"Haiti is so dark," and other harmful generalizations

The sun was not yet up as I crept with my Haitian roommate across dimly-lit paths to join the men. They were in their pajamas - Haitian businessmen, pastors, and teachers - and still rubbing their eyes as we stumbled in.

They were tired for a reason. I was in the Dominican Republic for only a handful of days, and my organization's Haitian board of directors had made the trip over to meet me there. Gang violence and instability had made it unsafe for me to visit Haiti for quite some time, and we had a lot of work to cram into a few days. Plus a retreat to attend. But Christians across Haiti had agreed to spend one of those days in prayer for their country. And our team wasn't going to let them down, even though they had crossed the border to the Dominican. Our day was packed so they rose at dawn to pray.

We formed a circle, joined tired, cold hands, and began praying together for their country. It wasn't long before one by one, they quietly dropped to their knees. They were praying out loud, all at once, in a mix of Creole and French and English, and slowly their voices swelled and began to rise. Have mercy on us, forgive us, Haiti has turned away from you. Their prayers gathered in intensity and as I glanced around the room I saw tears drop from their hardened faces.

"Haiti is so dark."

I've been ruminating on this statement since an American coworker casually dropped it into a prayer about six months ago. It was an earnest prayer, and I don't fault them. In many ways, it is true - and no Haitian I know would deny it. But a friend drew it to my attention after - something is off with this statement.

I've thought since then about how easily we categorize entire counties and even continents as "so dark" while consistently avoiding reflection and lament on our own depravity. I have three kids and a part time job so I wrote a few lines in my head on his subject but never took the time to type them out.

But in the last two weeks, two things have happened in my world that compelled me to pull this old blog back up.

One was that the New York Times published several deep dives into the specific ways France and the US exploited, extorted, and then outright silenced the Haitian people. A debt worth more than 2.4 billion has been charged and paid by Haiti to their former colonizers and enslavers, and the US removed their democratically elected president from the country shortly after he demanded justice and repayment. I knew all these facts, but no news outlet had strung them all together so completely and convincingly.

The second was that right here, in my own country, an eighteen-year-old kid bought an assault weapon and slaughtered nineteen children and two teachers in the middle of an elementary school lesson.

Whenever we casually generalize the "darkness" of a country, we must remember two things.

One, is that the darkness is often the result of generations of historical trauma from oppression, violence, and exploitation. And in the case of Haiti, those traumas were inflicted in part by our own nation.

And second is that it is always easier to look out than inward. Particularly when our own debasement looks more civilized to the world's eyes - greed, disregard for creation, entitlement, exploitation, pride, judgement, self-righteousness, disunity, and the like. As CS Lewis put it in his Screwtape Letters, this is the kind of evil that is "conceived and ordered in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."

I imagine it is in warmed and well-lighted offices such as these that our country has forged systems and laws that allow this type of unspeakable violence to occur and very little to be done in response. It is in these offices that our nation turns against itself, in a stalemate over abortion and gun rights, while women suffer from lack of quality healthcare and childcare - and children are murdered before our very eyes.

And I imagine it was in one of those offices of old that someone had the vile idea to force an island of newly-freed slaves to pay billions of dollars for their independence

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At the end of the retreat, our speaker challenged each one of us - Dominicans, Haitians, and Americans - to find a quiet space and repent to God on behalf of our own nations' sins. As I sat, the images of the Haitian board of directors - grown men weeping on their knees - refused to leave my mind. All I could repent of was my own inability to lament, call out, and pray for repentance and change in my own country. I knew there was more, but I had done so little of this before, it was hard to know where to start.

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"Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say 'we see,' your guilt remains." - John 9:41, ESV

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"And if the light that you think you have is darkness, how great that darkness is!" - Matthew 6:23b, NLT

Taking communion at night together at our retreat in the Dominican Republic.