18826: loveayiti: Haitian People Still Kneel to the White Man (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: love haiti <loveayiti@hotmail.com>

 Haitian People Still Kneel to the White Man

By Kwame Akbar Lumumba

 Recently, the president of Haiti, Mr. Jean Bertrand Aristide gave two
different interviews to different members of the media, in Haiti. The first
interview was with a reporter from CNN, Anderson Cooper, a white man who
represents a specific section of white American society. The other interview
was a press conference given to a group of independent Haitian media
personalities in the country where the majority of the journalists present were
Haitian reporters. In the first interview, with Anderson Cooper, President
Aristide’s tone of voice was polite, humble, and kind, in line with the typical
embedded colonial education that many of us have received during the past two
hundred years of physical independence. His answers to Mr. Cooper’s questions
were modulated and respectful. On the other hand, when answering the Haitian
reporters, Mr. Aristide was extremely forceful and defensive, and
disrespectful.

What really puzzled many observers, including those who oppose Aristide, was
his arrogance and his humiliation of Alex Régis, a Haitian reporter from the
local radio station, Radio Vision 2000 when Régis asked him a question?
President Aristide publicly called Régis a liar during the press conference and
also accused him of taking money from the opposition group to direct negative
propaganda against his presidency. The most shocking part of the whole incident
was not the matter of the question, but the way he treated the two reporters,
one of whom was a white man, (Blan Je Vet)  and the other was a Haitian man,
(Ti neg tet Gren).
For starters, I was shocked to hear President Aristide, the head of a nation,
behave in such an uneducated manner as that. Particularly,  when President
Aristide has been regarded by many around the world and among many Haitians as
a man of great personal dignity. Much of the media in Haiti have continued to
comment negatively about the way Aristide treated this young reporter. On the
other hand, many liberated people who make their decisions based on what the
white colonialists have taught us were not at all shocked at the president’s
behavior. As a matter of fact, his statements and his negative behavior is
simply another sign of the ongoing symptoms of the mental slavery imposed upon
us by the white colonialists. Too many of us Haitians still suffer from these
symptoms. Their motto: White is good; Black is evil. In truth, it should be
seen as the reverse.

What President Aristide did to that young Haitian reporter is evidence of what
we have lacked for more than two hundred years: a true conviction of being a
liberated black nation. Of course, we have been physically free from the white
man’s physical abuse, but the mentality is still the same as it was since
before 1804. We still practice the ‘house nigger’ mentality, protecting the
good old white racist system.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been preaching about and denouncing this ‘house
nigger’ mentality for many years. Some people don’t acknowledge this, because
I’m saying it. But if a white man or anyone but a Haitian had been saying it to
us, they would have been listened to. Many of those in the media today in Haiti
who were shocked by what Aristide did also would have trouble acknowledging it.
This is a problem that too many of us Haitians from all social classes have
suffered from. I’m not the first to have said it. Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey,
Thomas Sankara, Kwame Mfume, Nelson Mandela, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques
Roumain, Franz Fanon, many liberated Haitians that I know and many I don’t know
have been saying it for years. We live out our lives depending on what the
white man says and when he says it. This is nothing new. Many in the media
today who are making a big issue about what the president said would have done
the same, if not worse. Because the mental slavery cancer that we suffer from
is within all of us who still practice the ‘house nigger’ mentality.

It’s unfortunate that such treatment came from President Aristide, who has
always been seen as a man of dignity, a proud black man. However, the way he
treated that Haitian reporter compared to his treatment of the white reporter
from CNN was hypocritical. He has always criticized the white man for putting
us where we are now, but in the meantime he shows no respect for his own
journalists in his own land. Even if that reporter was against his presidency,
that still did not give him the right to humiliate him as he did. Again,
Aristide’s behavior is typical of the way many of us have lived our lives for
so many years. We live our lives according to what Washington or the European
community says about us.

