Best Paragraphs About Haiti So Far

"What worries me most about Haiti’s future is the unintended lesson of cargo comfort (delivering stuff, no matter how essential and useful water, food and shelter obviously are now) and remittances both: when people get stuff they didn’t make (or buy with what they make) it’s terribly easy to subconsciously  infer that they can’t do for themselves, and easier when stuff is delivered by white people to blacks in a world with precious little evidence of blacks delivering to whites from prosperity rather than extortion.  This (not the race part)  is the curse of a resource-extraction-based economy (one Haiti doesn’t have to worry about, having nothing to dig up and sell).  Remittances from emigrants are a little different, but villages like the ones in Mexico with no men and everyone living on money from people working in the US are at the least in a very fragile sociological state, and I’m not aware that their local economies are creating much value where the kids can see it happen.

“White man’s burden” movies like the Indiana Jones series play this message out: the cookie-cutter plot is that a bunch of brown people are having a terrible time and can’t do anything about it until a white guy comes into town and saves them (I haven’t seen it, but have the impression Avatar follows this template).  Not too different from the parfait gentil knight saving the helpless peasants from the dragon up the valley; since David and Jeanne d’Arc, I don’t remember a lot of stories about the farm boy (or the Puerto Rican on the loading dock) saving a roomful of bankers and generals from something; it was Robert Gould Shaw who made it possible for the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts to get their licks in. Toussaint L’Ouverture is a glorious Haitian exception to this meme, but it was a long time ago and the docs running the rural medical centers, and the guys handing out the water and biscuits at the airport, seem to be all white now." - Michael O'Hare

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