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Haiti and the Caribbean; the history and the historians
Commentary by Deoliver47, Black Kos editor
"The transformation of slaves trembling in hundreds before a single white man into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement."
C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins, ix
The following is a brief excerpt from a lengthy oration by Frederick Douglass.
Fifteen hundred of the best citizens of Chicago assembled January 2, 1893, in Quinn Chapel, to listen to the following lecture by Honorable Frederick Douglass, ex-United States Minister to the Republic of Haiti.
The Haitian Pavilion Dedication Ceremonies
Delivered at the World's Fair, in Jackson Park, Chicago.
By the Hon. Frederick Douglass,Ex-Minister to Haiti.
January 2, 1893
Lecture on Haiti
Until she spoke, no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.
Until she spoke, no Christian nation had given to the world an organized effort to abolish slavery.
Until she spoke, the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace the South Atlantic, painting the sea with the Negro's blood.
Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included. Men made fortunes by this infernal traffic, and were esteemed as good Christians, and the standing types and representations of the Savior of the World.
Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit was dumb. Slave-traders lived and slave-traders died. Funeral sermons were preached over them, and of them it was said that they died in the triumphs of the Christian faith and went to heaven among the just.
Two quotes on Haiti’s history – one from Fredrick Douglass from over a hundred years ago, the other from the author of the seminal work on Haiti’s revolution, CLR James.
As I sit and watch the television coverage of the current crisis in Haiti, the shallowness of the analysis, and reporting still has the power to amaze me. I know I should know better. I know I should have no expectations of more than surface reporting. The images flood in...reporters by the score documenting misery, death and destruction. Heroic pictures of Haitians and others attempting to dig out the dead, and still living.
Echoes of Katrina...
TV reporters clutch microphones breathlessly reporting from the scene. Anchors weigh in. Pundits natter on about the eventually of rioting and looting. The UN, US political figures, the Marines, missionaries from Christian sects...orphans and orphanages..Haitian Americans seeking loved ones, right-wing spews...all there in living color.
For this brief moment in time, by geological serendipity, Haiti has finally captured the attention of the American viewing public. The deaths of many thousands is the price Haiti and Haitians now pay to take the center of the world stage. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.
Where is the "background" to all of this? Over and over the mantra of "Haiti...the poorest nation in the Western World is repeated". The poor Haitians, the black Haitians...the starving Haitians.....the dying Haitians....the Haitians that will now be the adoptees of the international community.
Where other than a few marginalized, non-mainstream places like Democracy Now can we expect to get a handle on this and begin to understand that this "disaster" has been in front of us for years; hidden in plain sight? The readership here is highly literate, better read than most; progressive and activist. If we as a collectivity are for the most part uninformed, and unaware of the history and genesis of Haiti (and the rest of the Caribbean along with it) how can we possibly expect those in the mainstream to do any better. Here at least there is some interest in going beneath the surface.
There are places on the internet where one can go to read a progressive perspective on Haiti, and other parts of the Caribbean. They are usually not on the blogrolls of many, and require first, once sought out an ability to "hear" and accept harsh critiques of US and global policies. One such site is Haiti Progres "le journal qui ofre une alternative", published in French, Kreyòl English, and Spanish.
Today they offer this critical assessment:
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered. As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ¬distribution of international "aid". The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop ¬trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.
Others places on the web to find in-depth history and current analysis are the Haiti Archives, Windows on Haiti and the World, and the Haiti Mailing List.
In a diary I wrote the other day on the American Revolutionary War participation by Haitians, several commenter’s remarked, "I’m embarrassed that I know so little about Haiti’s history", or words to that effect. Several other readers asked, "what should I read to begin to understand?"
This commentary today will attempt to address that question. I will provide a few suggestions and links to books and online sources that I use in the courses I teach in Caribbean studies. But I do so with a warning, in advance. The body of literature that critically explores the Caribbean, and Haiti in particular is a large one. But to this day, many of the seminal works, the great classics, are not part of US curricula (except in Caribbean, Black, Latin American and Women’s studies) for a number of reasons. First and foremost "The Canon"; be it history, social studies, literature, or political science tend to exclude many writers of color. Secondarily, but key to this country in particular, given the dominance of conservative Texas in producing textbooks, a chilling effect is still in place from the purges of the McCarthy era. The fact that many of the greatest scholars of the Caribbean were Socialists, Marxists, Pan-Africanists, left-of center, and as such "not acceptable reading" in a country that still throws "socialist" around as a political curse word has kept them from being widely disseminated.
