Haiti is in the news these days as it basically seems to have gone to hell in a handbasket, at least from the accounts we are reading. This led one enterprising person on Twitter/X to dig up a fourteen year-old first-hand account of rape in Haiti, and that post went viral:
1. Woman goes to Haiti to write about r*pe in Haiti being exaggerated.
— Chalkboard Heresy 🍎🔥 (@CBHeresy) March 11, 2024
2. Gets r*ped repeatedly by Haitian man.
3. Blames it on misdirected “Black rage” against “white world.”
4. Says she is “grateful for the experience.”
White liberal women are not well. pic.twitter.com/RtiCfz2M46
We would normally enlarge the screencaps for easy reading, but in this case the simpler way is to find the original article and post block quotes from it, because we found the article, written by Amanda Kijera. This Twitter/X user linked to her piece:
It's real https://t.co/Tl7ziKp4jb
— Rodrigo (@RodrigoSemPouso) March 11, 2024
And ‘Chalkboard’ is mainly right about it. Our only quibble is that it sounds like she didn’t travel to Haiti. It seems like she was already there. But that is a nitpick.
Thus, let’s quote the parts that ‘Chalkboard’ is quoting from, with the parts he or she highlighted in boldface:
Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight ‘the man’ on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for. …
Truly, I have witnessed as a journalist and human rights advocate the many injustices inflicted upon Black men in this world. The pain, trauma and rage born of exploitation are terrors that I have grappled with every day of my life. They make one want to strike back, to fight rabidly for what is left of their personal dignity in the wake of such things. Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected.
Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Because women–and particularly women of color–are forced to bear the brunt of the Black male response to the Black male plight, the international community and those nations who have benefitted from the oppression of colonized peoples have a responsibility to provide women with the protection that they need. …
I went to Haiti after the earthquake to empower Haitians to self-sufficiency. I went to remind them of the many great contributions that Afro-descendants have made to this world, and of their amazing resilience and strength as a people. Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience. It woke me up, made me understand on a deeper level the terror that my sisters deal with daily. This in hand, I feel comfortable in speaking for Haitian women, and for myself, in saying that we will not be your pawns, racially, politically, economically or otherwise.
So … that’s a lot. In fact, if you read the entire piece, it arguably gets worse. Here she is talking about some of what happened during the repeated rapes—although not in overly graphic terms:
It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night.
We wouldn’t ever make light of such a horrible crime, but it honestly read like bad, heavy-handed satire—the kind that is trying and failing to be funny. Indeed, we checked if the website (called Race-Talk) is a satire site and … it doesn’t seem to be. For instance, we went to the homepage and clicked on a link at random and found the story linked here:
The Partners of Neighborhood Stabilization http://t.co/WCNfDtk2
— The Kirwan Institute (@KirwanInstitute) April 27, 2012
If you read it, it is just a very boring discussion of housing problems, from a leftist point of view. No satire detected.
And, as an aside, this Race-Talk website is described as follows:
The Race-Talk is managed and moderated by the staff at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and is open to all respectful participants. The opinions posted here do not necessarily represent the views of the Kirwan Institute or the Ohio State University.
And a little more digging has this at the Kirwan Institute homepage:
The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is an interdisciplinary engaged research institute at The Ohio State University established in May 2003.
We’re sure that taxpayers in Ohio will be pleased to know this is being funded by the state.
Back to the piece, she describes how, during this crime, she started to think there might be a problem with the oppression of women only to change her mind:
Accepting the helplessness of my situation, I chucked aside the Haiti bracelet I had worn so proudly for over a year, along with it, my dreams of human liberation. Someone, I told myself, would always be bigger and stronger than me. As a woman, my place in life had been ascribed from birth. A Chinese proverb says that ‘women are like the grass, meant to be stepped on.’ The thought comforted me at the same time that it made me cringe.
A dangerous thought. Others like it have derailed movements, discouraged consciousness and retarded progress for centuries. To accept it as truth signals the beginning of the end of a person–or community’s–life and ability to self-love.
What she seems to be getting at is that sometimes in history, the fervor to protect white women from rape turns into atrocities against black people. One of the justifications Democrats offered for continuing American slavery in the nineteenth century was because they believed that if black people were liberated, they would just go crazy and start rioting and raping constantly with no end. This is why many southerners who owned no slaves were willing to fight and die to protect slavery during the Civil War—they literally thought that the slaveholders were doing them a service by keeping black people in chains.
But you can’t put aside your own right to seek justice because you’re afraid someone else will do something unjust in response. There’s a medium between ‘let’s enslave all black people because we think they are all rapists’ and ‘sure, this black dude raped me, but I should let it slide because of historical racism’ where we take reasonable measures to protect innocents of all colors from rapists of all colors, and we take strong steps to punish the proven rapists. Justice can't be collective. It can only be individual.
This isn’t really that difficult to understand.
