MLK, Jr and the Haitian Tragedy

By John Ballard

It was my honor to serve part of the King family in my early days as a cafeteria manager in training. The location has been closed for years, but the old Piccadilly Cafeteria at Cumberland Mall in Atlanta was where I worked as trainee and associate for the better part of twelve years before being assigned my own unit.

Occasionally on Sunday afternoons a party of four or five, sometimes as many as seven or eight, would come for lunch which included M.L. King, Sr., whom everyone called Daddy King, and Mrs. Coretta King. Their visit was always a low-key event. By then (between 1976 and 1980) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was over a decade past, public racism was no longer acceptable, Daddy King's wife and Mrs. King's husband had both been killed and all the family seemed to want was a quiet place to enjoy a Sunday meal together.

The first time they came Daddy King sent for the manager on duty and wanted me to know that when they left they would be paying by check and he didn't expect to have any trouble. He made it clear that he wanted to pay the bill and leave quietly just like any other party, with no special attention. A quiet word to the cashier ahead of time was all that was needed.

I resisted the temptation to make conversation, as much as I would have liked to do so, because I felt the best service I could provide was seating them quietly where they would be least likely to attract attention and allowing them to enjoy their meal without interruption. I know my staff was proud to have them as customers and after a few visits they got used to the idea and didn't make a big deal out of it.

At that time we were living in downtown Atlanta. Our neighborhood, Virginia-Highland, was racially balanced enough that the local elementary school was pretty well integrated. It was situated between two other neighborhoods that were not integrated. At that time the Atlanta Public Schools were busing students to balance the racial composition, so an elementary school in Bedford-Pine, which was nearly all black, was paired with another school in Morningside which was white. The same buses that took white first-, second- and third-graders from Morningside Elementary to C.W. Hill Elementary in the black neighborhood returned with black fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders to integrate Morningside Elementary.

My wife and I noticed that our daughter was not learning to read in the first grade. By the start of second grade we heard that C.W. Hill had a good reputation and might be a better place for her to attend school. We learned that since we were white and that school was majority black (51%) we were eligible to transfer our child to that school in accordance with the "M to M program" (Minority to Majority). I suppose had we been black she would not have been allowed to go there, but since we were white, it was approved. Sure enough, when she started she was tested and paired with a "team-teacher" and before the second grade was half over she was reading out loud and we were well pleased.

While at C.W. Hill our child was invited to a birthday party of a classmate who was a nephew of the late Dr. King, but again we didn't make a big deal of it aside from telling her how very special that was. Children accept one another at face value much better than their parents. We reared our children to select their friends according to how they live rather than who they are. They are grown now and I think it worked.

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It seems providential that this year's remembrance of King is overlaid with images of the Haitian tragedy, an event that is more about poverty and political disorder than nature. And yes, it is also about race. It's time that someone said it out loud: racism is alive and well in the world and the Haitian tragedy is part of it's legacy. Repeating what I wrote yesterday...

In a way Hispaniola is a microcosm of the world, with a stable and relatively prosperous Dominican Republic on one end and Haiti, the world's first Black republic, at the other. A Wikipedia snip from the Dominican Republic article is revealing.

A system of racial stratification was imposed on
Santo Domingo by Spain, as elsewhere in the Spanish Empire. Its effects
have persisted, reaching their culmination in the Trujillo regime, as
the dictator used racial persecution and nationalistic fervor against
Haitians. A U.N. envoy in October 2007 found racism against blacks in
general, and Haitians in particular, to be rampant in every segment of
Dominican society.  According to a study by the CUNY Dominican Studies
Institute, about 90% of the contemporary Dominican population has West
African ancestry to varying degrees.  However, most Dominicans do not
self-identify as black, in contrast to people [who?] of West African
ancestry in other countries. A variety of terms are used to represent a
range of skintones, such as moreno/a (brown), canelo/a (red/brown)
["cinnamon"], indio/a (Indian), blanco/a oscuro/a (dark white), and
trigueño/a (literally "wheat colored", or olive skin).

In addition to those historic roots of racist origin can be added a more recent damning indictment articulated in that careless, stupid remark by Ronald Reagan that government is not the solution to the problem, government IS the problem.

Bill Quigley connected a couple of dots yesterday in a short piece with one bullet point: Part of the Suffering of Haiti is "Made in the USA"

Part of the suffering of Haiti is indeed "Made in the USA." While the earthquake would harm any country, actions by the United States have absolutely magnified the harm from the earthquake in Haiti.

How? In the last decade alone, the U.S. slashed humanitarian assistance to Haiti, blocked international loans, forced the government of Haiti to downsize, ruined tens of thousands of small farmers, and replaced the government with private non-governmental organizations.

The result? Small farmers are starved out of the countryside and migrate by the tens of thousands to the cities where they built cheap shelters on hills. International funds for roads and education and healthcare are halted by the U.S. The money that does come into the country goes not to the government but to private corporations. Thus the government of Haiti is nearly powerless to provide assistance to its own people on regular days - much less in the face of a real disaster like this one.

