ever be heard.” In 1497, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, ordered burned alive those guilty of the “nefarious sin of sodomy,” who previously had been stoned to death or hanged. The conquistadors offered their own worthy contributions to the technology of punishing homosexuals. In 1513, two days before what is called the discovery of the Pacific Ocean, Captain Vasco Núñez de Balboa “dogged” fifty Indians who offended God by committing “the abominable sin against nature.” Instead of burning them alive, he threw them to dogs trained to devour human flesh. The spectacle took place in Panama by the light of bonfires. Balboa’s dog, Leoncico, earned the salary of a second lieutenant.

  Nearly five centuries later, in May 1997, in the small Brazilian city of São Gonçalo de Amarante, a man killed fifteen people, then committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest because people in town were saying he was gay. Ever since the Conquest, the established order has worked feverishly to uphold the biblical tradition not by socializing worldly goods—God forbid—but by perpetuating its most horrendous phobias.

  Today, the gay and lesbian movement has won broad freedoms and respect, above all in the North, but cobwebs still cloud our vision. Too many people see homosexuality as a sin that cannot be expiated, an indelible and contagious stigma or an invitation to ruin that tempts the innocent. The sinners, whether viewed as diseased or delinquent, constitute a public threat. Many homosexuals fall victim to “social cleansing groups” in Colombia, death squads in Brazil, or any number of fanatics in uniform or civilian clothes around the world who exorcise their own demons by beating or stabbing or shooting. According to anthropologist Luiz Mott of the Gay Group of Bahía, no less than eighteen hundred homosexuals have been murdered in the past fifteen years in Brazil. “They kill one another,” say the police. “That’s how fags are.” One hears exactly the same explanation for wars in Africa (“That’s how blacks are”) and for massacres of Indians in the Americas (“That’s how Indians are”).

  “That’s how women are” is also said. Racism and sexism drink from the same wells and spit out similar words. According to Argentine criminologist Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, the founding text of all penal law is The Witches’ Hammer, a manual from the Inquisition directed against half of humanity and published in 1546. The inquisitors spend the entire book, first page to last, justifying the punishment of women by their biological inferiority. Women had long been mistreated in the Bible and in Greek mythology, from the days when foolish Eve made God throw us out of paradise and when that idiot Pandora opened the box and filled the world with misfortune. “The head of woman is that of man,” explained Saint Paul to the Corinthians, and nineteen centuries later Gustave Le Bon, one of the founders of social psychology, was able to prove that an intelligent woman is as rare as a two-headed gorilla. Charles Darwin acknowledged some feminine virtues, like intuition, but these were “virtues characteristic of inferior races.”

  Since the earliest days of the Conquest of America, homosexuals have been accused of treason to masculinity. Then, the most unpardonable of affronts to the Lord, who was obviously male, was the femininity of those Indians who to be women needed only to have tits and to give birth, as Balboa is said to have put it. Today, treason against femininity is the accusation leveled at lesbians, those degenerates who don’t reproduce. Born to make children, undress drunks, and dress up saints, women have traditionally been accused of congenital stupidity, like Indians, like blacks. And like them they have been condemned to the shantytowns of history. Official history in the Americas concedes only a tiny role to those loyal shadows of male heroes, resigned mothers and suffering widows: the flag, embroidery, and mourning. Rarely is mention made of the European women who fought in the Conquest or the women born in the Americas who raised their swords in the wars of independence, although macho historians should at least applaud their virtues as warriors. Even less does one hear of the Indian and black women who led several of the many rebellions in the colonial period. Invisible, they appear only miraculously, when you dig deep enough. Not long ago, reading a book about Surinam, I learned of Kaála, leader of free people, who roused fugitive slaves with her sacred staff and abandoned her husband because he was feeble at love.

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  Points of
View/5

  Had the Saints who wrote the Gospels been women, how would they have portrayed the first night of the Christian era?

  Saint Joseph, the Holy women would have written, was in a foul mood, the only one with a long face in that stable where the baby Jesus shone in his manger. Everybody else was smiling: the Virgin Mary, the little angels, the shepherds, the sheep, the oxen, the donkey, the kings who had come from the East, and the star that had led them to Bethlehem. Everybody smiled except for sullen Saint Joseph, who grumbled, “I wanted a girl.”

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  Points of View/6

  If Eve had written Genesis, what would she have said about the first night of human love?

  Eve would have begun by making it clear that she was not born from anyone’s rib, nor did she know any serpents, nor did she offer anyone apples, and God never told her that giving birth would hurt or that your husband would tell you what to do. All those stories were just lies Adam told the press.

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  Like Indians and blacks, women, though inferior, are a threat. “Better a man’s spite than a woman’s kindness,” warns Ecclesiasticus. And Odysseus knew enough to avoid the songs of mermaids meant to entice men from their course. There is no cultural tradition that does not justify the masculine monopoly on weapons and words, nor is there a popular tradition that fails to perpetuate disdain for women or to denounce them as a danger. Proverbs transmitted from generation to generation teach that women and lies were born the same day and that a woman’s word isn’t worth a pin. The peasant mythology of Latin America is filled with ghosts of women seeking vengeance as fearsome spirits, “evil lights” that lie in wait for travelers at night. In vigil and in sleep, men betray their terror that females may invade the forbidden territories of pleasure and power, and thus it has been from time immemorial.