The New York Times is wrong about Haiti
vodoueconomics.substack.com
vodoueconomics.substack.com
1) While "wall street" did want the U.S. to invade Haiti to increase profits, there were other reasons for the U.S. to invade as well. Specifically, there was a worry that Germany would invade (Germany was 80% of Haiti's trade). This was during WWI where there were fears about Germany's Latin America business dealings. After the invasion, it appears Citibank (aka "wall street") lost out due to increased competition.
2) Haiti had a number of structural differences that would have prevented it from developing even if France didn't force Haiti to pay for its freedom. One example is that Haiti tore down their plantations and distributed land among individual farmers. These farmers were not economically productive and prevented Haiti from adopting new technology as it became available. The other example is that Haiti had extreme instability even before France demanded payment. Leaders were frequently assassinated and the government even split in two for some time.
The author of this post feels the NYT glossed over the facts in order to paint a narrative.
In fact, the majority of criticism from the academic community (as mentioned in the article) is the fact that the historians that were consulted on this piece weren't named in the text.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...
From the very article you link
> Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history.
The 1619 Project contained historical errors that the authors should have avoided. But historians working in this area do not consider it to be a "journalistic rag" even as they criticize it. As I mentioned in my post, academic criticism is not evidence that a piece is devoid of merit.
That article was not some random historian offering an academic criticism. That person was hand-picked by the NYTimes to "fact-check" their article. They undoubtedly chose her because of her ideological background, thinking that she would be okay with revisionary history. She wasn't. So they ignored her.
The NYT made fairly basic and preventable factual errors in the 1619 project. They should not have done this. This is not new or interesting or controversial information among relevant historians. What is controversial among relevant historians is the conclusion that therefore the 1619 project is ideological bullshit that shouldn't be seen as anything other than garbage. The author of the article you link was indeed correct - factual errors became a lightning rod for reactionaries to dismiss the work as propaganda. But that's not actually how criticism of historical writing works in the academic community.
I suspect that if I spoke with the author of this piece, as I have spoken to many people who I suspect she would call colleagues, she'd be more likely to agree with my presentation than yours.
All historical writing is "revisionist history." This term is not actually a slur in the academic community because each historian is almost necessarily writing on a topic that many historians have written on before and their work is in dialogue with the work that came before. Presenting a historical narrative from another perspective or through a different methodological lens is not bad nor does it attack or destroy the work that came before.
Braudel has claims that are outright wrong but The Mediterranean is heralded as a triumph. Said has claims that don't hold up today but Orientalism is a critical step forward for the field. Heck, even fucking Foucault is seen as essential writing for historians despite him having all sorts of factual errors in his work. Historical writing should seek to be based in fact. But fucking up (even very badly) is not a reason to declare a work to be propaganda.
Most of the critique from the right seems to start with the point of view that the 1619 Project should be distrusted and works backwards from there, rather than determining its trustworthiness based on a good-faith reading of the work itself.
Historians should seek to make their writing based on as firm of factual footing as possible and make it clear when they are making an inference due to limitations of the archive. But historians constantly work with material that has factual errors and they do not tend to consider this to be a death sentence for a particular work.
I find that a huge number of people have very strong opinions about how historians work and have never actually spoken to one.
The large bulk of historians I speak to, whether tenured or tenure track or at various different institutions, do not arrive at the same conclusion that you do.
EDIT: We've hit the depth limit but I do not believe that I am more qualified here. I believe that professional historians are and that people should go speak to a bunch of them before developing very strong opinions about historical writing. I do not believe that this is a clubby toxic attitude but instead is valuing expertise and experience.
And, I reject your repeated assertions that because you have historian friends, you are somehow more qualified to speak on the topic than one who does not. That type of clubby gatekeeping is frankly toxic to society and you should abandon that sort of thinking immediately.
Like that the revolution was to preserve slavery.
That is a fundamental mistake that undermines the whole project.
I have no idea what you are personally told or what views your friends, whatever their qualifications, have. The article's author is generally favorable to revisionist interpretations and even she has serious doubts. As a historical matter one of the central claims of the 1619 project is false and is mostly asserted without evidence. Now, if you produce a work with a thesis and one of the most important (as asserted by the work itself!) test cases of that thesis is false the credibility of that work is clearly undermind.
>>Braudel has claims that are outright wrong but The Mediterranean is heralded as a triumph. Said has claims that don't hold up today but Orientalism is a critical step forward for the field. [...] Historical writing should seek to be based in fact. But fucking up (even very badly) is not a reason to declare a work to be propaganda.
The difference is that those works advanced the field even where they had shortcomings. They did so by rigorously supporting claims and providing evidence. The 1619 project does neither.
