Why Multiculturalists Can’t See Haiti
By Richard Davis (03/10/04)
What do multiculturalists see when they look at Haiti? Do they see a culture equal and commensurate with all others, one that just coincidentally needs food, water, shelter, security, medical care, sanitation, a working economy, basic infrastructure and a functional government? Do they see Haiti, the world’s first black republic, as a representation of authentic black culture, a model, along with Liberia, of what might have existed in this country had American slaves gained independence on their own and separated from whites? If not, why not?
The short answer is that multiculturalists don’t see Haiti at all. Haitian culture is what is gleaned from Miami or New York, or what some Haitian-American writer or professor extrapolates and sanitizes for popular consumption, a menagerie of colored cloths, Caribbean rhythms and exotic spirituality. The multiculturalists’ Haiti is an ideological creation forged primarily for domestic cultural politics. If Haiti and countries like it are domains of inequality, repression, poverty, futility and violence, then that’s not a reflection of their true cultures but an artifact of Western interference.
Which is nonsense. After 200 years of independence, two centuries to get at least something right, Haiti is a mess, and it’s not a hate crime to wonder what is so wrong. The America-did-it excuse doesn’t hold water. Our involvement in Haiti has been a response to its problems, not the cause of them. Besides, innumerable cultures throughout the world have been interfered with, invaded, trampled and destroyed, some more than once during the past 200 years, and they’ve still managed to create competent societies. Victimology only explains so much for so long (and in this case it explains almost nothing). It’s time to call the multiculturalists on this nonsense and begin holding people and cultures accountable. We need some cultural tough love.
In truth, multiculturalists really don’t want us to leave other cultures alone. They want us to keep sending food, medicine, supplies of all kinds, peacekeepers, and, most importantly, money, lots of money. We have it and they don’t, and for that we should feel guilty. We must be racists. Forget about the billions that disappeared in Haiti alone. Just don’t insist on any internal changes. That resurrects memories of colonialism. When Americans occupied Haiti early last century they provided security and stability, built roads and bridges, restructured government, paid foreign debts and provided education. Multiculuralists don’t want those mistakes repeated. For once they’re probably right--it was all a waste of time.
Multiculturalists fancy themselves post-colonial, but their arrogance, racial preoccupation (anti-whiteness) and disregard for actual living populations places them squarely in the colonial bloodline (which is literally true, of course). They are unlike the colonialists in one respect, however. As Haiti illustrates, colonialists were right in much of what they thought (if wrong in much of they did). Rationalism does underly modern civil societies. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it.
But multiculturalism is post-rational, too, rationality being a Western instrument of oppression and racism. But is there a nonWestern alternative? A black alternative, a long-term solution of color? Why doesn’t the Black Caucus propose it? Modern tribalism certainly doesn’t work, just ask the million or so Haitians who would be willing to risk life and limb to reach a Western shore.
The only nonWestern societal alternative being offered the world today is radical Islam, and the Islamists’ final solution to the cultural problem is the Taliban. Even nonextremist Islamic cultures are basket cases. Remove Western interference--i.e., money and technology--and you’re back in feudal times.
Racial politics and political correctness make it virtually impossible now to engage struggling cultures in any meaningful way. Even talking about them has become a challenge. Take the recent State Department briefing on Haiti attended by black Congresswoman Corrine Brown. Brown claims that the administration is racist toward Haiti, a country she takes an interest in for the sole reason that it is 95 percent black. She became incensed that State Department representatives at the briefing were “a bunch of white men.” How could they understand? (The team’s leader, however, was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, a Mexican-American. When informed of that, Brown explained that they “all look alike to me.” Noriega would later moan that he “deeply resented” being “branded a white man.” One wonders what idyllic cultures these two would be struggling in today if not for a bunch of white men.)