My list of "must read" writers would start with the works of:
C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, and Kamau (Edward) Brathwaite.
First stop would be C.L.R James Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
Several excerpts can be found online;
http://www.webster.edu/...
I will quote liberally from one of them here, which sets the scene in slavery:
The stranger in San Domingo was awakened by the cracks of the whip, the stifled cries, and the heavy groans of the Negroes who saw the sun rise only to curse it for its renewal of their labours and their pains. Their work began at day-break: at eight they stopped for a short breakfast and worked again till midday. They began again at two-o'clock and worked until evening, sometimes till ten or eleven. A Swiss traveller has left a famous description of a gang of slaves at work. They were about a hundred men and women of different ages, all occupied in digging ditches in a cane-field, the majority of them naked or covered with rags. The sun shone down with full force on their heads. Sweat rolled from all parts of their bodies. Their limbs, weighed down by the heat, fatigued with the weight of their picks and by the resistance of the clayey soil baked hard enough to break their implements, strained themselves to overcome every obstacle. A mournful silence reigned. Exhaustion was stamped on every face, but the hour of rest had not yet come. The pitiless eye of the Manager patrolled the gang, and several foremen armed with long whips moved periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take a rest - men or women, young or old.
This was no isolated picture. The sugar plantations demanded an exacting and ceaseless labour. The tropical earth is backed hard by the sun. Round every carry of land intended for cane it was necessary to dig a large ditch to ensure circulation of air. Young canes required attention for the first three or four months and grew to maturity in 14 or 18 months. Cane could be planted and would grow at any time of the year, and the reaping of one crop was the signal for the immediate digging of ditches and the planting of another. Once cut, they had to be rushed to the mill lest the juice became acid by fermentation. The extraction of the juice and manufacture of the raw sugar went on for three weeks a month, 16 or 18 hours a day, for seven or eight months in the year. Worked like animals, the slaves were housed like animals, in huts built around a square planted with provisions and fruits. These huts were about 20 to 25 feet long, 12 feet wide and about 15 feet in height, divided by partitions into two or three rooms. They were windowless and light entered only by the door. The floor was beaten earth; the bed was of straw, hides or a rude contrivance of cords tied on posts. On these slept indiscriminately mother, father, and children. Defenseless against their masters, they struggled with overwork and its usual complement - under-feeding. The Negro Code, Louis XIV's attempt to ensure them humane treatment, ordered that they should be given, every week, two pots and a half of manioc, three cassavas, two pounds of salt beef or three pounds of salted fish - about food enough to last a healthy man for three days. Instead, their masters gave them half-a-dozen pints of coarse flour, rice, or peas, and half-a-dozen herrings. Worn out by their labours all through the day and far into the night, many neglected to cook and ate the food raw. The ration was so small and given to them so irregularly that often the last half of the week found them with nothing.
Even the two hours they were given in the middle of the day, and the holidays on Sundays and feast-days, were not for rest, but in order that they might cultivate a small piece of land to supplement their regular rations. Hard-working slaves cultivated vegetables and raised chickens to sell in the towns to make a little in order to buy rum and tobacco; and here and there a Napoleon of finance, by luck and industry, could make enough to purchase his freedom. Their masters encouraged them in this practice of cultivation, for in years of scarcity the Negroes died in thousands, epidemics broke out, the slaves fled into the woods, and plantations were ruined. The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a régime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety. For the least fault, the slaves received the harshest punishment. In 1685 the Negro Code authorized whipping, and in 1702 one colonist, a Marquis, thought any punishment which demanded more than 100 blows of the whip was serious enough to be handed over to the authorities. Later the number was fixed at 39, then raised to 50. But the colonists paid no attention to these regulations and slaves were not infrequently whipped to death. The whip was not always an ordinary cane or woven cord, as the Code demanded. Sometimes it was replaced by the rigoise a thick thong of cow- hide, or by the lianes - local growths of reeds, supple and pliant like whalebone. The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food.