At the same time, we should respond to Ms. Kijera’s moral confusion with compassion. Christians are fond of saying ‘love the sinner, hate the sin,’ and we think that is the right approach here: Hate that she wrote something so blinkered but also show love and compassion for the writer. We’re not saying that the sentiment she is putting forward isn’t completely messed up. It absolutely is. But people who have been raped don’t always think rationally and behave rationally. Her piece makes it pretty clear that the rape was still very fresh in her mind—about two weeks before publication. To be blunt, she really might not have processed the whole thing yet, and sorted out her feelings. It wouldn’t be unusual for an event like that to radically change a person’s entire worldview, but the change isn’t likely to happen overnight or even within two weeks. So, if she was asked to write how she felt about what happened to her, today, she might have written something radically different than this morally confused piece.
In any case, as we said, despite the fact that this piece was over fourteen years old, it went viral—certainly in part because of recent events in Haiti.
For instance, this led to a discussion between Ian Miles Cheong and Elon Musk:
True
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024
Question now is how do we turn back the tide? Free speech is a good first step. We wouldn't be having this discussion anywhere else, nor on old Twitter. But addressing the problem for what it is is only the beginning.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 11, 2024
And other people joined in:
Wow this is absolutely insane https://t.co/zrcU1S6Wk7
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) March 11, 2024
This is the bigotry of low expectations...on steroids. These are also the type of women who can't say what a woman is https://t.co/6sSZeOCUc2
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) March 11, 2024
This is where we are. These people are mental cases. https://t.co/eTHRhmGiKa
— Matthew Marsden (@matthewdmarsden) March 11, 2024
Please tell me this is satire. I don't want to live in a world where this is not satire. 😮
— Mr. Flake (@MrFlake2) March 11, 2024
Like we said, we don’t think it is.
I remember this story. There's a section in the article where she tells the rapist she's "a Malcolm X scholar," but he didn't care & slapped her/ordered her to shut up. It's very sad when people convince themselves of lies so thoroughly they put themselves in danger like this https://t.co/cvvYfn4zKJ
— Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior) (@IamSean90) March 11, 2024
We're not sure she said she was a Malcom X scholar as he attacked her, only that he didn't care that she was one.
Bluntly, we are also leaving out some really ugly replies, including more than one absolute racist and several people suggesting that she wanted to be raped. We don’t need that ugliness here. But continuing with less ugly comments:
Good grief. We need a new definition of Stockholm syndrome https://t.co/rN4TzYVcpw
— Laura✡️Marcus🇬🇧🇮🇱 (@MissLauraMarcus) March 11, 2024
In TX, if she become pregnant, she would be forced to carry. https://t.co/b0WL0cH9st pic.twitter.com/A5OZFh4z3r
— Sade (@SuckaFreeZone3) March 11, 2024
Actually, if you read the laws, you see Texas is a ‘heartbeat’ state, meaning they are basically pro-choice before the fetus would gain a heartbeat, and with a medical emergency exception after that point. That is glossing over many technicalities, but that is the basic idea. Please, leftists, stop lying about the law. The left always pretends they are scared that women will get a back-alley abortion and hurt themselves. But how many times have they misled women on the law, and that caused women to seek the back alley when they didn’t have to?
Also, isn’t that just like a leftist? They worry more about killing the baby than dealing with the rapist?
Moving on, the discussion also went international and, if we can trust the translation, he makes an interesting point:
左派对哈马斯的强奸暴行无动于衷，你觉得奇怪吗？看看这个：
— 张平 (@pingzhang632) March 11, 2024
这个白人女记者去海地写关于海地强奸被夸大的问题。结果被海地黑人男子多次强奸。她将其归咎于正当的“黑人愤怒”对“白人世界”的错误指向，然后说自己“对这次经历感激涕零”。 https://t.co/oUP53nMECd
According to Google, he is saying:
Do you find it strange that the left is indifferent to Hamas’s rape atrocities? check it out:
This white female reporter went to Haiti to write about the exaggerated issue of rape in Haiti. As a result, he was raped multiple times by a black Haitian man. She blamed it on legitimate ‘black anger’ being misdirected toward the ‘white world,’ and then said she was ‘overwhelmed with gratitude for the experience.’
Other responses:
I see why Woke Ideology is called a "mind virus." It completely disables both rationality and the instinct for self-preservation to the point where women accept rape if the male is seen as a member of an "oppressed class." Wow.
— Zubi Bubalus (Reality Matters) (@Zubi_Freeman) March 11, 2024
She thinks it's an oppression response rather than simple savagery from base nature devices.
— Somewhere in Time (@a319442) March 11, 2024
To quote one of our favorite movies: ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn.’
At most, the oppression gives the rapist permission, the rationalization, to do what he wants to do, anyway. And that is something we can also apply to Hamass' atrocities.
Finally, let me give some advice to people who use social media. Stop using just screencaps alone when posting about an article, like ‘Chalkboard’ did. A screencap can be useful to highlight an important part of a piece, but you should still link to the original article. In our experience, about 60% of the time when someone just shows you a screencap of an article to prove a point, that is because they are trying to conceal a problem with the underlying article. Screencaps of articles are so often misleading, that this author treats them as presumptively false until proven true and we think other people have learned to do the same. So, if you have the goods, provide a link to the article in question so we can see immediately whether or not it is real.
*gets off soapbox*
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