Both may certainly be true (which I believe), but it's not a very good argument.
Everyone carries ideology with them. It is the source of subjective interpretations and judgments. And unfortunately for your position, we have more or less come to the consensus that all language and communication is fundamentally subjective: this means that no statements or actions are without ideology.
The problem here is the narrative that is built based on the facts is not accurate and conclusions weren’t scientifically drawn.
Yeah, I think you always have to read things like the NYT with an eye towards their demonstrated institutional biases. I think they can be trusted to get the facts right (even if that fact is "ABC made claim XYZ," when XYZ turns out to have been wrong), and I don't really see a better alternative for getting facts about current events.
That said, I don't think journalists at the NYT are the right people to be writing revisionist histories of events that are very much not current. If they want to publish stuff like that, it would better if the hired some actual historians to do these projects (instead of just trying to use them as QC).
That reads like a misrepresentation of TFA: the author conceded that the historical facts reported by the NYT are accurate, but they disagree with the tone and conclusion.
The author's angle is a weird one: author thinks that the article(s) should be read as an academic paper (no reason given), and then lobs criticism at it for not being a good academic paper.
Well, isn't that the whole business of the NYT since forever, only with "history" usually replaced with "news", and "ideology first" sometimes being "the government says so"?
People love it when their biases are confirmed.
I pretty much assume everything I read online is a lie unless proven otherwise.
Sure, Haiti was not at the cutting edge of technology but the staggering amount of debt they owed France certainly didn't help them catch up
Sure, the US didn't want a German puppet in the Caribbean but it's mostly because the US liked the profit margins of being the sole puppet master
To make matters worse, he makes a case for a more nuanced portrait, but then titles the thing The New York Times is Wrong About Haiti
In general, I'm surprised this article is getting so much traction here when it combines two much maligned (by HN) rhetorical styles, but I think it's because of some emerging culture war against the NYT.
If I have a pre-existing condition that wouldn't have killed me this year, then I get COVID and die, what caused my death?
EDIT: And let's be clear here, the author blithely ignores the problems that slavery causes and acts as though the debt and the slavery are unique concepts.
You were alive prior to having covid, so we can assume had you not become infected, you'd still be alive. Haiti wasn't economically prospering before the debt, so we can't assume they would have prospered without the debt. That's not to say it's impossible for Haiti to prosper without the debt, but you can't just definitively state that Haiti would prosper as if it were a fact. There isn't enough evidence to say.
It's sort of wild that we live in a world where Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965 for being too poor and violent, yet you think that the organizational structure of Haiti's farmland in the 19th Century is what doomed it.
I'll concede that they were in bad shape in the 19th Century, but I challenge you to tell me that Haiti in 1890 was significantly worse in organization than Chile at the same time. One of those two countries was able to benefit from its resources and is in the OECD and the other had to pay debt to France and is one of the poorest countries in the world.
You're putting words into my mouth. I didn't say what caused Haiti's lack of economic growth. I was pointing out that there isn't enough evidence to say French debt caused the lack of economic growth. It's totally possible to French debt did in fact cause the lack of economic growth. But it's also possible other issues caused the lack of economic growth. Or perhaps it was a combination. Maybe Haiti could have prospered economically had it been better structured even with French debt, or it could have prospered with poor structure without French debt.
I don't mean this to be offensive, but I think you believe that the French debt caused Haiti's issue. I'm not convinced of this by the evidence, and I think you're taking my lack of conviction personally because it contradicts something you believe. Or perhaps we have different thresholds on the amount of evidence needed before we're convinced of something.
1) There were dozens of countries in Latin America that had various levels of disfunction and poor organization
2) One of those countries had to pay a debt to Europe as protection money
3) That one country is by far the poorest in Latin America
It is my baseline that the unique thing about Haiti is the reason it had the worst outcome. This article supposes "No, there were plenty of other problems with Haiti" while ignoring that fact that there were plenty of other problems with nearly every Latin American country.
The author does this by ignoring other historians' views on the matter (see my other comment) and most importantly doesn't propose alternate reasons why Haiti is different vs. other Latin American countries.
Was it the land distribution? Why did Mexico do better in their 1910 campaign then? If not that, then what?
At least the NYT makes a cogent argument.
There are many differences between Haiti and the rest of Latin America. One big one is that Haiti was French, whereas much of Latin America was ruled by Spain and Portugal. We don't really have much evidence on how France's colonies handle independence as they are either still French territory or got absorbed by other countries, e.g. French Louisiana. Perhaps something in the Spanish model led to better outcomes for former colonies. Another difference is that that Haitian revolution was a successful slave revolt that resulted in a purge of the ruling class. Compare this to America where many of the founding fathers were members of the colonial government, meaning they had governing experience. Haiti's government was also unstable after the revolution, further hindering its ability to form a cohesive economic plan. Haiti's primary source of domestic energy is charcoal, which has lead to near total deforestation of the country. Perhaps that played a role. These are just some differences off the top of my head, and I'm not an expert in Haiti.
