Haitians mourn and bury their dead as earthquake news is buried here in the U.S.

[Brexiter]

Less than two weeks have passed since the deadly August 14 earthquake in Haiti, which killed over 2,000 people and has left thousands homeless. U.S. news continues to focus on Afghanistan, while news about the ongoing earthquake disaster in Haiti rapidly left the headlines. I wrote about this for Black Kos on Tuesday; I’m reposting parts of that commentary today with updates.

I’ve read the excuses for the dearth of coverage. Afghanistan, COVID-19, crazed anti-vaxxers, Hurricane Henri, yadda yadda … so much news, and yet in the 24-hour cycle that is cable news, very little of that time is dedicated to following what is happening in Haiti and engaging the American public in helping. Efforts from the Biden administration to assist Haiti have been buried in a shitstorm of Biden blaming and Republican posturing, aided and abetted by pundits and pontificators.

Our neighbor in the Caribbean is a short, two-hour flight away from Miami. Less than 700 miles. But often, it feels like Haiti might as well be on another planet, despite the very long and checkered history we have with the first nation in the New World to rise up and overthrow the shackles of enslavement. In the wake of the massive 2010 earthquake there, I explored that history.

I ponder the question, “Would Haiti get more attention if Haitians were white?” and then shake my head, simply because it would not be Haiti were it not Black. What was once “the jewel of the Caribbean” when it provided riches for Europe to develop is now the poorest nation in our hemisphere, stigmatized and discriminated against.

Vanderbilt University Professor Brandon Bird placed that racism front and center, writing for The Washington Post in 2018.

In July 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette. More than a decade after meeting the French aristocrat during the American Revolution, Jefferson congratulated Lafayette for his leadership of the French Revolution, which was “exterminating the monster aristocracy & . . . its associate monarchy.”

The author of the Declaration of Independence was proud of his old ally, but he had advice for him, too. From the United States, Jefferson had taken notice of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue. He wondered whether France would “ever be able to reduce the blacks” in its most profitable colony. He warned Lafayette that Saint-Domingue would “be lost if not more effectually succoured.”

Jefferson’s letter does not just confirm the hypocrisies of a Founding Father who battled British colonialism and advanced ideas of universal freedom before condemning the Haitian Revolution. It also reveals the pro-slavery and racist foundations of U.S. policy toward Haiti. U.S. politicians and policymakers, then and now, have equated Haiti with slave rebellion and blackness, disaster and poverty. They have advanced imperialism and stifled immigration based on the mischaracterization of Haiti as a “shithole,” simultaneously dangerous and diseased.

Given our failure to eliminate systemic racism and white supremacy here at home, can there be any question about how we view and treat our Black neighbors?

Despite Haiti failing to dominate headline news here, there have been a few bright spots in coverage, mostly from print media—specifically to the work of Miami Herald Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles.

Charles reported on Haiti’s post-earthquake funerals on Monday.

A week after the deadly 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck this community and rural regions across Southwestern Haiti, families have begun to bury their dead. On Saturday, it was Franck Morin’s turn. The government employee in the Ministry of Agriculture lost five family members, plus the sister of his sister-in-law, when both his home and that of his brother’s fell.

As he and his wife looked on at the caskets, the crowd around them wailed. In three of the four coffins were his mother, Marie Rose Morin, 86; his nephew, Kelly Phildor, 15; and his daughter, Wood-Langie, 10. The fourth coffin belonged to Carl Handy Valmont, 4, also killed.

As the ceremony got under way amid Creole hymns, a stoic Morin, 43, tried to remain strong as he consoled his wife, Judith Lysius. Wood-Langie, 10, was their only child. Outside the field, food distributions continued, and in the city of Les Cayes, a search and rescue team from Mexico continued to sift through the rubble for bodies using a live locator.

Serge Chery, the delegate for the region, said he hopes people can still be found alive. “We hope that, but we can’t say for certain,” he said.

We must see the faces and hear the stories of real people going through hell right now, reported by journalists who know Haiti; Charles is the daughter of a Haitian mother. However, The Miami Herald has a circulation of about 75.3 thousand readers, which is far smaller than national television and cable news viewership—viewers who aren’t seeing such coverage.

YouTube Video


Here’s more coverage from Charles:

‘I’m sleeping in the streets.’ Life in a Haiti fishing village battered by the earthquake https://t.co/8EOaXIAQm0

— Jacqueline Charles (@Jacquiecharles) August 24, 2021

"Even though there is insecurity in the country, we said, ‘We have to come help.’ " Driven to help, young Haitian doctors brave gangs to create clinic under a borrowed tent #haiti #earthquake https://t.co/LP7wKl78Or

— Jacqueline Charles (@Jacquiecharles) August 26, 2021

I’ve been searching for media analysis of recent Haitian coverage and haven’t found much, but I stumbled upon a few items of interest. This study, conducted by the University of Connecticut’s Dr. Thomas Craemer—an associate professor in public policy analyzing the 2010 earthquake coverage under a Ford Foundation grant—could be applied today.

