Muscio - Autobiography of a blue-eyed devil: my life and times in a racist, imperialist society

autobiography of a blue-eyed devil

autobiography of a blue-eyed devil

my life and times in a racist, imperialist society

inga muscio

seven stories press

new york

Copyright 2005, 2014 by Inga Muscio

First Seven Stories Press edition March 2014.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muscio, Inga.

Autobiography of a blue-eyed devil : my life and times in a racist, imperialist society / Inga Muscio .

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-60980-520-3 (pbk.)

1. Muscio, Inga. 2. Feminists--United States--Biography. 3. Racism--United States. 4. United States--Race relations. I. Title.

HQ1413.M87A3 2014

305.42092--dc23

[B]

2013024899

Printed in the U.S.A.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to all the folks who read it with an open mind.

Good job and thanks.

Sending love to you.

This dedication is dedicated to Riz Rollins,

who presides over an embassy compound inside my heart.

table of contents

foreword: conceptions of a pale-skinned savage

preface

eenie, meenie, miney, mo,
catch a cracker by the toe

foreword

conceptions of a pale-skinned savage

Consider this redaction of world history, the sort of thing to be found in any grade school textbook:

Sixteenth-century South Asia had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. So their most important export was force. Bolstered by superior firepower, the conquerors that burst forth from the Indian subcontinent were more than able to shoulder the Brown Mans Burden of bringing the pale savages in the far northwest to their rightful dharma. Owing to this, the succeeding five centuries granted the works of esoteric regional authors like Shakespeareji and Chaucerji an otherwise-unobtainable immortality through their transliteration into that most universal of scripts, Devanagari. Similarly, Dickensji received rare admittance to the otherwise exclusive canons of world literature with his powerfully narrated condemnations of the occasional abuses committed by a handful of overzealous Hindoo administrators upon the yeomanry of the English countryside.

Of course, this is not to be found in any textbook. South Asia had a great deal that was in demand in the rest of the world, and by and large had little interest in exporting force. So I have begun with a fiction, a lie, my own deliberately twisted misrepresentation. Whats worse, I have begun with a plagiarism as well, a misrepresentation of a story I pilfered from somebody else. This is the story I stole: Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. And unlike my own narration, this one is not a fiction, a lie, nor a misrepresentation. It is a fact.

Facts, though, only go so far. They are the components from which truths are manufactured, but they do not come with instructions for assembly. Consider, for example, this fact: I am white. Fair enough, but what to make of this? One possible configuration is that I possess a relatively small amount of melanin per square inch of skin, from which one may conclude that my ancestors made their livelihoods in locales where sunburn was a lesser issue than was the bodys hunger for vitamin D. Personally, I am comfortable labeling this constellation of facts a truth . One might also conclude from this that being so cursed with melanin insufficiency, I am not a member of those other chromas arrayed along the spectrum we compulsively employ to paint humanity: black, yellow, red, and sometimes brown. Again, fair enough.

But what other meanings can one draw from my whiteness? That I am lactose tolerant, perhaps? Not so fast. One finds lactose tolerance and intolerance spread across all hues of the human spectrum. Indeed, one could speak of the two races of humanitythe lactose tolerant and the lactase insufficientand I could join with my fellow ice cream eaters (regardless the shade of their dermis) to celebrate our well-deserved mastery over the hordes of frozen-dairy-treat-hating savages (pale-skinned ones included). Could one, then, at least conclude that my blood cells are not prone to sickle and so deprive my body of oxygen? In my particular instance, a fair guess, but a hypothetical blood-cell-sickling-anemic race would include representatives of at least three chromatic distinctions: people from spots scattered across the European subcontinent, a sizable contingent from the lowlands of Southeast Asia, and people from only certain parts of Africa below the Sahara.

The color of ones skin, then, tells us only one thing for certain: the color of ones skin. So how could it even be imagined that one might be able to deduce from whiteness such notions as this: to be white is to be hardworking and ingenious, for it is to have come from a clime harsh enough to demand diligent effort if one was to thrive, but not so harsh as to render diligence futile. Yet we have all heard this story so many times and in so many ways, this fairytale of the European Miracle, that we know it by heart. Heres another one: to be white is to be a barbarian, a savage incapable of governing oneself or others, for it is to have come from a clime that overfills one with spirit and deprives one of the leisure to develop intelligence or skill. The ancient Athenians, no slouches themselves in the exportation of force, came up with that one. And in retrospect, I am not convinced that it is the Athenians who are further from the mark. If white could tell me anything more than the color of my skin, of course.

Here I feel compelled to make a further confession, I have inflicted upon you yet another fiction. No spectrum is composed of just primary colors, and to the discerning eye I am not merely white. I am pale, but with a distinctly olive tinge. And for those whose eyes discern, this is no small thing. One such pair of eyes was upon me during a long-ago trip through ol Virginny. After some while, the markedly pinkish body behind those eyes approached me with an inquiry, Where are you from? Navely, I answered with the city of my origin, Los Angeles. No, the questioner interjected, where are your parents from? An odd question that, and I answered with the rust belt city of their birth. Frustration was clearly mounting, and my questioner demanded, I mean, where is your family from?! He wanted a simple answer, and my family had none to offer. So I described the procession of ancestors across the undulating steppes of central Asia to Crimea, the hope-filled strides of others due south across the frostbitten fields of the Russian empire, the involuntary eastward flight of yet others from the violated glories of al-Andalus (just at the moment Columbus set out from the same point, albeit in the opposite direction) and across the farther Mediterranean shore. All the while, I was certain I could hear the most spectacular of terminological gymnastics straining my interrogators imagination: two-humped-camel-jockey-oriental-dune-coon-rag-headed-spic-kike-russki trash. But I need not have feared; he was far too parsimonious for that. I got it, he burst out, in a matter-of-fact tone tinged with relief but not the slightest hint of malice. Youre lessthanwhite.