Again, the debt to France certainly didn't help. But to me, it feels a little too convenient of an excuse to lay the blame solely at France's feet.
Just to restate 'It feels too convenient to blame the country that forced these people into slavery, cut them off from the world economic system and then forced them to pay a tax to remain free?'
Damn just say what you mean at a certain point (I won't put the words in your mouth but...)
“French debt” wasn’t just some unpaid loan. Haiti went through a variety of trevails through a long an vicious period of fighting for independence. At the end, they ended up where they were not diplomatically recognized by the US or Europe - Haiti went from a land of plenty to a pariah, unable to trade, and the only way out was to pay a steep indemnity, helpfully financed by the French on usurious terms.
Debt was used as an implement of control. I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but those are not conditions that will allow a nation or a economy to flourish.
Absolutely false. Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia for wanting its Chinese citizens to have equality with Malayan citizens. Which the Malaysian government responded to by stirring up race riots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore#Racial_te...
The GP is making a good faith attempt to educate you, but you're trying to "win" by asserting facts without a second of googling.
Although the Malaysian economy and population were much larger than Singapore's, as the international financial and commercial centre for the Malaysian peninsula and with per capita income more than twice that of Malaysia, we might expect ex ante that Singapore would be in a strong position to determine the arrangements. But contemporary views were more optimistic about the development of the Malaysian economy than that of Singapore in the late 1960s. In addition, Malaysia had already developed a central bank, which placed it in a more powerful position to lead the discussions on monetary reform. Ultimately, Singapore's distrust of the Malaysian administration led to the abandonment of the efforts at continuing the monetary integration of the two territories.
[0]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2013.7...
Although the Malaysian economy and population were much larger than Singapore's, as the international financial and commercial centre for the Malaysian peninsula and with per capita income more than twice that of Malaysia, we might expect ex ante that Singapore would be in a strong position to determine the arrangements. But contemporary views were more optimistic about the development of the Malaysian economy than that of Singapore in the late 1960s. In addition, Malaysia had already developed a central bank, which placed it in a more powerful position to lead the discussions on monetary reform. Ultimately, Singapore's distrust of the Malaysian administration led to the abandonment of the efforts at continuing the monetary integration of the two territories.
What caused Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor? Was it wanton imperial ambitions? Or was it the US oil blockade.
What caused US to bomb Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Was it a desire to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers? Or was it a desire not to have to split the islands with the Soviets who were lining up to invade, and intimidate them with the new weapon the US developed?
There are always multiple angles to every historical narrative. Noone is purely good or purely evil.
Understand that the NYT isn't writing this in a vacuum. None of the discussions of colonialism are. Discussions of colonialism are responding to DECADES of commonly accepted stereotypes that "Shucks darn, Haiti/Africa are just fundamentally worse at economics, peace and prosperity than the rest of the world. Must be because black people are inherently stupider/more violent/insert other racist justifications". It is only in the last couple of decades that we've openly started to acknowledge that maybe centuries of oppression had something to do with creating the violent/unstable environments we scoff at at the west, AND that the impact didn't end overnight when the colonial powers left - such as in the case of Haiti's ongoing debt repayments to France.
I don't think that anyone, the Soviets the first ones, ever seriously envisioned a Soviet invasion of the US mainland; I'm not even aware of serious Soviet plans and/or preparation for it. Which is understandable given (i) their absence of fleet, (ii) their inexistent experience in full-scale amphibious invasions, (iii) the semi-failures that their smaller-scale amphibious operations were along the war, from the Crimea to the Kurils.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_...
Sure, there was a huge political part at play and I don't deny it, but even abstracting the US, purely militarily speaking, the Soviets would have been hard-pressed to succesfully invade Japan mainland.
Partly only. The 1932 famine was much more complicated, and a conjunction of what you said, a weak economy a few years after WWI and the civil war, Stalin pushing on exporting massive quantities of grain to pay for industrial imports, bad weather, lack of information due to the fear within the state apparatus of being the shot messenger, and failure in resources allocation.
of course. Though for precision sake:
>a weak economy a few years after WWI and the civil war
that wasn't really an issue as food production has been pretty much restored during 192x "New Economical Policies"
>lack of information due to the fear within the state apparatus of being the shot messenger, and failure in resources allocation.
in many senses that was exactly the consequences of the transfer of control from successful private farmers ("kulaks") to collective farms
>bad weather
one can argue that private farmers would have fared much better through it than collective farms exactly due to management issues you mentioned. As far as i remember agriculture in USSR had always had a lot of production issues and officially blamed "bad weather", and USSR had to import grain. Interesting that after end of USSR, Russia and Ukraine has again (like before 1917 Revolution) become large exporters of grain - as if "bad weather" magically disappeared :)
Fair point; I meant that many efforts were devoted to the industrialization of the country, depriving the agricultural sectors from those – especially regarding resources allocation in brainpower and machinery.
