I’m working over some of the material I wrote and have never published – it’s one of my summer projects. There are quite a few projects that need a bit of work to push them over the edge. One of them has me revisiting my Haiti files. I have a pretty passive research method – stuff comes to me. The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) for example, is an active community of people, among them very skilled researchers, constantly posting stuff on Haiti politics for years. Looking back at their archives is a pretty amazing exercise.
I’m working over some of the material I wrote and have never published – it’s one of my summer projects. There are quite a few projects that need a bit of work to push them over the edge. One of them has me revisiting my Haiti files. I have a pretty passive research method – stuff comes to me. The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) for example, is an active community of people, among them very skilled researchers, constantly posting stuff on Haiti politics for years. Looking back at their archives is a pretty amazing exercise.
There are some good people on the ground now too, like Ansel Herz who wrote this very clever piece.
I think because I’m around a television, which I’m not normally, I caught a glimpse of CNN. Some kind of scandal because some Con blogger took snippets video of a black speaker (Shirley Sharrod) speaking to a black audience – and this Con calls her a racist, saying she hasn’t gotten past the black-white divide (the way, presumably, that he has). What saddened me was watching on CNN, which is the “liberal media”, and presumably the media that’s sort of fighting back against the Cons, bringing all these black people on their show, all of whom then proceed to try to prove to their white questioners that they are not racist.
Meanwhile, and I’m not often privy to these types of conversations but reliable informants (including members of my own family) have told me they happen all the time, I don’t think it would generate a scandal at all if at some homogeneous white event people said things that were out and out racist, let alone things that could be interpreted as favouring black over white, when the moral of her story was the exact opposite (Tim Wise knows the details, as I expected he would).
Perhaps this is progress of a type? I mean, I think of the conservative blogger that started all this as engaging in a kind of coded racism – the selection of target and the nature of the operation suggests as much. But he had to put his argument in terms of anti-racism – arguing that black people are the real racists, just look what they say when they think we’re not watching.
But I see it less as progress and more that the public conversation is totally muddled and that we’re all so bamboozled that we can’t see the difference between something genuinely offensive and something that isn’t. How else could this tactic even work in the first place?
It’s only a tenuous connection to be made to Haiti, but I think it’s there. Aristide’s was a democratic government overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship, but the criticisms of Aristide were that he was a dictator and replaced by a democratic government. So even if you want to be a dictator, you can’t say so, you have to say that the other guy is. And even if you dislike democracy, you have to say you’re in favour of it. That’s the part that could be progress, just like racism having to dress itself up as anti-racism.
But on the other hand we return to the muddled public conversation. Why can’t people tell the difference between a regime where dozens of people die over a period of years largely because of events beyond the government’s control and a regime where thousands of people are killed in systematic, targeted campaigns of murder and massacre? How can people fall for claims that the former is a dictatorship and the latter a democracy?
