A lot has been said in praise of “The Ransom” series on Haiti, recently published in The New York Times. Social media coverage of the series has been particularly intense; thousands of readers were “shocked” to learn this history for the first time—namely, that France made Haitians pay, and pay, and pay for their own liberation from enslavement.
I found the endless stream of kudos aimed at the paper of record to be a bit disconcerting. France’s extortion of Haiti been written about over the years in mainstream media, taught in college courses, and is well-known to anyone who has ever read anything about the Haitian Revolution, but it seems like it takes coverage from the Times to make it real to the broader public.
As someone who taught this history for a number of years as part of cultural anthropology courses on the Caribbean, and has written about it multiple times here at Daily Kos, it’s not that I’m not delighted that many more people will now connect Haiti’s current abject economic present to the economic rape of the past. Or that people now see the role played by both France and the United States in the oppression; however I hope that when the flurry of media attention fades, that perhaps a few people will find time to read the work of Caribbean historians who have been pointing this out for decades.
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Democracy Now! had an excellent show in response to the Times’ series. As co-host Juan González notes, “a lot of this is only new to people who haven’t paid attention.”
We look in depth at “The Ransom,” a new series in The New York Times that details how France devastated Haiti’s economy by forcing Haiti to pay massive reparations for the loss of slave labor after enslaved Haitians rebelled, founding the world’s first Black republic in 1804.
We speak with historians Westenley Alcenat and Gerald Horne on the story of Haiti’s finances and how Haitian demands for reparations have been repeatedly shut down. Alcenat says the series “exposes the rest of the world to a knowledge that actually has existed for over a hundred years,” and while he welcomes the series, he demands The New York Times apologize for publishing racist Haitian stereotypes in 2010 by columnist David Brooks.
Horne also requests The New York Times make the revelatory documents that the series cites accessible to other historians. He says the series will “hopefully cause us to reexamine the history of this country and move away from the propaganda point that somehow the United States was an abolitionist republic when actually it was the foremost slaveholder’s republic.”
Amy Goodman and González had two very knowledgeable guests on the program, Dr. Westenley Alcenat and Dr. Gerald Horne.
(link to transcript)
For those of you not familiar with Dr. Alcenat, he was born in Haiti, and teaches United States, Atlantic, and Afro-Caribbean history at Fordham University in the Bronx. Here’s a link to Dr. Alcenat’s 2021 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) report.
Dr. Horne is a historian with an extensive bibliography, with over 30 books published; Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic should be required reading.
The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers—France, Great Britain, and Spain—suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti’s mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne’s path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola
Dr. Christy Thornton, an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins University departments of sociology and Latin American studies, tweeted about previous coverage of this history, while taking a poke at the Times.
Dr. Thornton isn’t wrong. A simple Google or Twitter search turns up quite a few mainstream stories and a documentary, Aristide and the Endless Revolution, which is described as a “detailed account of the United States' removal of Haiti's democratically elected president, Aristide. Features Aristide, Sen. Maxine Waters, Noam Chomsky, Rep. Charles Rangel, [and] more.”
Here at Daily Kos, the July 30, 2013 edition of Black Kos linked several stories on CARICOM’s calls for reparations, which included what had been done to Haiti. This history was also covered in this very series in October 2021 in “Caribbean Matters: Time to push against Haiti hate yet again, and learn some hidden U.S. history.”
Al Jazeera posted a call for reparations in 2016.
Five years later, Al Jazeera made another call in this feature from 2021, noting that “Haiti is the first Black-led republic, but now it’s often characterized as ‘poor,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘unstable,” and asking “What has contributed to Haiti’s misery? What is missing in this conversation?”
Here’s coverage from The Guardian in 2010.
Taking a different perspective, Dr. Peter James Hudson, associate professor of African American studies and history at UCLA, posted this Twitter thread, which I’ve condensed here for your convenience. He celebrates the series for bringing the story of Haiti’s extortion to new audiences, while naming conversations that he wishes “The Ransom” had inspired—and lamenting some of the ones it did.
I find myself in the invidious position of having to come to the defense of the New York Times, a newspaper I stopped reading regularly after 9/11, when they started running lifestyle articles justifying torture.
They have given cover to every US military adventure since then and of course, their coverage of Haiti has traditionally been horrible, reactionary, and racist.
To give but one example, their Current History supplement published the racist City Banker John H. Allen’s "An Inside View of Revolutions in Haiti" in 1930.
In the article, memorial of the the beginnings of the US occupation of Haiti, Allen gives us a typical view of Haiti's supposed atavism and backwardness and attributes to William Jennings Bryan the unfortunately immortal line, “Dear me, niggers speaking French!”
Yes, of course, their citational practices have been awful. When a NYT reporter wrote history of US interventions and occupations of Haiti, it seemed to borrow heavily from an article on the subject that Jemima Pierre and I had just published in The Black Agenda Report.
