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{haitin' on haiti} jim goad The first thing that popped into my mind when I read that a monster quake had rocked Port-au-Prince was, “How the fuck will they be able to tell the difference?” I mean, it’s Haiti, for fuck’s sake. They eat fly poop for all three meals and drink AIDS-tainted blood for an evening snack. What we call trash dumps, they call houses. The media response has been typically hypocritical and vomit-inducing. Amid the outpouring of vigils and prayers and drum circles and outreach projects and relief efforts and humanitarian work and charity organizations and healing and cooperation and the inevitable flood of dirt-stupid, America-hostile refugees to our shores, I don’t see many people willing to actually move there. Why is that? And why, amid the sick choking fog of sanctimony, haven’t I heard a peep about the fact that Haiti fucking BECAME Haiti as a result of racial genocide? I mean, the victims were French, so that tempers it quite a bit, but still—the Dusky Ones had themselves one of them there “slave uprisings” and murdered all the Ghost People. And then, before the corpses even began to smell, the nation regressed into a vile Third World toilet. Racial tolerance had nothing to do with the Haitian Revolution. It was all about racial self-interest. The end result of this noble “uprising” was that, by some accounts, every remaining white was killed or exiled by 1805. An aide to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, first ruler of an independent, honky-free Haiti, wrote, “For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!” Danny Glover has made a movie about this noble racial revolution. Look for it in theaters near you this year. I suspect he’ll play down the white-skulls-for-inkwells angle. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m of French ancestry. To make matters worse, the French part of my bloodline comes by way of Canada. I believe Carl Jung was onto something when he spoke of a “collective unconscious,” and I also believe the “racists” are onto something when they speak of things such as “tribal instinct” and “genetic memory.” Therefore, I think it’s entirely natural for a black dude living in Brooklyn in 2010 to feel aggrieved about the indignities suffered by his distant ancestral brethren in Haiti before the slaves came to their senses and slaughtered all the whites. And by the same reasoning, I think it’s entirely natural for a white dude of French ancestry living in Georgia in 2010 to feel aggrieved about the slaughter of my distant ancestral brethren in Haiti. In this conflict, I’m going to take the French side, not the Haitian one. So, Haiti, how did things work out once you snuffed all the Frogs? How’s that voodoo been working out for you guys? How’s postcolonial life been treatin’ ya? Per-capita income is a smooth $790 a year, an estimated 300,000 children are enslaved, and on average you can expect to live nearly two decades less than if you decided to sail to America and live among all that stinking white oppression. You can prattle like a Sociology 101 student about racism and capitalism and colonialism, but a truth that’s deadlier than AIDS is that postcolonial China and post-Diaspora Israel seem to be doing A-OK, while no one has ever been able to show me a postcolonial majority-black country that isn’t a violence-wracked, disease-ridden, poverty-stricken dumpster. I’d like to see one, actually—it’s just that I haven’t. Remember Liberia, created after the Civil War to give ex-slaves a chance to return to Mother Africa and build a mighty nation free of the white man’s oppression? So wha’happen’? Did the brothers wind up workin’ it out in Liberia? Let’s see: Per-capita income there is $215 bucks a year, average life expectancy is 45, they’ve been snuffing each other in the hundreds of thousands with their OWN civil wars, and—most ironic of all—conditions are so utterly destitute that untold thousands of Liberian refugees are now living back in the Evil United States whence their ancestors fled. You can call me a racist—because you’re predictable—but that word is a social construct and has absolutely no meaning for me personally. I’d suggest you all worry a lot less about “right” and “wrong” and instead focus on “true” and “false.” And the truth is, none of you are moving to Haiti any time soon. There’s a word for what happens when you kill all the crackers. That word is “Haiti.” Don’t be Haitin’ on me for saying it. Jim Goad: www.jimgoad.net |
