As with Yemen after the failed underwear bombing, it's been astonishing to watch one Haiti expert after another emerge to explain all that ails Haiti in the aftermath of its earthquake. The explanations from these righteous dilettantes have been astonishingly similar.
David Brooks writes that Haiti "suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences" including "the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile." Anne Applebaum, who is "unable to look at the photographs from Haiti," briefly acknowledges the "historical reasons" why U.S. aid to Haiti could be seen as "colonial imposition" but again looks away rather than considering more carefully why this might be the case. (More astonishingly, she writes that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were "moved quickly out of New Orleans". No.) Jonah Goldberg is less tactful, writing that "Even if blame lies everywhere except among the victims themselves, it doesn't change the fact that Haiti will never get out of grinding poverty until it abandons much of its culture."
What all these critiques have in common is that they maximize white innocence and remove all responsibility from Western society. Goldberg in particular, is inadvertently revealing, writing that "if it alleviates Western guilt to say that Haiti's poverty stems entirely from a legacy of racism and colonialism, fine." But in fact the dirty secret is that all of these writers are trying to alleviate "Western" guilt by ensuring Haitians understand its their own goddamn fault that they are bleeding, dying, and crawling out from underneath the rubble of their shattered homes.
It's deeper of course, than simply erasing the "Western" role in creating the Haitian "culture" these critics condemn. As Mark Danner writes today, Haiti's suffering was indeed caused by "men, not demons." Danner rehashes the colonists' role in making Haiti pay "reparations" for being humans with the audacity to seek their own freedom.
The new nation, its fields burned, its plantation manors pillaged, its towns devastated by apocalyptic war, was crushed by the burden of these astronomical reparations, payments that, in one form or another, strangled its economy for more than a century. It was in this dark aftermath of war, in the shadow of isolation and contempt, that Haiti's peculiar political system took shape, mirroring in distorted form, like a wax model placed too close to the fire, the slave society of colonial times.
At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue: the brutal predatory extraction of the country's wealth by a chosen powerful few.
This is the ugly truth about Haiti's political "culture" that these critics don't want to face: Like so many post-colonial nations once dominated by white supremacy, Haiti's culture reflects the brutality and inhumanity of the powers that once ruled it. Disassociating its cultural dysfunction from the "West" is revisionism.
Ultimately, as with the age-old American past-time of pimping black cultural pathology as the sole explanation for lingering racial inequality, the aim here is to sever the fundamental cultural connections between black and white. Just as some whites refuse to see how the black cultural idiosyncrasies they rail against -- hyper-masculinity, materialism, homophobia -- are fundamental aspects of American culture, we would like to believe that Haiti's political and social dysfunction have nothing to do with us.
Haiti's suffering forces us to look in the mirror. Brooks, Applebaum and Goldberg ultimately sense that we don't want to and so they rush to comfort that rising anxiety. The only problem is their writing is so explicitly aimed at exonerating white people that it is self-implicating.
-- A. Serwer