> in many senses that was exactly the consequences of the transfer of control from successful private farmers ("kulaks") to collective farms
I disagree; it seems to me it was the consequences of Stalin's purges profiling at the horizon, and noone – especially among the low-rankers of the party hierarchy – wanting to find themselves on the wrong side of a Nagant for announcing a failure to fill the quotas.
> as if "bad weather" magically disappeared :)
Bad weather is a problem if (i), as you mentioned, the whole incentives for production are screwed up, and (ii) the agricultural infrastructure of the country is miles behind the state of the art. Imperial Russia was still relying mostly on human work for agricultural tasks in the 1910's, and 1930's USSR was miles behind 1950's-1980's USSR w.r.t. agronomical methods & knowledge, equipment, irrigation, mechanization, etc.
So if bad weather would only be an inconvenience more recent USSR, it would become a compounding factor for a generalized famine in 1932.
Recent history of Zimbabwe <http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>
It also omits the incredible amount of wealth stolen by the Duvalier regime
And which was not visited upon Haiti from some higher plane; but rather, was structurally enabled by the events of 1915.
They must be new on planet earth.
It is not even about right or wrong. The question is, what does the NYT narrative serve? Is it anti-french? The last time the U.S. had an official anti-French attitude was before the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps they are trying to give the French Globalists something to browbeat against the French Nationalists.
It serves the same narrative as a long Reddit comment waxing on and off about the America's imperialism in South America. While it's technically true, I think it just makes the writer feel more intellectual while being morally superior to some powerful status quo. These ideas travel from serious intellectuals, to pop-sci nerds, to reddit comments then ultimately to mainstream.
Not to say that they are wrong, I'm just saying I don't think there's some nefarious conspiracy (not to say they don't exist), but this could be just a case of a writer making a name from himself.
In truth, inequality makes everyone poorer, because we share the same world, and we all suffer when opportunity is hoarded. The richest often live the worst lives trying to maintain their advantages. Consider Putin spending decades obsessing over television news.
Addressing inequality isn’t about punishing those who benefitted unfairly, it’s about making the world better for everyone.
“But these projects are trying assign greater moral weight by claiming exaggerated economic consequences. But these claims can weaken the morality of the original crime. Take slavery as an example. Many journalists and even some historians claim that American economic prosperity would have been unattainable without slavery. If you truly believe that, and you look at the billions of lives that have been lifted out of poverty thanks to this prosperity, then a callous calculus could conclude that the abuses of slavery were a cost we had to pay. But economists do not believe this claim. In fact, economists believe at best slavery did not provide any growth benefits over free labor and at worst it impeded America's economic development. To me, this is a much stronger moral claim because not only was slavery terrible, it was unnecessary.”
So the robber who says: "If hadn't stolen your paycheck, you would have drunken it all away" is perfectly in their rights.
It's not addressed to the simpletons who can't escape childish black-and-white thinking in which reality doesn't exist outside of the ammunition it provides for taking sides.
Tldr: it's ludicrous to hear the claim "reparations weren't responsible for Haiti's underdevelopment" and conclude "OH so you think the reparations were good??"
This is not saying, "reparations weren't responsible for Haiti's underdevelopment". Money paid is economic opportunities lost. France was benefiting from the payments and Haitians were suffering.
The argument being made is that this is either insignificant or OK because if France had not done this, Haiti would have been underdeveloped some other way.
It's pretty exactly analogous to thief that steals from you on Friday and when confronted on Monday says "I'm not responsible for you being broke, you would have lost the money some other way". That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true.
1. The thief steals from you on your way to the bank, where you have a history of making on-time loan payments. The theft causes you to default on your loan and lose your car which leads to you losing your job.
2. The thief steals from you on your way to the tavern, where you have a history of drinking your paycheck.
Wouldn't you agree that in scenario 1, the thief owes you more compensation than just the money he stole?
Imagine if I said "If France hadn't forced Haiti to pay for its freedom, Haiti would have become a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, like Taiwan". Do you have any evidence against that claim? Can you see why the extent of the damage is relevant for determining how France should make up for it?
