Haitian people are not your political pawns: Stop the Anti- Blackness now
As a global community rooted in the struggles against the structural violence faced by the Haitian people, their abandonment and the health inequities they experience,, we are outraged and concerned by the Anti-Blackness that unfolded in Springfield Ohio and amplified during the US electoral debate on Tuesday, September 10th, 2024..
These white supremacist attacks cannot be seen as isolated from the long history of necropolitical policies and actions that we have seen in play over the years to destabilize, control and impoverish the Haitian community. Mass migration of Haitian communities to the United started in the 1950s, decades after the US occupation, when fear and terror were the rules in Haiti under the Dictator Francois Duvalier backed by the US. Since then we have seen Haitians taking risks by all means seeking better living conditions because their land and economy were devastated by colonial powers. Powers that have drained their resources, controlled their economy, and manipulated their political leaders but Haitians continued to fight for their lives, braving seas, mountains, and wild forests to look for a life to sustain themselves. Haitians are strong people who continue to await reparations for the collective punishment they faced as a result of being the first black nation to free themselves from Aby Yala (Term used by the indigenous peoples of America to refer to the American continent) and its symbolic representation of liberation all over the world.
More recently, on 5th September, Anthony Bliinken was in Haiti to push for a new UN peacekeeping force. It is no coincidence that while the US occupation interests are masked once again under the pretense of a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti , the Anti-Blackness towards Haitians also rears its head again on the domestic electoral platform in the US. We cannot view any of this as a bi-partisan issue and we cannot view any of this in isolation. In these moments we need to increase the collective consciousness of knowing that these issues are deliberate white supremacist acts. Dehumanization and extraction are the forces of colonization. The savagery imagery of Black people that was stirring in US communities and media this week, is the same imagery that attempted to legitimize Haitian bodies used as slaves and later the settlement of France and then the US in Haiti.
Since the white supremacy whipping of Haitian communities living under a bridge in Texas del Rio, EqualHealth´s Campaign Against Racism, has been trying to raise consciousness on Anti-Blackness as a foundational pillar of the US immigration industrial complex. A system that upholds the criminalization of Black migrant communities and allows these narratives to spread rapidly. We know that the narratives from this week are not memes that remain in social media but that they are living structures that deliberately shorten the life of Haitian migrants and all Black migrant communities. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us,
Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death
We ask that we collectivize our responsibility around these narratives. We must act in solidarity by lifting up the demands of Haitian migrant collectives that are struggling every day against the embedding of the Anti Blackness practices across our institutions and operating in our communities. From EqualHealth´s Campaign Against Racism our demands remain clear. Please click to read and support our demands here Nobody is Free until Haiti is Free.
