Haiti: Systems of Oppression

The eternal and often elusive nature of systems of oppression.

Currently, I am in the process of reading a book on Haitian systems of oppression, the unbelievably tragic history of Haiti entitled Haiti: State Against Nation, 1990, by an Haitian anthropologist/historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot.  Available from University of Iowa library.

The French are infamous for their two systems of oppression---slavery and debt slavery---which forever damaged and crippled Haiti.  But what replaced the French systems of oppression?  Haitian elites---military, political, urban, merchants who were often allied with foreign, including U.S., merchants---controlling an oppressive system of taxation, custom taxes on imports and exports specifically discriminating against poor peasants; for example, higher fees on coffee grown by peasant farmers than on sugar grown on plantations.

A Haitian-U.S. elite replaced the French elite creating a new systems of oppression---custom taxes and a different debt slavery.  Read Naomi Klein's article on debt entitled "Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor," in The Nation, March 1, 2010.  She asserts: "Each [illegal debt] payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electric line. . . . Failure to comply [make payments on illegal debt] was met with a punishing economic embargo from 2001 to 2004, the death knell to the Haitian public sphere."

Evil individuals running a system of oppression such as the high priest running the Temple as a "den of robbers" or Papa Doc, the corrupt Haitian dictator, may die or be deposed, but the systems of oppression they ran usually continue.  Evil individuals may personify the system of oppression and the average person will think now that the evil individual is gone, the evil system has ended.  Wrong! Systems of oppression outlive the individuals running them, sometimes for generations.

Even more deceiving is when a specific system of oppression such as slavery is eliminated, most people tend to believe the evil is, at long last, ended.  Not necessarily!  Quite often, a new system of oppression is invented to take its place.  The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation ended legal slavery.  However, soon segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs and lynching took the place of slavery.   And when legal segregation ended, mass incarceration took its place.

Some systems of oppression are more invisible than others.  Using the criminal justice system to incarnate racial profiling and mass incarceration is an exceedingly clever and diabolic system of oppression.  Done quietly, one male at a time, blacks are targeted.  Blacks are not arrested and imprisoned in a mass roundup.  For decades, even black civil rights leaders did not fully realize what was going on.  Finally, Michelle Alexander exposed what was going on.  A new racial caste system had been created; she called it mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow.

In Haiti, French legal, physical slavery is gone; it has been replaced by a somewhat more invisible system---custom taxes on imports and exports targeting poor peasants.

Jesus called the operation of the Temple "a den of robbers."  How so?  The national treasury was part of the Temple bureaucracy; church and state were not separate in Israel.  The poor paid a
Temple tax.  The Temple treasury became incredibly wealthy.   Follow the money; follow the system of taxation.  Who runs the system of oppression?  In this case, we have a religiously legitimated system of oppression; perfect cover for oppression.  Read Kraybill's The Upside-Down Kingdom.

Where has the church been in all of this?  Invisible, hiding in a building, or sometimes participating in the system of oppression.  There is extensive biblical teaching on oppression, 555 references to oppression and its synonyms in the OT, but very little theology on oppression in the Western church.  So oppression runs rampant, sometimes unrecognized, unchecked and unchallenged by most of the church.  Any volunteers to change this atrocity?