It was shocking to see the treatment of Haitian refugees at the border but not surprising as Haiti has a history that pisses off colonial powers.
Haitian refugees treatment directly proportional to hue
Many in the United States condone a certain kind of inhumanity when applied to people with darker hues. Said inhumanity is generally directly proportional to the degree of darkness.
I felt like throwing up watching as the border patrol on horses mimicked what we imagine was the behavior of the slave police in the eighteen hundreds. These people are from a country that has had to pay the price of having the gall to be the first independent free black nation in the hemisphere.
The Haitian people suffered from the indignity of paying France for their nation’s property loss: black bodies. They could not have been allowed to succeed because of the precedence it would set.
Does Cuba ring a bell? Well, Cuba is a double edge sword. Up until 1995, when the right kind of Cubans was coming over, they could stay. After 1980, the “wet feet, dry feet policy” took effect. The idea, if they touch land, they could stay. But we caught most at sea. And under President Obama, more normal immigration came about.
Sadly, there is a distinct silence from too many U.S. organizations. Many of these people have been out of Haiti working in South and Central America since several disasters. Repatriating them to a country recovering from a coup, a hurricane, and an earthquake is inhumane.
News outlets report that there are 20,000 throughout Central and South America migrating here based on misinformation. The humane thing would be to invest a few million dollars in those countries where they could inexpensively build support systems for them in their southern adopted countries to mitigate their need to come to the U.S.
Too often, we fail to think outside of the box. And too often, our hue-based inhumanity supersedes rational thought.
