U.S. complicity, not Trump’s vulgarity, the key point

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Jan. 22, 23 or 24

I care as much what vulgarity President Trump uses as what his height and weight are. Instead, what’s important is his attitude affecting policies: enriching the wealthy, damaging the environment and the education and health-care systems, and hurting international relations and individuals from other countries.

Other presidents – notably Democrat Lyndon Johnson – were crude, but did any disparage or dismiss millions of people so high-handedly? Trump’s comments may not reveal racism, but they certainly show a lack of awareness, of knowledge, of history.

People can be victimized by brutal dictators or terrible disasters, and by economic subjugation.

I visited Haiti as part of a church medical mission years ago, but I’m no expert. However, here are a couple, with enlightening perspectives:

“The importance of history in migration cannot be overstated,”  says Tisha M. Rajendra, author of “Migrants and Citizens: Justice and Responsibility in the Ethics of Immigration.”

“Migration is not only the result of poverty and unemployment – these factors mustbe ‘ignited’ by a certain kind of intervention,” she continues. “Some of these interventions, like colonialism, happened centuries ago; others, like foreign investment in factories, happened decades ago. The relationships between migrants and citizens are distorted by false narratives that the relationship is one where mirgants are demanding goods and services they have no right to. This is false. The relationships have their genesis in our own economic and foreign policies.”

Jonathan Katz, author of “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,” specifically addresses that Caribbean nation. The Associated Press’s Haiti correspondent from 2007 to 2011, Katz recently took to social media to challenge Trump. Here are exerpts:

“Lot of folks think they’re making a great argument in the president’s defense by noting that Haiti and El Salvador are, in fact, poor. But they’re just revealing their own racism. Here’s why: In order to do a victory lap around the Gross Domestic Product difference between, say, Norway and Haiti, you have to know nothing about the history of the world.

“You have to understand nothing about the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, the systematic theft of African bodies and lives. And you have to not understand how that theft built the wealth we have today in Europe and the U.S.

“You’d have to not know that the French colony that became Haiti provided the wealth that fueled the French Empire. You’d have to not realize that Haiti was founded in a revolution against that system, and that European countries and the United States punished them by refusing to recognize or trade with them for decades. You’d have to not know that Haiti got recognition by agreeing to pay 150 million gold francs to French landowners in compensation for their own freedom. You’d have to not know that Haiti paid it, and that it took them almost all of the 19th century to do, to not know about the rest of the 20th century either –

the systematic theft and oppression, U.S. support for dictators and coups, the U.S. invasions of Haiti in 1994-95 and 2004, the use of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to impose new loans and destructive trade policies.

“In short, you’d have to know nothing about WHY Haiti is poor (or El Salvador in kind), and WHY the United States (and Norway) are wealthy. But far worse than that, you’d have to not even be interested in asking the question. [You] ASSUME that Haiti is just naturally poor, that it’s an inherent state borne of the corruption of the people there.

“If Haiti is a s***hole, then you can say that black freedom and sovereignty are bad, hold it up as proof that white countries are better, because white people are better – in 1804, in 1915, and now.

“So if anyone tries to trap you in a contest of ‘where would you rather live?’ – or ‘yeah, but isn’t poverty bad?’ – ask them what they know about how things got that way.

“And then ask them why they’re OK with it.”

Some 670,000 Haitians live in the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has editorialized against deporting about 59,000 of them, as Trump recommends. That 670,000 is less than 2 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population.

“With almost a decade of legality under their belts, the Haitian migrants have put down roots in the U.S.,” the conservative newspaper said. “Returning likely would plunge them into poverty.

“If the Administration and Congress are putting America first,” the paper said, “they ought to let these productive people stay.”

And, it must be added, also “Dreamers,” Salvadorans, Africans and others whose countries of origin victimize them.