Sunday, January 24, 2010

This Week in "Stuff elle can't f*cking believe!"

Item 1: Mark Krikorian posits that Haiti's suffering is the result of not having been colonized long enough. Haitians didn't have long enough to absorb civ-uhl-eye-zayshen from the French.
My guess is that Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough. The ancestors of today's Haitians, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, experienced the dislocation of de-tribalization, which disrupted the natural ties of family and clan and ethnicity. They also suffered the brutality of sugar-plantation slavery, which was so deadly that the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born, because their predecessors hadn't lived long enough to reproduce.

But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn't stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

You notice this line: "the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born"--yep, no civilization at all.

Item 2: "South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer(R)Compares His State's Poor Children to 'Stray Animals'" and advises against feeding them, lest they reproduce:
My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

And y'all thought negative eugenics was a thing of the past!

h/t Nezua

3 comments:

Anita said...

elle, I followed the links back to the video clip of this speech and it is every bit as chilling as reports are saying. Following past the sections that have been quoted, he told of speaking to a nurse who was in the room when a 10-year-old girl gave birth to a child. The Lt. Gov. concluded this story the question, "Now, what chance does that child have with a mother who is a child herself." What smacked me in the face was that his lumping this story in with the general rant about babies having babies, by racing past any normal human reaction to her story, implied that the ten-year-old got herself pregnant.

When he started asking, "what chance does this child have" I was thinking of the little girl who had so obviously been abused and for that split second I thought he might be going to speak of her plight, but no, he was was just another damned user using her misery to hammer his point.

Both Mark Krikorian and Andre Bauer need to be repudiated, defeated and removed from their public platforms as affronts to common decency.

And nothing I can say is enough. I am very angry and disturbed by this.

Anonymous said...

GAAHHH.

elle said...

@Anita it is disturbing beyond words. How long will it take to repudiate such bullsh*t?

@softestbullet thanks for stopping by; couldn't have said it better myself

Revelations and ruminations from one southern sistorian...