Former President Barack Obama on Saturday seized on what he described as cruelty and indecency coming from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, stepping into one of the nation’s ugliest midterm fights as he worked to rally Democratic voters in two Midwestern battlegrounds.
First in Ohio, Obama took aim at Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has doubled down on an advertising campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Dr. Amy Acton. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have also defended the ad, even as Republican leaders across Ohio, including Gov. Mike DeWine, have called for its removal.
So you come in to a conversation specifically about immigration laws and law and order politics wherein my counter to the person I am arguing with was that the West is a massive contributor and maintainer of the causes of and driving conditions behind mass migration of poor and traumatized people into the West and you thought: “you know. I don’t want to get involved at all in the topic of law and order or immigration law, but I just think that if you’re going to talk about what the West did Haiti, it’s really racist of you not to also blame the Haitians for some of their own problems”
Do I have that about right?
You didn’t say the West was a cause of the problems. You said it was the cause. All I meant was, “this is a bit eurocentric, don’t you think?” We should keep discussions grounded in reality, is all. I wasn’t expecting it to upset you so badly.
The West played a massive role in Haitian history. All bad things pretty much. But the Haitians themselves have played a major role as well.
Again, with all due respect, Haiti doesn’t even exist without Europe forcing it to exist in the first place. It was cleansed of the original peoples, and of the names of the places and the governance and the ecology to the best of their ability and then populated, by Europeans, with trafficked humans who were beaten, murdered, and taught a European language. Literally everything about the situation is foundationally a European construct and the Haitian people are working within that context to liberate themselves despite all of the best efforts of the West to stop them and to limit them.
Do you understand the critique? The Haitian people are self determining, yes, but they are self determining inside of a historical context created by the West over centuries. Yes, it is true that every runner finishes the race on their own, but when the runner is trafficked into the race, beaten within an inch of their life, maimed, and then given salt water by the organizers along the route, it’s not exactly the conscientious thing to say “look, we have to treat them and all of their stumbles and scrapes and lost time as something they cocreated in order to respect their agency”.
It is appropriate to acknowledge, thoroughly, just how devastating the West has been to the world’s people.
Absolutely. I’m not saying you’re wrong. It just sucks when the history of a country is discussed without mention of the people who live there. It can be infantilizing to speak of them as if they’ve just been nothing but bossed around, is all.
They literally are the only successful slave rebellion in the history of European empire. They are some the most self determined people in the history of humanity not in absolute terms but relative to asserting themselves against the greatest force of domination on history