France doesn't care. They're not going to pay. They still have colonies for that matter. Their museums aren't going to be losing plundered artifacts any time soon. But it's interesting that the argument against Haiti being able to ever rise out of its colonial mire was the fact they nationalized the plantations where they had been enslaved and doled them out to Haitians.
Maybe the fact the US sent marines to seize assets from the Haitian treasury (to ensure France got those payments) impacted their ability to adopt new technologies as they became available. Who's to say?
"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X
This is my point. Nobody is saying it's "okay". Facts are _upstream_ of the normative claims people use them to support, and don't always lead to conclusions that you can predict from kneejerk, nonsensical assumptions of the sort you're making.
A historian can object to the NYT (allegedly) explicitly making an incorrect _factual_ claim; that's practically his damn job! The only person rushing to project an agenda onto it so that you can get high off of outrage is you. Before we can make detailed normative decisions about reality, we need to understand the facts that underlie them.
> That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true
Even the assumption that this exonerates the French doesn't make any sense! It's trivial to frame this as "the French further damaged an economy that was already at a disadvantage relative to its peers"! You're throwing away the truth for a "benefit" that doesn't even make any sense!
I apologize for the pointed language, but I can't think of anything in modern discourse that I loath more than this revolting focus on what factual claims _sound_ like instead of what they actually mean and how they contribute to our picture of the world. The world is _complicated_. Facts don't always lead you to the conclusions that this childish kneejerk style of analysis assumes they do. There are a lot of decent, serious people trying to understand the world and make it better, and it is _precisely_ this alternative-facts approach that is poisoning our modern discourse.
> Haiti has been the victim of injustice. The indemnity was immoral, and France should be ashamed of it. The US Occupation of Haiti abused many Haitians, and I, an American, am ashamed when I see photos of Charlemagne Peralte nailed to a door.
> But these projects are trying assign greater moral weight by claiming exaggerated economic consequences. I can condemn the Haitian indemnity for the injustices they were. But I worry that unnuanced articles like what the NYT has been publishing will cheapen those past injustices by attracting critics who believe that disproving some of the articles' claims then disproves all of them
The thing about this is he's not challenging the bare facts - that France was the force taking resources from the Haitian people. That agreed. He's challenge the conceptual framework; "if France hadn't done this, someone else would have". Whether one agrees or disagrees with this change, it's not a factual question and so his hand wringing about disproofs seem basically disingenuous.
Now, looking at the series of instable and corrupt regimes the country had since independence, the more apt analogy would be that it was smart from the bank's (France) point of view to foreclose the property before thieves broke in and stole the TV and copper wire. If you're looking for the TV by the way, there's a man called Duvalier who knows exactly where it is.
Even recently, Wyclef Jean's humanitarian foundation (the same person who tried to ran for presidency in Haiti) was found to be diverting an impressive amount of funds to... Himself!
The issue is cultural. But that's certainly not a position that will be popular with the NYT's readership.
>While I have some criticisms, most of the historical facts are correct. There are places where I could nitpick, but most of the facts are solid. I think the problems with the articles are in tone and in conclusions. In many places, we do not have enough evidence to infer what they conclude. The NYT claims to solve a jigsaw puzzle, then it only shows one-third of the pieces and they aren't even connected properly.
I read the NYT article and even not being well versed in Hati I wondered about some of the lines the author(s) drew in the articles.
I would argue "The NYT's conclusions are questionable / at best debatable" but I'm also not sure that makes for a good title.
Maybe this gets drowned out in the "OMG NYT" kinda responses but I think there's a space where the information is correct, but the conclusions are up for debate in newspapers. Granted they also should make that clear.
I also think that the NYT article(s) could have been better, and this critique of them is valid too... and both existing is healthy / ok.
> Did Citibank see an opportunity for profit in Haiti? Yes. Was that sufficient to commit the US to a full-scale invasion? Not a chance.
That is a flat out refutation of the NYT's article entitled "Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged".
> the title [of another NYT article] reveals the central thesis. The Root of Haiti's Misery. The argument is that the indemnity not only contributed to Haiti's poverty; it's the cause.
> Since that all started before the 1825 indemnity, it was unaffected by the debt and is therefore one really big reason why Haiti would not have grown like the rest of Latin America.
> Maybe without the indemnity, Haiti could have formed coalitions that ended the instability. But that's imagining a counterfactual that we have no evidence for.
In other words, another refutation: the NYT is making strong, evidence free claims of a causal link between indemnity and Haiti's relative historical poverty.
> both existing is healthy / ok.
Were all readers of the NYT's Haiti series to read this article, I would agree. But that's not the case. The NYT will reach millions, this article will reach thousands. As such, the NYT should adhere to a higher standard or just get out of this business of history.
