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 Sweden, for example, has recently admitted to sterilizing more than sixty thousand people under a 1930s law not repealed until 1976.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