In case the reader missed the point, I will repeat it clearly. Government is NOT the problem. In Haiti the LACK OF GOVERNMENT is the problem. And as Quigley points out, a veritable explosion of NGO's, all with the best of good intentions (and perhaps not without other motives... Naomi Klein has something to say about how NGO's and capitalism intersect, but I don't think she names NGO's as a class), inspired by the misguided impulse so cleverly captured by Reagan, have laid the groundwork for the catastrophe we see unfolding this weekend.

For any who have not recently watched King' s "I have a dream" speech, here is a link. It's only twelve minutes long, and it would be a fitting personal tribute for anyone to take twelve minutes to watch and listen. Note his natural and frequent use of the word Negro which has since been twisted to make it sound racist. I'm of a generation that was taught that people who say Nigger or Nigra were showing both ignorance and lack of good breeding. My grandmother used now forgotten terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon. I never expected to read about any elected official's being castigated for mentioning skin tones or language referring to race, especially when both are uncontroversial everyday topics among Black people I know. 

Xeni Jardin's news roundup at Boing Boing is one of many clearing houses links about the Haitian disaster.  That's were I found this video

.

I came across another observation of a recent trend in reportage toward more graphic images and descriptions. Philip Kennikott at the Washington Post reflects on this trend.

The images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those from recent natural disasters, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not clear if this reflects the magnitude and proximity of the disaster, or some change in the willingness of newspapers and other media to accurately present the full horror of the earthquake that devastated the desperately poor nation on Tuesday afternoon.

Or is Haiti simply an exception? Is there something about the essential status of the entire country and its people that gives the media new license?

The usual conventions of suggesting rather than displaying trauma seem to have been punctured, at least for now. Bodies caked in dust and plaster, faces covered in blood, the dead stacked in the streets without sheets to hide them -- these are all violations of the unwritten code that death can only be seen, in the established etiquette of the mainstream media, by analogy or metaphor or discreet substitute.

On Friday, The Post ran a picture of a young girl, seen from behind, her torso crushed by the weight of fallen concrete. The New York Times ran a picture of a dead man on a makeshift stretcher, covered in the white dust that makes so many of the bodies -- living or dead -- look sculptural. The BBC's Web site featured a warning about the graphic nature of its image gallery, which included a young girl looking up imploringly at the camera while a man, half buried in rubble and his face turned away, bled profusely down his back. Old ladies are seen disheveled and almost naked; the bandages on children don't hide the gore.
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Images of war, especially the wars the United States has been fighting for almost a decade now, are always politicized. Graphic representation of death is explosive, and it is customary (in this country) to control it, for fear of inflaming passions, either for or against the conflict. In recent years, and in contrast to millenniums of history in which wounds and blood were proudly displayed by warriors (come back with your shield, or on it, the Greeks said), the soldier's privacy has been seen as paramount. And so in the United States, images of wartime suffering are intricately referential but rarely graphic: a shattered car, but not its occupants; blood on the ground, but not the body that bled; clothing scattered among rubble, but not the people who once lived there.

The fear of violating the victim's privacy -- which is a strange and dubious scruple -- isn't in operation in Haiti. After years of hinting at horror, the scales have fallen, the camera is unsheathed as a seemingly transparent window on misery, and journalists are allowed to show the worst, and say with the blunt, desperate urgency of the best journalism: Look.

In December, the fifth anniversary of the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in Southeast Asia, we recycled images of that disaster. Although the tidal wave struck in poor countries, it also affected wealthy Westerners living and vacationing on the coasts of the Indian Ocean, and it was their imagery that defined the tragedy in the public memory. These were horrifying, dynamic images of the tragedy in motion, of waves surging onto beaches, over sea walls, through streets. There were images of bodies, too, but to see the devastation in motion was more seductive and mesmerizing, and it made the stronger impact. Perhaps we were also more squeamish then, less willing to look at the aftermath (though it wasn't hard to find).

What's changed? There are obvious answers: The slow numbing effect of the past decade, which also included devastating images from New Orleans and Sichuan, China, may simply have the lowered the threshold of what is acceptable to show. The easy availability of the most graphic photographs and videos online may have changed the equation for everyone. There also seems to be a self-lacerating, guilt-ridden quality to the graphic coverage, as if the Western media are indicting both themselves and the larger Western indifference to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

But the cruelty and anguish of this disaster are also incongruously large compared with the usual, crude metrics -- the reading of the Richter scale or the body count -- we use to assess earthquakes. The images may be stronger and more visceral because they are already in argument with the bland ranking the history books may record.

More than anything else, however, the willingness to look this disaster square on reflects the problematic, even embarrassing status of Haiti. It was a country tossed aside, seemingly consigned to the status of a street person whose needs are intractable. There were, of course, years of engagement and disengagement, as the United States and countries from around the hemisphere intervened (often disastrously) in Haitian politics. There were U.N. resolutions, peacekeepers and aid efforts. But with devastating hurricanes, a failed political system, corruption, coups and riots, Haiti became the very definition of a failed state. To be blunt: It came to seem as if the people of Haiti had no status.

If you believe that, then it is impossible to violate their privacy.

There are many more important things that must be wrung out of this misery, but the camera is recording something elemental that will affect everything to do with the future of this troubled country. It is asking if these are people, like us. It is asking if we believe they are human.

Failed state = people with no status = "are they human"...

Hmm...
When have we heard language like that before?