Amy Wilentz: The Haiti Haters
[Amy Wilentz is a Nation contributing editor and the author of the award-winning The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (Simon & Schuster, 1989). She teaches journalism at the University of California, Irvine. ]
The Haitian tragedy has opened up a whole new industry for what I call the genteel racist point of view... There are many problems in Haiti, but most of the negative pronouncements that have been circulating do not touch on them. The commentary has been psychopolitical rather than analytical....
At least reporters, while their views may be wrongheaded, are giving us new information from the ground. Far more insidious are the armchair commentators who know nothing about Haiti--many never having set toe there--but enjoy rebuking suffering Haitians from the comfort of their white bastions in the United States and Europe. I've never seen victims so roundly blamed for their fate. David Brooks's recent column in the New York Times--one of the paper's most e-mailed articles the week it was published--blamed Haiti's culture for the quake's violence.
"It is time," Brooks writes sententiously, "to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well."
By all means, let's turn to actual history, which Brooks has mangled. As has been mentioned repeatedly, the Haitian slaves rose up in 1791 and began what was to become the only successful slave revolution in modern history. That war ended, after much loss of life on both sides, with the establishment of the world's first black republic, in 1804--just twenty-eight years after the American Declaration of Independence. The Haitians' models were the American and French revolutions, and they based their ideas on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But their revolution seems to have been a little premature for the tastes of the world in which they had to operate. Haiti was almost immediately saddled with a gargantuan and punitive reparations payment to France in exchange for recognition and the ability to engage in unhampered international trade. The wealthy, slaveholding United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the Southern states seceded. Haiti has been a pariah nation for its entire history.
Barbados, on the other hand: the Barbadians made their bold stand for independence from Britain in... 1966. The British had already given up slavery more than a century earlier. It was an unbloody, negotiated independence, and Barbados is still a part of the British Commonwealth. In fact, its membership began on the date of independence, as did Jamaica's, in 1962, when it shrugged off the very loose shackles of the remnant of British colonialism. The British were less brutal masters than the French, and in the eighteenth century it was probably wiser to remain a colony under them than, as the Haitians did, gain your freedom at the expense of your economic welfare....
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The Haitian tragedy has opened up a whole new industry for what I call the genteel racist point of view... There are many problems in Haiti, but most of the negative pronouncements that have been circulating do not touch on them. The commentary has been psychopolitical rather than analytical....
At least reporters, while their views may be wrongheaded, are giving us new information from the ground. Far more insidious are the armchair commentators who know nothing about Haiti--many never having set toe there--but enjoy rebuking suffering Haitians from the comfort of their white bastions in the United States and Europe. I've never seen victims so roundly blamed for their fate. David Brooks's recent column in the New York Times--one of the paper's most e-mailed articles the week it was published--blamed Haiti's culture for the quake's violence.
"It is time," Brooks writes sententiously, "to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well."
By all means, let's turn to actual history, which Brooks has mangled. As has been mentioned repeatedly, the Haitian slaves rose up in 1791 and began what was to become the only successful slave revolution in modern history. That war ended, after much loss of life on both sides, with the establishment of the world's first black republic, in 1804--just twenty-eight years after the American Declaration of Independence. The Haitians' models were the American and French revolutions, and they based their ideas on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But their revolution seems to have been a little premature for the tastes of the world in which they had to operate. Haiti was almost immediately saddled with a gargantuan and punitive reparations payment to France in exchange for recognition and the ability to engage in unhampered international trade. The wealthy, slaveholding United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the Southern states seceded. Haiti has been a pariah nation for its entire history.
Barbados, on the other hand: the Barbadians made their bold stand for independence from Britain in... 1966. The British had already given up slavery more than a century earlier. It was an unbloody, negotiated independence, and Barbados is still a part of the British Commonwealth. In fact, its membership began on the date of independence, as did Jamaica's, in 1962, when it shrugged off the very loose shackles of the remnant of British colonialism. The British were less brutal masters than the French, and in the eighteenth century it was probably wiser to remain a colony under them than, as the Haitians did, gain your freedom at the expense of your economic welfare....