I find that the farther you go down the rabbit hole it is more about emphasis, and I'm certainly happy to agree the NTY's emphasis seems off / not entirely supported.
Having said that I'm always skeptical about "real reasons for war" as even in modern times that's up for debate.
Here's Millet's take from his well-regarded history of the Marines [0]:
This instability was of great concern to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, no one in Wilson's State Department knew much about Haiti. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan relied for information upon Roger L. Farnham, head of the National City Bank's interests in Haiti. This was bad because Farnham was unsympathetic toward the Haitians and was determined to bring about U.S. intervention in the republic. He was even able to convince Bryan that Germany and France, who were then at war, were working together to gain control of Mole St. Nicholas.1°
It's good this economist wants to make a debate, but he seems more opinionated than fact-driven.
[0] https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/U.S.%20Marine...
Sure, you can believe what you want just because you want a smoking gun amidst a complicated reality.
But it’s not much of a stretch to say that a colonised enslaved country was in poverty and driven to more poverty due to the coloniser’s forced “reparations” from their slaves.
Is it? Did citibank not push for an invasion? Did that invasion not happen? The title certainly omits nuance, but it wasn't flat out refuted.
This is not a matter of nuance.
Clickbait headline for a piece by an anonymous researcher -- or an anonymous group of them -- who've complained about a "lack of credit" for the Times' source materials and have an axe (or axes) to grind with the paper.
That's a very 20th-century take. There's no reason why any article couldn't have a little "show version with citations" button tucked away somewhere.
There are plenty of other citing styles that are non-obtrusive, including those that use footnotes and/or hyperlinks.
The author of the original article mentions that a publication they read would not be intelligible without citation because you lose the context. I don't think just switching citations on and off is a viable form of marrying good narrative and academic standards.
How so? When I was writing papers in college I'd read my sources, bang out the text, then for every citable claim I'd ctrl+F my sources and cite them. For a journalist who's presumably taking notes while writing an article it should be even faster. This only seems hard if you're writing articles based purely on vibes and not information.
The culprit was MLA. Chicago-style (which I was allowed to use in most college classes) or just a very-casual "here's the link" are easy.
Fucking MLA. No idea why it's what they teach in secondary school. It blows, well-developed alternatives exist, and it's not even anywhere near being some kind of universal, preferred citation style in all of academia.
Paper and ink are not the constraints they once were and news sites clearly have bandwidth to spare given all the crap they try to force the majority of their readers to download to read one article. Hyperlinks are a core function of the web and for the New York Times, the web is their primary medium now.
The Times' piece was a magazine-style narrative, not a historical white paper. A mile-long bibliography at the end of the story is unnecessary for a package made for a normal audience.
Many journalists and even some historians claim that American economic prosperity would have been unattainable without slavery. If you truly believe that, and you look at the billions of lives that have been lifted out of poverty thanks to this prosperity, then a callous calculus could conclude that the abuses of slavery were a cost we had to pay. But economists do not believe this claim. In fact, economists believe at best slavery did not provide any growth benefits over free labor and at worst it impeded America's economic development.
The argument for reparations is they are owed because the value of the slaves' economic productivity was stolen from them (and thus also their descendants), its not at all dependent on slavery producing a higher economic output compared to a hypothetical situation in which slaves received fair compensation.
Sorta similar to how wage theft is illegal because its stealing earned economic value not because doing so increases productivity.
Identity politics is built around the notion of victimhood and standing outside the dominate (i.e. "white", male) social and economic system, and tuned to bolster the sympathy and guilt factor, which notions of agency and independent contribution tend to diminish. Given that narrative, it's unsurprising that when making the case for positive contributions to the shared, national identity, they're going to heavily emphasize contributions via the institution of slavery.
But to be fair, slavery and peanut butter is basically how most Americans understand the black contribution to the American story. The dominate narrative on the left, after failing[1] with peanut butter in the 20th century, simply reverted back to slavery. Of course, the black contribution and place in the American story is infinitely more complex, substantial, and pervasive than that. We just haven't figured out to how to get out of that rut.
(And one of the primary arguments against reparations is that not only would reparations not address that, it would further it. I think even many proponents, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, would agree with the first part of that claim. Coates admits that reparations wouldn't actually fix anything; rather, he argues that achieving reparations would be the proof that we materially reconciled ourselves with and •changed* the narrative. IOW, from that perspective the solution is not in the reparations, per se, but the process of coming to an agreement on reparations. The reparations themselves are just the stakes, so people aren't just making idle, abstract commitments--talk [alone] is cheap.)