I have observed the mental behavior of many regarding the Haitian media in
Haiti and in the diasporas, including Miami. For example, when the Miami
Herald, Channel 10, WSVN and others of the white media talk about an issue,
most of us in the Haitian community give more credence to them because the
information comes from a white institution. However, the same news and the same
topics and information coming from the Black or Haitian media generate a ‘don’t
give a damn’ attitude from us. If a white man says the sky is green, many of us
will believe him. But let a black man say it’s blue, we don’t believe it. A
Haitian will put more trust in what a white doctor says, and will doubt that a
Haitian doctor knows what he’s talking about. As to President Aristide, his top
security detail is comprised of all white men from the United States. Haitian
security isn’t good enough for him. As the president of Haiti, he shouldn’t be
doing what he should be speaking out against.


This is the way we have been programmed. We’ve been programmed to want to look
like the white man and think like the white man. I recently changed my name
from the slave name I was given at birth (Rudy Antoine) to a liberated name
(Kwame Akbar Lumumba). My Haitian friends and relatives, and many other Blacks,
are still questioning me about why I changed from Rudy Antoine, which many of
them consider to be a beautiful name, to Kwame Akbar Lumumba, a difficult name
according to them. This is how many Haitians think; they prefer to give their
kid a French or English or American name instead of a Creole name or one that
represents their true heritage.

Ladies and gentlemen, I know there are a few liberated Haitian men and women in
this community who do not live their lives according to what the white system
wants them to do. They validate their own thinking and their own destiny. This
is what Haiti needs. We need to practice the philosophy of loving our own kind
first before we can love someone else. We need to do it not as a theory but as
a practice that we follow in our daily life. I have started doing it myself. As
a matter of fact, I have given all of my children African names, not French or
English ones. This is in protest of the slave mentality that too many of us
continue to endure. I have seen this double standard way of life, even within
life in the Haitian family. If a Haitian marries a white person, or at least a
person who is not Haitian, we praise and kiss up to that person. However, when
a Haitian marries a Haitian, we tend to bring all kinds of nonsensical
questions to validate that person, asking what family he or she is from, or
what education he or she has. The white spouse could be a serial killer,
someone we have no information about, but as long as he or she is white we
trust our own children with them. Our slave mentality makes us accept them,
instead of accepting a hard working Haitian man or woman. All of these
practices put us where we are now. This is the reason why Haiti is still where
it started after two hundred years of independence: mental and physical
violence against each other among the Haitian family, the individual family as
well as the national family.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what President Aristide did to Alex Régis is not
exclusive to him. Aristide is now the wrongdoer of the hour, and he deserves to
take the heat. But we are just as guilty. Most of us still don’t respect our
own Haitian brothers and sisters. This problem can only be solved when Haiti
has a second revolution, which will be a social cultural revolution. There are
many countries in the world that lived for many years under the white man’s
mentality and after armed struggle or revolution to physically chase the white
enemy out they still had to spend another decade to change the way they thought
about one another. They had to create a social cultural revolution in which
they had to validate themselves before they could validate the enemy.

In Burkina Faso, a country in Africa, when Thomas Sankara came to power in
1983, he wasted no time in changing the blueprint of his country. He
automatically changed the name from a French colonial name, Upper Volta, to a
name that represents the working class people of his African nation. He named
the country ‘Burkina Faso’, meaning ‘the land of the upright people’. Thomas
Sankara did that because he said that in order for Burkina Faso to be a truly
liberated country they had to get rid of all French mentality and legacy in the
country. In China, after the Chinese revolution, Mao Tse-tung pushed another
revolution to the person which was a cultural revolution, in which the Chinese
people reprocessed the way they see one another.

Changing the mentality of Haitians from a European colonialist mentality to a
revolutionary one is what we need to spend the next hundred years doing. It’s a
long road. But if we condition ourselves and are conscious of that Mental
Slavery Virus, we can one day become a truly liberated nation, not just
physically but also mentally. Until we as a nation are really conscious of that
disease that attacks even our leader, President Aristide, we will continue to
repeat the same mistake over and over. If we are ready to build a better
nation, a great nation, changing governments or individual leaders is not the
solution. We need a second revolution, a Social Cultural Revolution that will
erase all the mental slavery illness that causes so many of us Haitians to hate
one another.


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