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Is It Fair to Compare Haiti to New Orleans?
The comparisons between the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans have come fast and furious, but often from people who've watched both disasters through the clean-cut white lens of Anderson Cooper broadcasts. Meanwhile, people in Haiti-and those in the Gulf Coast still struggling four years later-need more than blame and comparisons. They need real solutions.
To offer some, we ask Monika Kalra Varma, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Princeton professor, Nation contributor, and author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
Thanks to Chicken & Egg Pictures for video in this segment.
11 Comments so far
Show AllFair?
Sure.
Always done well?
No.
Reason comparison retards progress?
Absent.
I think Laura embarrasses herself and pseudo-left-wing media with this show.
"Haiti" isn't a mass media meme that needs to be analyzed in terms of which narratives it helps construct. It's a country of people who have been abused by the colonial thinking and behavior of rich countries and their business elites.
This post-modern gab-a-thon about "comparitive disaster narratives" is an affront to reality and to the rich/poor and broadcaster/viewer divide.
Rich broadcasters - both left and right - tend to present the world in terms of which texts are the most amusing - most stimulating. There are no real people with real needs. The world - from the vantage point of the broadcaster - is made up of abstract political actors with strategic reactions to measure and compare for media points.
True, and notice that not one mention was made of how the Haitian government installed from without (repeatedly) has been killing its opponents in substantial numbers.
Indeed, Laura should be embarrassed. From the get go, Obama's media lackeys have been spinning the comparison to show how much more quickly his government responded to Haiti than Bush did in New Orleans. Besides the fact that it really isn't true as aid has been very slowly reaching people (though our military sure handled its 'invasion' or occupation most expeditiously), the analogy is flawed as Haiti is not the US. If you want to compare apples and apples rather than apples and oranges, compare the response to the Tsunami by Bush to Obama's response to Haiti. Obama's presidency should be called The Mendacity of Hope.
"...a country of people who have been abused by the colonial thinking and behavior of rich countries and their business elites."
This is also a narrative that has been constructed. Narratives are constructed because they contain the meaning of events. Narratives are important because they are the basis of belief and action.
Some call them history; some call them myth. But they drive interpretation and agency.
What the "broadcasters" are presenting is a false narrative, with false meaning, intended to misdirect.
It is entirely appropriate to ask how Haiti and New Orleans are similar or different, and to find disturbing parallels there. It's a little narcissistic: no matter what happens to others anywhere in the world always goes back to Americans worrying about themselves - Can it / Did it happen to us? to me?
What was missing from the discussion was the similarity of the deployment of heavily armed military forces, the application of a military solutions to humanitarian problems, the criminalization of self-help, especially by Blacks, the heavy-handed use of force by those who do not understand or care about the local situation (shooting first and asking questions later), and the treatment of Blacks as vermin. Further parallels will emerge as time goes by- you watch. Ultimately, the basis of the similarities is the issue of how the moneyed elites can enrich themselves even further by intervening. Like New Orleans, Haiti is merely another "opportunity".
Just wait, San Francisco, Los Angeles (anywhere along the San Andreas fault) and New Madrid Missouri and even Charleston, S.C., those areas always have the potential for BIG surprises.
It's not about compassion to me so much as it is about justice.
qatzelok-That's why I couldn't get past the first few minutes of it.
It must be nice being a talking head for a living.
"Joining us to help us make sense of this is..."
Ugh.
It's not just about Obama either. Haiti's latest disaster has been centuries in the making. It's severity is directly rooted to imperialism.
Is it fair to compare Haiti to NOLA?
Is it fair to for Haiti to be as it is? Was it fair for the imperial powers to meddle and have it's way with Haiti in so many ways?
Christ, give them reparations and forgive their debt already.
Compassion IS justice.
It was a lousy interview, really. I had to force myself to hear the whole thing -lots and lots of blather and relatively little substance. 10 minutes for that!
Poverty IS imperialism.
The wealth that the poor don't have is in the banks of the wealthy, remember? Wealth doesn't trickle down; it flies up. Reagan lied.
You can count on the moneyed class to enrich themselves further on the backs of the already dispossessed.
Journalist Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn Magazine, a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute, who has also reported from Gaza recently wrote:
New Orleans' Heart is in Haiti
New Orleans and Haiti are connected by geography, history, architecture, and family, and news of mass devastation and loss of life in the island nation has hit hard in the Crescent City. Almost every hurricane that has hit our city first brought devastation on our neighbors in Haiti. We are linked not just by a shared experience of storms, but also by first-hand understanding of the ways in which oppression based on race, class and gender interacts with these disasters.
Many New Orleanians have roots in Haiti, and their revolution lent inspiration to our city. The 500 enslaved people from the parishes outside New Orleans that participated in the 1811 Rebellion to End Slavery (the largest armed uprising against slavery in the US) were directly inspired the Haitian revolution. Even much of our housing design – such as the Creole cottage and shotgun house - came here via Haiti...
After Katrina, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat said New Orleans looked more like Haiti than the US. “It’s hard for those of us who are from places like Freetown or Port-au-Prince not to wonder why the so-called developed world needs so desperately to distance itself from us, especially at a time when an unimaginable tragedy shows exactly how much alike we are,” Danticat said. “We do share a planet that is gradually being warmed by mismanagement, unbalanced exploration, and dismal environmental policies that might one day render us all, First World and Third World residents alike, helpless to more disasters like Hurricane Katrina."
...New Orleans’ education, health care, and criminal justice systems were already in crisis before Katrina. In Haiti, two hundred years of crippling debt imposed by France, the US and other colonial powers drained the country's financial resources. Military occupation and presidential coups coordinated and funded by the US have devastated the nation's government infrastructure...
The Rest @
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1562&Itemid=228
"Compassion IS justice."
It's hard to argue with that. Justice to me means righting a wrong though. The "compassion" I'm seeing seems to be rooted in the notion that this earthquake was an Act of God and nothing more, no questions asked about imperialism.
Compassion is rescuing a polar bear from drowning. Justice is not only saving the polar bear, but also asking why the polar bear is drowning in the first place, rectifying the situation so that it stops happening to other polar bears, and going after those who caused it all.
If one does research enough they will find both the Quake, and Katrina were delibertaly man created. Especially Haiti. Less population,- the clearance of land to drill for oil they have been doing under Bush. Remember it was Bush Sr. behind the coup ousting of Aristide, and Bush Jr. who had the CIA kidnap him and placed into exile.