Neil deMause: The Website

The Port-au-Prince earthquake is four months in the past, but the suffering — and efforts by Haitians to raise funds to help survivors — goes on:

This week is a special one for Haitians: Today, May 18, is Haitian Flag Day, commemorating the day in 1803 when Haitian revolutionaries chose the blue-and-red banner to represent their country; on Thursday, Haitians worldwide mark the 267th birthday of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who helped lead the nation to independence.

This year’s celebrations are simultaneously more subdued and more focused, as the international Haitian community works to rebuild from the devastating earthquake that struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving one million homeless… [read more]

With Haiti starting to drop out of the news again (despite continued problems there for earthquake survivors, not least of which is the rain), it’s an apropos time for my article to appear on how the media covered the Haitian earthquake and its aftermath:

One of the most striking images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was of poor New Orleans residents crowded together outside that city’s convention center, days after the floodwaters had receded, chanting, “We want help!” It was a scene that shocked viewers and reporters alike, who had not realized that a major U.S. city could be home to so many people who lacked the economic means even to flee in the face of oncoming danger–though the promised national conversation about poverty that was supposed to result never really arrived (Extra!, 7-8/06).

Such images couldn’t help but come to mind in the aftermath of the January 12 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, where crushing poverty greatly worsened the devastation wrought in Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns. In TV news coverage, Haiti was described as “underdeveloped, overpopulated, and incredibly poor” (Nightline, 1/12/10), “extremely poor” (CBS Evening News, 1/12/10), “desperately poor” (CNN, 1/12/10) and, over and over, “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Reports focused particularly on the lack of building codes that had helped lead to such widespread destruction when the ground shook, and on the lack of government emergency services to rescue quake survivors and bring them supplies.

In many ways, the TV news coverage of Haiti paralleled the round-the-clock attention to Katrina–down to the ubiquitous presence of Anderson Cooper on CNN, asking why it was taking so long for aid to arrive. But if grinding poverty in New Orleans was seen as cause for outrage (however short-lived), in Haiti it was presented more as a natural state of affairs. …

The article is print-only (for the time being, at least), but you can find the latest copy of Extra! on newsstands, if you can still find any newsstands. Or drop them a line and ask how to send them $3.95 for a copy by mail.

I check in on the state of microlending projects in Haiti, and how they will fare in the post-earthquake economy:

As Haiti continues to dig out from the earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, local microlenders are gearing up to begin rebuilding the country’s shattered economy.

International aid groups have been “focusing on supplying food and shelter,” says Daniel Jean-Louis, a business professor at the State University of Haiti and Quisqueya University who also works as a consultant for local business groups in Port-au-Prince. “Nobody has talked yet about businesses resuming and people getting back to work.”… [read more]

After I wrote my last post, I spotted David Brooks’ Times op-ed asking why Haiti had such poor building construction. His answer: Voodoo and bad child-rearing!

I’d say more, but the letters in response really say it all.

So here we are again: Watching scenes of unimaginable devastation, of people crying out “Help us!” (or in this case, “Amwe!“) while the world watches and waits for rescuers to arrive. And again, we are told over and over that while the disaster may be natural, poverty is to blame for the scope of the disaster — in New Orleans, people couldn’t afford cars to escape the water, in Port-au-Prince people couldn’t afford reinforced concrete to stand up to a 7-magnitude quake.

What’s missing, so far at least, is outrage at this. There has been no Jack Cafferty moment, no news reporters looking at the horrors and wondering how, in our modern world, this can still happen.

I know the reason, of course. The cry during Katrina was “How can this happen in the United States?” and, of course, Haiti isn’t in the United States. It’s in the Third World, where, presumably, in the American mind this sort of stuff is acceptable — the corollary of “How can this happen here?” of course, is “This is supposed to happen there!” But it’s still odd when you think about it that compassion, at least of the “We should prevent this” type as opposed to the “We should send $20 to the Red Cross” type, stops at national borders, especially when you consider that Port-au-Prince is only slightly further from my home in Brooklyn than New Orleans is — not to mention that there are way more Haitians in my immediate neighborhood than Louisianans.

Which brings me to the other media omission: Despite all the focus on Haiti’s crushing poverty, I haven’t yet seen many reporters wondering how it got to be that way. It’s a complicated historical issue, obviously, but no one (outside of Canada, anyway) has even asked the question — not even bringing in a Haiti development expert (and lord knows there are plenty) to explain why it is that the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is relatively richer and more resilient to disasters than its neighbor to the west. The closest I’ve seen so far is a brief aside in the ABC News article linked above, citing Cuba for its “very good emergency management infrastructure,” without investigating why that might be the case.

Now, maybe it’s just too early for the media to turn its attention to this topic — maybe by the weekend, we’ll have tons of articles exploring Haitian history and North-South economic relations and racism and the differing features of Spanish and French colonialism. But somehow I’m not holding my breath.