It was from this world of horror, that these same enslaved humans fought back, and won a victory that would shake the foundations of the slave system in the New World. Haiti, and Haitians have paid a price since then. James goes on to detail how they won their victory, and how they were denied the fruits of that victory in the years following.
I will not stop at James. You may have noted that the list I cited above of Fanon, Williams, Rodney, Césaire, Lamming, and Brathwaite is all male. It is simply because the first wave of major Caribbean scholarly voices were those of men. I have spent a lot of time as a result exploring Caribbean women’s writings and researches, which have been gaining more of a foothold in recent years but are still unknown to many, outside of certain academic and literary spheres.
For women's voices, suggest you start here:
MaComère, Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars
Caribbean Women Writers And Globalization: Fictions of Independence
Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival
Haiti specific: Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance
For a broader, non-gender specific listings see:
Writers of the Caribbean, and Caribbean authors. For a Journal that is always worth reading I suggest Callaloo.
To get a better understanding of the impact of globalization on the Caribbean, a film everyone should see is Life and Debt, which uses Jamaica as its focus, but illustrates graphically the role of the IMF, the World Bank and other forces, like tourism, on the undermining of the Caribbean economy. Though a bit dated, a film made in 1996 by the National Labor Committee, Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti - Walt Disney and the Science of Exploitation, is available for viewing on youtube, in two parts: http://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/...
I hope this is a useful introduction or review, not just to Haiti, but to the Caribbean as a whole. Please feel free to add to this rudimentary list in the diary comments. Thanks for reading.
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Today's News by Amazinggrace, Black Kos Editor.
Color Lines: Fire Department Ruling Seeks to Extinguish Racism.
New York City firefighters stoked the national debate on affirmative action this week with a landmark court ruling.
Last year, a federal court ruled in favor of the Vulcan Society, an association of Black firefighters, determining that the city’s civil service exams were fundamentally biased against applicants of color. A new ruling this week goes further; it actually attributes racial disparities not only to an exclusionary exam, but to intentional discrimination against blacks.
Firefighter exams became a political lightning rod on the national stage with the sweeping Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. The court sided with a group of mostly white firefighters in New Haven who accused the city of "reverse discrimination" because it scrapped a civil service exam that had failed to promote Black candidates to achieve diversity benchmarks.
That case sparked intense controversy, particularly because the Appeals court ruling that rejected the firefighters’ claim involved Judge, now Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor.
New York City’s case is almost the mirror opposite. The basic premise of the earlier ruling was that since 1999, the Department had "used written examinations with discriminatory effects and little relationship to the job of a firefighter... [that] unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color from the opportunity to serve as New York City firefighters."
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New York Times: Black Schools Restored as Landmarks.
Until 1923, the only school in the largely black farm settlement of Pine Grove was the one hand-built by parents, a drafty wooden structure in the churchyard. Anyone who could read and write could serve as teacher. With no desks and paper scarce, teachers used painted wood for a blackboard, and an open fireplace provided flashes of warmth to the lucky students who sat close.
This changed after a Chicago philanthropist named Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, took up the cause of long-neglected education for blacks at the urging of Booker T. Washington, the proponent of black self-help. By the late 1920s, one in three rural black pupils in 15 states were attending a new school built with seed money, architectural advice and supplies from the Rosenwald Fund.
Chicago Tribune: Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden of Chicago served President John Kennedy as the first African-American on the White House security detail.
Like many African-Americans of his generation, Abraham Bolden used to have a large portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert Kennedy displayed prominently, reverently in his living room.
But unlike many blacks of his generation, Bolden, who is 74 and has lived in the same Auburn-Gresham bungalow for 47 years, had a special relationship with each of the men. How he met the Kennedy brothers and wound up writing a letter to King is a remarkable story that begins this way:
In April 1961, Bolden was working as a Secret Service agent based in Chicago when President Kennedy arrived for a political event at McCormick Place. Bolden was assigned to guard a restroom that had been cordoned off exclusively for the president.
"My colleagues kidded me about having bathroom detail," Bolden said. "Most agents liked to be shoulder to shoulder with the president. But as fate would have it, when the president arrived that morning, he had to use the washroom."