[1] Or believing that they failed. The project of creating a shared sense of inclusive history is ongoing. I cringe at proclamations of first black this or first female that. But it's the proclamations that are cringe worthy and, I think, counter-productive, not the fact itself. (The proclamations are a double-edged sword--they draw attention to particular instances of representation of a group, but the proclamation also reinforces passivity and lower status of the group.) Taking affirmative action to improve inclusion across society is extremely important, though obviously it's in tension with notions of equal treatment and so I don't necessarily agree with all forms of formal institutionalization of affirmative action. If you look at countries where an oppressed class (minority or majority) has achieved formal, institutionalized preferences--Malaysia, South Africa, Rwanda, etc--it clearly doesn't achieve the goals and even tends to solidify hierarchy and economic disparity.
Apropos Haiti, one theory for why Haiti has never properly developed is because the society strongly internalized a victimhood mentality from the very beginning. Long after slavery ended the national identity is still centered around enslavement and oppression, rather than on a positive sense of construction and cooperation. That makes the society easy prey for demagogues and avaricious elite--internal and external.
(For arguments that suggest some disadvantage is thrust upon the descendants of the slaves one need only compare the economic status of American blacks with African blacks.)
But I'm not sure I understand your comment of "African blacks weren't slaves" - plenty of African blacks were slaves. African slavery was a thing long before Europeans and Americans became customers and continued long after (IIRC, slavery wasn't outlawed in Ethopia til the 1930s). Heck, even today there's something like 30 million slaves worldwide, with many of them in Africa (though I think the majority of current slaves are in Asia).
On top of that, it doesn't matter for reparations-purposes whether slavery was, overall, efficient. What matters is whether an institution harmed someone and therefore owes them compensation.
But realistically very people would give enough of a shit to read it.
And if that wasn't shady enough, in the days of online content, these outlets often don't even bother with admitting they were wrong. They simply edit the original stories - silently and without public notice - and pretend it was never written in the first place.
The NY Times was caught red-handed doing this with their 1619 content several times already.
The softest of takedowns.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...
[2] https://kushalmehra.com/2021/07/18/the-gray-lady-winked/
[3] https://rameshrao-89399.medium.com/understanding-the-new-yor...
The 1619 articles in the NYT magazine (used in this blog post as a prior example) were not footnoted. The subsequent book version is heavily footnoted, plus includes info on contributors and an index. This criticism feels like someone complaining about character development in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings: that's not the nature of the medium.
Relatedly: the NYT is hardly overreaching (and if they were, I don't consider it a justifiable criticism). Newspapers do analysis and inherently do summarization and selection. While most such articles are "small" (i.e. reporting on the recent shooting) they have had large analysis, most notably the Pentagon papers that weren't merely published but extensively analyzed. They do "long form" multi-article analysis all the time, from the recent Tucker Carlson pieces to analysis of the complex timeline of the Jan 6 incident.
The definition of newspaper changes all the time and frankly more long form is a good thing.
(the comments here are orthogonal to any criticism I might have of the NYT in general)
I too think that deeper analysis is value-able, but when newspapers do that, they should up their game. If they are trying to present themselves as more academic or scientific, they need more citations and possibly a process akin to peer review (or even submitting a paper with underlying materials themselves to a journal if they are doing original work, as the NYT is claiming to have done here.)
The data for their calculations are also published on GitHub: https://github.com/nytimes/haiti-debt
100% yes. In the cyber security field, this has become such a problem. Several prominent cyber security news consolidating sites will put out very impacting articles, but remove any and all references where the information comes from. It is a nightmare of news reverse engineering.
I also have a vague suspicion that the articles are scraped from the original sites, and re-written by automagically with ML tools. That is, vast majority of these articles are auto-generated. Nothing wrong with it, but no way to prevent such scraping, and no way to compete SEO with them.
I don't know if this is true or not, but like this article I imagine the NYT is going to publish pro-reparations articles, and so wouldn't want to indulge this sort of even-handed thinking.
I don't think you can find anyone who would disagree that individual people and states benefitted. But all those people are dead.
I've never had a strong opinion on the topic in either direction but the argument of, as you put it, "this is _our_ wealth, which we created, and which we simply want returned to us." doesn't require excess wealth to have been created by slavery, it simply requires that some of the wealth didn't go to the people that did the work to produce it resulting in those people (and their descendants) not profiting from it.
Like I said in the other place I saw this, wage theft is illegal because someone isn't getting paid for work they did, its not in any way based on that theft providing economic growth compared to paying folks.
Of course slavery was a theft of wages. But the people who benefitted are long gone.
Also generational wealth is like _the_ predictive factor in future economic outcomes. This is basic stuff.
I don't know if that line of reasoning is correct; I'm just laying it out for discussion.
