<div dir="ltr">
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://progressive.org/latest/solidarity-with-haiti-will-strengthen-the-struggle-imara-210726/">progressive.org</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Solidarity with Haiti Will Strengthen the Struggle for Racial Justice Everywhere</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Nia Imara - July 26, 2021<br></div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-content">
<p>The current crisis taking place in Haiti stems from conditions
that, for the past century, the United States has had a direct hand in
either creating, manipulating, or defending. While the recent <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/7/jovenel-moise-haiti-president-assassinated-at-age-53" target="_blank">assassination</a>
of President Jovenel Moïse has induced U.S. media to place an
intermittent spotlight on the country, they have done a poor job of
providing any historical context that would expose the central role
played by the United States in creating the Haiti that exists today.</p>
<p>Moïse, a rightwing businessman, was installed as president in 2017, after a <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article41860518.html" target="_blank">fraudulent election</a>
marked by widespread voter suppression. Although the United States, the
European Union, and the Organization of American States <a href="https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-233/17" target="_blank">endorsed</a>
Haiti’s Electoral Council pronouncement that Moïse won a majority vote,
the popular view held in Haiti is that this was yet another “electoral
coup” orchestrated by the Haitian elite, with the aid of Western
governments. The mass demonstrations that followed the power grab were a
continuation of the grassroots effort to put an end to the debilitating
poverty, corruption, and violent repression engendered by previous
administrations.</p>
<p><em>Fanmi Lavalas</em>, the popular grassroots movement of the
Haitian masses, has been one of the main targets of repression. Since
2004, the movement’s efforts to hold free, democratic elections have
consistently been thwarted, as men subservient to the Haitian elite and
U.S. business interests have been installed in the highest offices. On
November 13, 2018, a government-backed paramilitary force stormed the
downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Lasalin, a <em>Lavalas </em>stronghold,
and attacked residents—ranging in age from ten months to seventy-two
years old. They massacred at least seventy-one children, women, and men,
according to human rights activists on the ground. The U.S. Embassy in
Haiti vaguely referred to the attackers as “gangs,” but a human rights <a href="https://www.nlg.org/report-the-lasalin-massacre-and-the-human-rights-crisis-in-haiti/" target="_blank">report</a>
conducted in partnership with the National Lawyers Guild determined
that this was an act of terrorism directed by the Moïse-PHTK (Haitian
Tèt Kale Party) government. The Lasalin massacre barely registered in
the U.S. press.</p>
<hr>
<p>The assassination of Moïse punctuates a crisis that has been
unfolding in Haiti for decades. In 1991, following elections that grew
out of a widespread popular movement to end the Duvalier dictatorship,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically elected
president. He wasn’t in office a year before the new popular government
was overthrown by a US-trained military loyal to the former regime in a
September 1991 coup d’état.</p>
<p>Years of violent repression ensued, with thousands of Haitians being
killed, imprisoned, or exiled. The Haitian people had to endure racially
motivated <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-clinton-solution-for-refugees-guantanamo/2015/11/23/7bf338a4-91f4-11e5-8aa0-5d0946560a97_story.html" target="_blank">internment</a>
in U.S.-run refugee centers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on top of punitive
economic blocks by the Bush and Clinton Administrations, before
Aristide was able to return and eventually be re-elected in 2001. His
second term was incredibly productive, with <em>Lavalas</em> making enormous advances in public education, health care, labor rights, and infrastructure.</p>
<p>This progress was brought to an abrupt standstill in 2004, when the
United States, together with France and Canada, sponsored another coup
d’état, which included sending in more than 7,000 U.N. troops. The
kidnapping and <a href="http://www.randallrobinson.com/agony.html" target="_blank">forced exile</a> of their president, many Haitians believe, was an attempt to curb <em>Lavalas</em>’s
progressive reforms to lift the masses from poverty. Raising the
minimum wage to seventy gourdes (about $1) a day was a boon to the
families of 20,000 factory workers, but a liability to the business
interests who benefit from cheap, unorganized labor.</p>
<p>In addition, President Aristide had been <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/" target="_blank">calling for reparations</a>
from France which, after its defeat in the Haitian Revolution, punished
its erstwhile colony by exacting recompense for its lost “property”
(i.e., enslaved people).</p>
<hr>
<p>The facts of these U.S.-led interventions in Haiti—including details
concerning the training, funding, and arming of Haiti’s military
dictatorships—are laid out in several books including Randall Robinson’s
<a href="http://www.randallrobinson.com/agony.html" target="_blank"><em>An Unbroken Agony</em></a> and Jeb Sprague’s <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781583673003/paramilitarism-and-the-assault-on-democracy-in-haiti/" target="_blank"><em>Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti</em></a>. These books and others, like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10234.The_Uses_of_Haiti" target="_blank"><em>The Uses of Haiti</em></a>, by Paul Farmer, also explain the <em>motivations</em>