Of course, multiculturalists fashion careers out of planting the seeds of hatred against whites and Westerners in general, and we’ll be harvesting their fruits for decades. Demonizing Europeans and their American progeny solves one of multiculturalism’s oldest dilemmas: How do you keep Western culture from claiming its rightful place at the multicultural table?
Simple. You criminalize it, delegitimate its claim, and then impose a ruthless political correctness against any “white supremacist” who dares even to mention it positively. In the ensuing silence you begin to deny its very existence, thus cultivating the insidious impression that Western society is structured solely by “privilege” and racism, not primarily by long-standing cultural determinants such as hard work, sacrifice, intelligence, education, achievement, etc. Only discrimination and racial imperialism give Western society its whiteness; had it not been for these, America as it exists today could just as well be black or brown. But where is there any evidence to support that in black or brown populations?
Black racialists often spout the absurd claim that blacks “built” America and were denied their rightful place, now occupied by whites, solely by white racism. The claim is absurd not because blacks didn’t contribute to America’s development or weren’t discriminated against, but because their contribution was much more circumscribed. They could have built Haiti, as it exists today, but not the United States.That would have required a European ancestry. What they were denied was full access to this transplanted European society, built, like it or not, in all fundamental ways by whites.
Multiculturalism is foremost a revisionist project intent on rewriting history to conform to a neo-Marxist ideology of class and race warfare, with whites as the hated ruling class and everyone else the proletariat. It purports to do the impossible--comprehend and render an infallible, ahistorical judgment on the past and the people who lived it, a trick achieved only through willful forgetting, reductionism and myopia. Single strands of history are programmatically extracted from the broad cloth and projected as the whole. A life sentence is then delivered--just the type of cultural judgment multiculturalists otherwise assert as impossible. Thus whites are unqualified to even sit on a briefing panel because 10 generations earlier a small number of their ancestors, over the increasing objections of their other ancestors, began to participate in the centuries-old slave trade.
The multiculturalists’ treatment of the Western slave trade, their favorite memory, is indicative of the reductionism that underlies this ideology. What happened before Europeans entered the trade or after they departed challenges racial assumptions and can’t be remembered. The contribution of whites in abolishing this ancient evil also must not be remembered, or at most remembered conditionally.They really thought they were doing something else, or their efforts were too belated. It goes without saying that black involvement (and that of other nonwhites, such as Arabs) goes into the dustbin. And any consideration of the variegated legacy of slavery (at least the good) is off limits. What can be remembered is this: whites were bad, blacks were victims. (And don’t ask why blacks were victims for 10 centuries or more.)
One of the unexpected consequences of the reparations movement has been the deconstruction of this type of historical disingenuousness. Writers like David Horowitz have documented the entangled complexity of the issue and the massive forgetting that is necessary to sustain the reparationists’ claims. Deliberately ignoring the complexity illuminates the racist underbelly of the multiculturalist agenda.
What Horowitz and others have begun with the reparations issue needs to be done with colonialism and American history in general. This history needs to be rescued from these ideologues and modern-day racists, such as the Edward Saids, whose visceral hatred of Westerners (the white ones) is evident in every paragraph they write.Their goal isn’t to tell the truth, not to be historians, but to orchestrate the destruction of Western culture by subverting its memory.
As for Haiti, it will not register so much as a blip on the radar screen in the current clash of civilizations. If Islam represents an alternative civilization--and that’s generous--Haiti represents an outcome. Totalitarianism and chaos. Both are threats to Western rationalism, though neither is an imminent threat, perhaps not even a distant one. Only demographics are in their favor.
Nevertheless, 9/11 taught us irrevocably that what you take for granted can be taken from you suddenly, and Western civilization, while not fragile, is not invulnerable. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of irrationalism on the human mind. Multiculturalists have welcomed both totalitarianism and chaos as comrades, and together they attack us for who we are and what we believe. They lie about our past and incite unnecessary ethnic and racial rivalry and discord. They will never lead us to some multiculturalist Shangri-La, but they are driving us a lot closer to Port-au-Prince.
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