Yet while the claims to “newness” of their series on Haiti’s debt are overblown, they are not entirely wrong. Jonathan Katz has outlined what is new, so I won’t rehearse his analysis.
But I would add that what is new, and important, about the series is its stitching together of the debt's history over a period of time fragmented by many historians. The 19th century is rarely connected to the occupation years, the occupation years to the Duvalier era, & so on.
This synethetic but granular approach is important, especially as it allows us to make political-economic claims on and of the present. We make a big deal about following the money, they have done just that.
I was approached by two of the writers about a year ago and had a number of conversations with them. I was more than willing to share what I could as I thought what they were doing was important, precisely because it was for the NYT.
For many years, I’ve published on Citibank and Haiti for The Black Agenda Report, Bloomberg, Haiti Liberte, Radical History Review, Boston Review, the LSE Blog, and in my book, Bankers and Empire.
But all of these publications combined over a decade did not have the audience this times piece has had in less than a week.
If that means that folks who don’t buy academic books or have access to paywalled, academic journals begin to think critically, or differently, or extend their knowledge about, debt, banking, Haiti, imperialism, and Citibank in particular, I’m happy about that.
And if the piece leads readers to other sources, which I think it has, that’s great, too. Moreover, while they used some of my research, they also built on it in some important ways that I did not, which is, I think, all one can hope for when you put your research out there.
(They also consulted with and named Guy Pierre, the Haitian economic historian whose work on banking I have always drawn on, but who rarely if ever get cited by North American anglophone historians.)
Would I have liked to have seen more radical conclusions, more calls for direct actions, a manifesto censuring Citibank, an outline for Haitian reparations from France? Of course.
But it’s the NYT. However, surprisingly, as the NYT they actually provided us with a surprising ballast to support claims more radical than they have made: like, let’s go after Citibank. Or, what about Puerto Rico? Or England and the West Indies.
Yet unfortunately -- but perhaps typically -- it seems that opportunity was quickly lost. The debate over the series became not one of the ethics of debt and reparations or a critique of the role of Citibank et al in US imperialism and Caribbean underdevelopment, but citation.
Historians effectively hijacked a potentially critical conversation to make the story about how they were not part of the story. Why were we, asked the North American historians, not the subject of this story about Haiti?
It's a little disgusting, this response. But what can one expect from an academy that is structured by the same racist and imperial forces that have shaped Haiti's history.
And the proprietary nature of Western knowledge production about Haiti is, at the end of the day, part of the regimes of extraction that have made Haiti "the poorest country in the hemisphere."
For once, the NYTimes, with all it's problems, wrote against those regimes of extraction. It's too bad the historians fucked it up
The New Republic should probably get a prize for best headline on this story, from journalist and professor Amy Wilentz: “The New York Times Corrects Lousy Haiti Coverage in … The New York Times.”
Wilentz echoes Dr. Hudson’s Twitter thread: “The Twitter hubbub over uncredited scholars is a sideshow. The real people who’ve suffered from the way we’ve covered Haiti are Haitians.”
Wilentz also responded to a U.S. defense and denial posted in the Miami Herald.
Jonathan M. Katz, journalist and author of Gangsters of Capitalism, weighed in.
Katz posted his take on his blog, The Racket, in a post titled “What's new (and what isn't) in the NYT's big Haiti story.”
That story finally dropped over the weekend. “Story” doesn’t really cover it: it’s a four-byline, six-article package with a paper insert in the Sunday edition, teased in a box that dominated the front page. It is, in other words, a News Event — almost certainly modeled on the epic success of the 1619 Project — as only the New York Times can attempt.
The reactions have been … intense. Among the majority of readers who’d never heard (or forgot) that so much of France’s and Citigroup’s wealth was literally stolen at gunpoint from Haiti, it’s been scandal and shock. (I’m getting emails from relatives I talk to once every other year asking if I’ve heard this story before.) My Twitter feed meanwhile is filled with historians who are furious that they weren’t cited for the help they gave the Times, or incredulous that the “Paper of Record” Columbused a central story in the place where Columbusing was invented.
At the risk of a little Timesian bothsidesing, I think both camps have a point. The package did cover a lot of very old ground, a lot of which is presented as if it is new. There’s a lot of “rarely taught or acknowledged,” “the Times reveals,” etc., about things that have been known and talked about by millions of people for decades. But there is value in making this story more widely known in France and the United States. And moreover, there is important reporting that many people who think they know the story are missing.
Give the whole thing a read.
Katz has been reporting on Haiti for some time.
No matter how you feel about The New York Times, I, like Professor Hudson, do hope you’ll read “The Ransom” series. And I hope that if this story was news to you, or even if it wasn’t new but you’d like to dive a little deeper into the history for more insight, that you’ll take some time to follow the links in this story and view the videos.
Please join me in the comments for more, and for the weekly Caribbean Twitter Roundup.