Thread by @darkfinance

I find myself in the invidious position of having to come to the defense of the New York Times, a newspaper I stopped reading regularly after 9/11, when they started running lifestyle articles justifying torture.

They have given cover to every US military adventure since then and of course, their coverage of Haiti has traditionally been horrible, reactionary, and racist.

To give but one example, their Current History supplement published the racist City Banker John H. Allen’s "An Inside View of Revolutions in Haiti" in 1930.

In the article, memorial of the the beginnings of the US occupation of Haiti, Allen gives us a typical view of Haiti's supposed atavism and backwardness and attributes to William Jennings Bryan the unfortunately immortal line, “Dear me, niggers speaking French!”

Yes, of course, their citational practices have been awful. When a NYT reporter wrote history of US interventions and occupations of Haiti, it seemed to borrow heavily from an article on the subject that Jemima Pierre and I had just published in The Black Agenda Report.

Yet while the claims to “newness” of their series on Haiti’s debt are overblown, they are not entirely wrong. Jonathan Katz has outlined what is new, so I won’t rehearse his analysis.

But I would add that what is new, and important, about the series is its stitching together of the debt's history over a period of time fragmented by many historians. The 19th century is rarely connected to the occupation years, the occupation years to the Duvalier era, & so on.

This synethetic but granular approach is important, especially as it allows us to make political-economic claims on and of the present. We make a big deal about following the money, they have done just that.

I was approached by two of the writers about a year ago and had a number of conversations with them. I was more than willing to share what I could as I thought what they were doing was important, precisely because it was for the NYT.

For many years, I’ve published on Citibank and Haiti for The Black Agenda Report, Bloomberg, Haiti Liberte, Radical History Review, Boston Review, the LSE Blog, and in my book, Bankers and Empire.

But all of these publications combined over a decade did not have the audience this times piece has had in less than a week.

If that means that folks who don’t buy academic books or have access to paywalled, academic journals begin to think critically, or differently, or extend their knowledge about, debt, banking, Haiti, imperialism, and Citibank in particular, I’m happy about that.

And if the piece leads readers to other sources, which I think it has, that’s great, too. Moreover, while they used some of my research, they also built on it in some important ways that I did not, which is, I think, all one can hope for when you put your research out there.

(They also consulted with and named Guy Pierre, the Haitian economic historian whose work on banking I have always drawn on, but who rarely if ever get cited by North American anglophone historians.)

Would I have liked to have seen more radical conclusions, more calls for direct actions, a manifesto censuring Citibank, an outline for Haitian reparations from France? Of course.

But it’s the NYT. However, surprisingly, as the NYT they actually provided us with a surprising ballast to support claims more radical than they have made: like, let’s go after Citibank. Or, what about Puerto Rico? Or England and the West Indies.

Yet unfortunately -- but perhaps typically -- it seems that opportunity was quickly lost. The debate over the series became not one of the ethics of debt and reparations or a critique of the role of Citibank et al in US imperialism and Caribbean underdevelopment, but citation.

Historians effectively hijacked a potentially critical conversation to make the story about how they were not part of the story. Why were we, asked the North American historians, not the subject of this story about Haiti?

It's a little disgusting, this response. But what can one expect from an academy that is structured by the same racist and imperial forces that have shaped Haiti's history.

And the proprietary nature of Western knowledge production about Haiti is, at the end of the day, part of the regimes of extraction that have made Haiti "the poorest country in the hemisphere."

For once, the NYTimes, with all it's problems, wrote against those regimes of extraction. It's too bad the historians fucked it up.