behind U.S. aggression toward Haiti. When we consider Haiti’s economic
significance to U.S. business interests, U.S. interference in “the
poorest country in the Western hemisphere” (or, more correctly, one of
the most robbed) becomes clear, and the origins of the present crisis
are demystified.</p>
<p>In the United States today, Haiti is entitled to much more than our
pity and charity; it deserves our solidarity. To begin, the birth of
this majority Black country had a unique historical impact in advancing
racial justice on the world stage. A former colony of France, Haiti <a href="https://haitianstudies.ku.edu/haiti-history" target="_blank">led</a>
the first successful mass slave rebellion of the colonial era. In
1791, enslaved Africans launched an uprising that would culminate in
Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1803. This momentous event was a critical
blow to slavery everywhere, including in the United States, where news
of the revolt inevitably spread, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/26/joseph.african.americans.haiti/index.html" target="_blank">inspiring resistance</a> to slavery in this country.</p>
<p>Having established the new republic in 1804, Haitians <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/12/haiti-was-first-nation-permanently-ban-slavery/" target="_blank">outlawed slavery</a>
in their constitution, arguably establishing the first true democracy
in colonial America. A decade later, Haitian President Alexandre Pétion
provided Simón Bolívar with protection, weapons, and soldiers for his
campaigns in South America. His one condition was that Bolívar <a href="http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/part03-slide03.html" target="_blank">promise</a> to abolish slavery in the territories he liberated from Spain.</p>
<p>Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, having capitalized on France’s defeat by acquiring the Louisiana Territory in 1803, <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/haitian-rev" target="_blank">partnered with</a>
European allies to deny Haiti diplomatic recognition. Defenders of
slavery clearly understood the threat posed by the new Black republic.
They began to produce <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/st-domingue-haiti" target="_blank">racist propaganda</a>
maintaining that instability in Haiti was due to the inferiority of
Black people rather than a consequence of slavery itself. Slaveowners
and their supporters offered up this demonized image of Haiti as
evidence that Black people were unfit for freedom and
self-determination.</p>
<p>For proponents of racial justice in the United States, it is
essential that we take a critical view of conventional representations
of Haiti. Anyone familiar with the media’s habitual portrayal—subtle or
not—of Black people in the United States as a people who tend toward
criminal, violent, uneducated, shiftless, and irrational behavior should
not be surprised when that same warped lens is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/america-haiti-limited-options/619481/" target="_blank">applied to Black people in Haiti</a>.</p>
<p>The language may not be as overtly racist as it was two centuries
ago. Yet the lack of historical context in typical news
coverage—especially when it comes to U.S. influence in Haiti—together
with the persistent misrepresentation of facts, amount to the same
message: Haiti is doomed to remain “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/world/americas/haiti-poverty-history.html" target="_blank">mired in economic underdevelopment and insecurity</a>.”
And the unwillingness to excavate below the surface with regards to the
current situation means that Washington is not held accountable for its
complicity in impoverishing Haiti.</p>
<hr>
<p>As we approach July 28, the <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article29093698.html" target="_blank">anniversary</a>
of the first U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, we might consider that the
U.S. government has no moral authority to make decisions about what
happens in Haiti today. This first invasion took place after the
assassination of a president, under the pretext of protecting Haiti
against “insecurity.” U.S. troops <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/30/100-years-ago-the-u-s-invaded-and-occupied-this-country-can-you-name-it/" target="_blank">occupied</a>
the country for nineteen years, leaving behind a legacy of Jim Crowism.
Rather than repeating history, the Biden Administration should
terminate the U.S.-led coup and occupation and take the further step of
making reparations for exploiting Haiti’s resources and labor and for
supporting dictatorships.</p>
<p>For many Black people in the United States, Haiti’s history has a
special significance. When we realize that Haiti’s present is as
important, it will be clear that its future is linked to our struggle
for racial justice here. Ultimately, the struggle for racial and other
forms of social justice in the United States stands only to benefit from
our commitment to solidarity with Haiti. If we say that we value Black
lives, our integrity demands that we educate ourselves about the history
of U.S.-Haiti relations. For how can we, as Black people, expect that
our <em>human</em> rights will ever be truly respected by the same government that applies racist tactics against Black people elsewhere?</p>
<p>A movement for racial justice in the United States will be successful
only when it recognizes that people of color around the world share a
common struggle.</p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>