Treatment of Haitian Migrants is About Punishing Black Freedom
The empires still haven't forgiven Black Haitians for the crime of liberating themselves
“The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.” - C.L.R. James, ‘The Black Jacobins.’
Heading into the last decade of the 18th century, the West Indian colony then known as San Domingo was “the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation.” The colony was the largest single market for the European slave-trade, and was responsible for two-thirds of France’s overseas trade.
All of this “rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves.” Those same enslaved people then revolted and, by the start of the 19th century, established the nation of Haiti.
This revolution still stands as the only successful national-scale revolution of enslaved people in human history. What the Black revolutionaries of Haiti overcame was astounding.
They not only beat back and beat down the military of France over the course of their 12-year revolution, but also the Spanish and British militaries. The White European world has never forgiven Haiti for its original sin of fighting to free itself from slavery.
France, supported by the rest of the world’s major powers, insisted that Haiti pay them $25 billion for the crime of freeing themselves and depriving the French empire of its human “property” and the resources those enslaved people cultivated. That mandate plunged the Black nation into nearly insurmountable debt at its founding.
Additionally, the United States not only refused to recognize Haiti as a nation once its people had freed themselves from literal slavery to France, the neighboring proto-empire also instituted a trade embargo that further crippled the new revolutionary state.
If that weren’t bad enough, the US later invaded and occupied Haiti for two decades, re-instituting slavery, systematically executing Haitians who disagreed with US politics, and taking control of Haiti’s economy. We are now just a century removed from the United States’ violent invasion and occupation of Haiti.
Since then, we’ve supported more coups in Haiti. All this is to say that we, along with other White European settler colonial states, have intentionally created the conditions in Haiti from its founding that produce the need for many Haitians to flee their home and seek refuge and asylum here in the North.
As we do all over the world, the United States has waged consistent, brutal war on Haiti, creating a hellscape from which their citizens need to escape. So, they come here, to the heart of the empire to seek protection from it inside its borders.
When Haitians then come here, seeking asylum as is their right to do not only under God and all that is just but also under US and international law, we send them back without allowing them to apply for asylum. That is a violation of our own laws.
To circumvent those inconvenient legal protections, President Joe Biden uses Donald Trump’s flimsy Title 42 order. Before we deport them, however, (and Biden has already, in just eight months, deported more people than Donald Trump did in four years) we send the tip of our empire’s spear - law enforcement officers - to punish them.
We punish the descendants of The Black Jacobins, we whip them, ruefully insult, men, women, and children alike. We corral them like animals, chase and terrorize their naked children instead of caring for them.
The United States does not, of course, do this to its undocumented White migrants and asylum seekers, en masse. There are over half a million undocumented immigrants in the United States from Europe and Canada and neither you nor I have ever seen a photo or video of the US Border Patrol stampeding over them, whipping them with leather straps, or insulting them before violating their rights and sending them away without asylum hearings.
No, we don’t do this to our hundreds of thousands of undocumented White immigrants. We do this to the descendants of those Black revolutionaries who committed the crime of fighting for their freedom.
We do this violence to those who, to this day, only want to seek refuge away from the crimes of empires like ours. We do this to Black Haitians.
Don’t look away and do not deflect. It is we, you and I, and all our neighbors, who do this.
A Democratic President, partnered with a Vice-President who is the daughter of a Caribbean immigrant, along with a Democratic federal Congress, all using federal law enforcement agents as foils, who are committing these dehumanizing, illegal violations against Haitians at our border. We are doing this.
Look at the excitement on the faces of the law enforcement officers as they whip and chase the Black families. Contrast the anger and scorn visible on their faces to the confusion on the faces of the Black babies they’re terrorizing.
Listen to the Border Patrol law enforcement officers’ taunts from on horseback, slung down at their victims. This is what the US Border Patrol does.
We literally pay them using public funds (and the Democratic congress recently raised their agency’s budget to its all-time high, even after pretending to care about Border Patrol’s abuses in the concentration camps they currently operate for Latin migrants) to do rodeo training and competitions. This is US Border Patrol training being implemented.
These terrorists with badges are doing what they are trained to do, what US law enforcement has always done at our borders to Brown and Black people. Believe your eyes, not the equivocating and cruel justifications from this Presidential administration.
What US law enforcement is carrying out against Haitians right now at our border is a crime against humanity, and it is happening mere miles away from our ethnic concentration camps which themselves are growing under President Biden’s direction. This is a human rights violation and a feature of American empire, not a bug.
This cruelty is a violation of human dignity and all morality, as well as the law. It is also being committed by the people we voted for.
So, it is our fault. What we do in response, hopefully with full, changed, and repentant hearts is up to us.
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