When many Americans hear the word “Haiti,” a host of negative associations may spring to mind: “poor,” “densely populated,” “over-crowded,” “aid-dependent.”

The media play a prominent role in shaping public perception of foreign countries, and such stereotypes of Haiti can often be found across the spectrum of the U.S. media, according to UConn professor of public policy Thomas Craemer. This is a problem, he says, not only because those epithets can paint a misleading picture, but because they can also affect how American citizens and governments act. “I think there is a chance that these stereotypes can affect foreign aid and foreign policy,” Craemer says.

[...]

Craemer was surprised to find that the picture of Haiti as a terminally dysfunctional failed state wracked by violence and endemic corruption was more or less consistently reported across the spectrum of news media outlets: about 67 percent of sentences coded in the New York Times’ coverage reinforced stereotypes, for example, as did roughly 77 percent of sentences in the conservative Limbaugh radio program. Craemer cautions that the small sample size does not allow statistical comparisons among individual media outlets. However, despite the small sample size a statistically significant bias emerged for the sample as a whole. In future iterations of the project he hopes to expand the sample so that source-by-source comparisons can be obtained.

The bias in the overall sample of news stories is a problem because the media take a prominent role in shaping public perception of foreign countries, says Craemer, and the stereotypes about Haiti present a flawed portrait of the country. Haiti is undoubtedly a poor country, but it has unique features that mitigate the poverty found there. For example, while in most other poor countries poverty means landlessness, many of Haiti’s poor are land owners. This unique feature dates back to the early 1800s, when former slave plantations were redistributed among insurgent former slaves. Land is a source of pride, and provides subsistence for extended families despite their poverty.

I did a word search in current stories on Haiti and found no difference from Cramer’s conclusions about bias in coverage in 2010.

This made me think back to my years of AIDS research and the unjust stigmatization of Haitians here as AIDS carriers. This was piled on top of racist portraits of Haitians as “devil worshipers” due to a complete distortion of the religious practice of Vodou, which stems from a time after Haitians overthrew enslavement with a successful revolution. (For more, read Daily Kos writer Ojibwa's 2010 story, “Haiti's Pact with the Devil.”)

A 2015 story in The Guardian explores Voudou’s significance to both Haitians and those who wish to stereotype them.

“Most Americans don’t know that they don’t know what Vodou really is,” explains Elizabeth McAlister, scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, specializing in Haitian Vodou. They think Vodou is about sorcery, maybe love magic, usually some sort of sinister practice.”

The 1920s and 1930s cinema – the heyday of B-films like White Zombie and pulp fiction – helped reinforce caricatures of Africans as hypersexualized, superstitious and demonic.

“The best thing that ever happened to racism is Vodou,” explains Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist, Vodou arts collector and former aid worker originally from New Jersey, who has lived in Haiti for over 40 years. “They made up their stories about it and their stories confirmed every prejudice of every white person in the world. It tells that person from Ohio that they’re right about black people as scary and dangerous … you can actually see on a screen your own racist beliefs justified.”

While pondering other disconnects between the American public and Haiti, I forgot that we rarely hear from Haitians, other than those who are fairly privileged, simply because of language barriers. Though most folks here assume Haitians speak French, that is far from the truth, which was addressed recently in Foreign Policy.

It is estimated that roughly 5 to 10 percent of Haitians are functionally bilingual in French and Haitian Creole. However, 100 percent of Haitians speak Haitian Creole, and, more critically, 90% of Haitians speak only Haitian Creole.

Very few English-language users of social media will bother to follow reports out of Haiti presented in Creole, like this one, about a historic school devastated in the earthquake.

#AlertFonkochon ! Sa se lekòl Metodis Gòlbotin, lekòl sa gen plis ke 60 ane di lap desèvi seksyon an... se youn nan pi gwo e pi ansyen lekòl nan fonkochon, ki te renove nan ane 99-2000. Tranblemandetè 14 la krazel. @MENFP_Education @Pwoteksyonsivil @francois_luigi @carelpedre pic.twitter.com/sJZ2mb9UN9

— Lutherson LEON?? (@LuthersonLeon) August 24, 2021

My final thoughts on this focus on the absence of “big social media influencers” for Haiti. If Beyoncé, for example, was Haitian American, she’d be interviewed around the clock and would have a major impact on visibility for the nation. Think about it: Name a very famous living Haitian American who is seen regularly on talk shows and in interviews. And when Trump botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, celebrities who amplified the crisis and stepped up U.S. fundraising were celebrities with Puerto Rican roots, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, and Bad Bunny.

I closed Tuesday’s commentary with a question: “Who does Haiti have?”

Rapper Future, who is not Haitian, is hosting a benefit. (Thank you, Future.)

Salute to @1future for this ???https://t.co/n1xTmh4T8v

— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) August 25, 2021

I’m still hoping to see more assistance from those with power and platforms. But we have to care, too, and demand more of the media.

Because, as author Elon Green tweeted Friday about the media ignoring the realities in Afghanistan for so many years, “if a major story is being persistently ignored, that’s an editorial choice.”