Chicago Tribune Bigotry takes on a different shade.
Tamara Field is no longer shocked when people make offensive remarks about her light African-American skin tone. But sometimes, she said, the comments cause her to pause.
Once, Field said, she had to explain to a white supervisor at work why she was having lunch with the company's minority recruiter, a common practice at jobs with few minority employees.
"I said, 'She wants to know if I am happy with my career path here,' " said Field, 41, of Evanston, a former journalist who works in public relations. When the supervisor asked why, Field answered, "Because I'm black!"
The supervisor responded, "Oh, you're not that black," Field said.
Chicago Tribune: Racism: 10 things you might not know about it.
With the election of an African-American president, some people thought this country had suddenly become "post-racial." Well, hardly. A new book quotes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as saying that America was ready for a president like Barack Obama who is black but "light-skinned" and speaks "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said in an interview that he was "blacker than Obama" -- a comment that Blago later called "stupid, stupid, stupid." Here are 10 facts about racism and its close cousin, ethnic intolerance:
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BBC: Haiti's history of misery
Haiti appears to have had more than its fair share of political upheaval, misrule, poverty and natural disasters. And, as has happened so often in the nation's past, just when the situation was getting better, a fresh catastrophe struck, writes Nick Caistor.
Until it was destroyed in the earthquake on Tuesday, Haiti's presidential palace was the most beautiful building in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Gleaming white, its imposing, harmonious structure was a symbol of the promise that has so often been dashed in this country of 10 million inhabitants.
The palace is situated on the Champ de Mars, the huge open square down near the port area of Port-au-Prince. This is the centre of the city, where all the main administrative and community buildings are clustered. Many of them, including the cathedral, the main hospital, and the UN peacekeeping headquarters are reported to have been crushed in the worst earthquake to hit the country in more than 200 years.
The Root: When are Haitians Looters and when are they just hungry
An arresting Damon Winter photo of a Haitian child graces the cover of the Sunday New York Times. A boy of about 10 wearing a bright red, oversized Polo shirt is caught mid-stride by the camera, dashing through the streets of Port-au-Prince, eyes gazing purposely ahead, gripping a white plastic bag.
The caption gives a seemingly "objective" recitation of the facts. "Haitians fled gunshots that rang out in downtown Port-au-Prince Saturday. Tons of relief supplies had arrived for delivery." It is up to the viewer to connect the dots, and connect them to another front-page article below the fold: "Looting Flares Where Order Breaks Down."
So was the kid looting?
Nearly five years ago, when you could see photo captions of white Hurricane Katrina survivors side-by-side with black survivors, the racial double standard in the news media covering a catastrophic tragedy were obvious. Hungry, desperate white survivors were "finding food" while hungry, desperate black survivors were "looting" for food.
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Color Line: Coal Mining Curbed on the Black Mesa, Paving Way for Navajo Green Economy.
The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory last Friday when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.
Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing administration—not surprising, when you consider that Peabody’s parent holding company was Bechtel, a defense contractor with strong political ties—a permit that failed to fulfill all administrative requirements.
Groups including the Black Mesa Water Coalition filed a petition in early 2009, charging that prerequisites, such as filing an Environmental Impact Statement, were ignored, thereby making the approved permit invalid.
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Comment of the Week
Hats off to this reader of the Minneapolis Star Tribune who wrote this letter as a response to Pat Robertson's screed attacking Haitian's for having historically made a "pact with the devil". The letter has gone viral.
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll. You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
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Voices and Soul by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, contributor
Tragedy and Redemption are constants in Caribbean culture; permanence
and faith are tested by land-leveling hurricanes and island-forming
tectonic shakings of economics and magma. Caribbean poet and Nobel
Laureate, Derek Walcott, addresses these dynamics; where permanence is
but smoldering paper and faith can be snapped like a heated wire;
where no matter how loud and constant a Belief might be shouted from
the pulpit, Redemption and the renewal of Faith is sometimes found in
the tragedy of...
A City's Death By Fire
After that hot gospeller has leveled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.
-- Derek Walcott
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The front porch is now open. Come on in, pull up a chair where you can find a space, and "set with us a spell". If you are new, or "de-lurking" after reading for a while, introduce yourself to the community.