The hard question from a reparations perspective is suppose that business person left the bulk of their family fortune to a particular church diocese. Let's further assume that donation was made in the form of the trust fund, so it's very easy to identify the source of a particular trust fund would not have existed but for the fact that this business person was part of the slave trade. What moral obligation, if any, does the church diocese have to repairing the harms that this donor may have inflicted on a group of people more than a century ago, given that in the meantime this church diocese has been enjoying a continuing income stream that originally had its roots in the slave trade?
One could argue, "none at all", and one could also point out that there was an awful lot of good being done by the works enabled from the income stream of that trust fund. Dismantling that trust fund (if it can be legally done; there might be donor restrictions that might make this difficult/impossible) would eliminate the good being done via that trust fund. But one could argue that this is a similar argument made by the British Museum when it was refusing to return the Elgin Marbles, and that it is a bogus one. Or someone could argue that no matter what the value of that trust fund should be, it pales in comparison that the harm that has been done, and so you shouldn't even try. Others might argue that at least admitting the truth of how an organization has benefited by past injustices is the important thing, and that reparations is not so much about money, as it is about repair --- acknolwedging and making at least some effort to repair the damage to the community by past injusticies.
After all, if someone burns down your home, what gets lost is far more than the monetary damages; it's also the emotion impact of having your home being lost, and objects of sentimental value, such as photographs, jewelry once owned by your mother, etc., which can't be compensated using mere money. All of that is true. And yet, having a true and sincere "I'm sorry" by someone who is genuinely sorrowful and repentant, can mean an awful lot.
Bottom line is "reparations" is a deeply complex topic, and it is not just about writing checks. In fact, that's arguably the least important part of the whole process. It's unfortunate that this is the part that most people who are against reparations focus upon.
The dilemma you described (using stolen goods to do otherwise good deeds) boils down to whether you want to take a utilitarian or deontological moral view. Having said that, no one (in our capitalist society, at least) would accept me stealing your car to drive patients to the hospital as OK, even if my car otherwise sits completely unused. And similarly, if I crashed your car while doing my good deed, there would be no question that I owe you a replacement.
I think the more interesting question about reparation is whether there is truly a “continuity” (of the institution, state, or country on the one hand, and of a family unit on the other). If there is, then obviously the institution owes everything needed to make you whole. If there isn’t, then they owe you the same as any other citizen.
Can you explain this? What is continuity in this sense, and why is it obvious that they owe everything needed to make everyone whole?
1. A PPT Deck. A 2 mins elevator pitch, A 10 mins potty reading
2. A Blog post. Ok you got my attention, why should I care?
3. A Careful Argument. I see your point, explain me everything
People do this in ML research, and it's way better than other fields tbh.
Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31468196 - May 2022 (183 comments)
Besides which, people think in stories, and presenting just a list of facts isn't going to be read by anyone.
The spin, speculation, and lack of sources are the other issues.
I would read a list of facts over a story. I hate fluff. Most people don't even read the story, they read the title and possibly the first/last paragaph.
I see this sentiment floating around a lot, but I think it's a bit of a naïve approach. Just by deciding which news to publish a newspaper already has a bias.
You can also do that to highlight the spin, but wouldn't it be nice if there was no spin in the first place?
The argument is that it's not possible, not that it wouldn't be desirable if it were. The way to get all of the unbiased facts not intended to illustrate a narrative is to be omnipotent. Otherwise, you're getting filtered information from someone telling you what they saw. The reason they leave out what color socks they were wearing at the time they saw it is because they're filtering the information down to what they think is relevant to their narrative.
I believe GP was more suggesting the latter than the former.
The word "fact" is very very sloppy.
Do people still think of the NYT that way? The Washington Post seems to me to have the better claim nowadays. Not a great claim, but better.
Most of the immigrants (to the US) that I've met from Haiti do not speak favorably of the country and have no intention of ever returning.
Whites in the Americas and elsewhere were shocked and scared by the news. Many US and European sailors refused to port in Haiti due to this, which only hampered Haiti's economic growth.
Ah of course, most colonisers wish that being ashamed is punishment enough. Sadly, the victims don’t even get that since France won’t even talk about it.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-766d88313d7f89c78da3f3...
They don’t even say that the NYT is wrong (“This is correct, but”).
If you’ll forgive me, I don’t think he could’ve done much worse.
That behavior suggests that Wyclef might have continued the same corruption that other Haitian politicians engaged in and maybe taken it a step further by leveraging his celebrity to also pocket money brought in as outside investment.
Again, maybe he couldn't be worse since other Haitian politicians would have and did engage in similar corruption, but it'd be a stretch to say that it's anything we should consider as "what if" that would had the real potential for positive change in the country.