by Joe Kaye

As mainstream media faithfully carry out their work of selling the dirty war of aggression against the Iraqi people, we are fortunate that there is a powerful beacon of truth - radio station WBAI, listener-sponsored, commercial-free (99.5 FM) - piercing the fog of lies and deceptions - a courageous voice for peace and social justice, a voice thundering against US imperialist aggression and in defense of the rights and interests of the masses here and abroad.

We are indeed fortunate to have WBAI, but it was almost lost to us two years ago when the national board of the Pacifica network, of which WBAI is a member, tried to abandon its peace and justice mission and bring its five stations into the political mainstream. In fact, it was hatching plans for self-enrichment by selling off its most valuable stations, including WBAI (currently estimated to be worth over $200 million). Crowning all this was the "Christmas coup" in New York when the station manager and program manager were fired, followed by the firing and banning of some of WBAI's most militant producers (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18, No. 43, 1/10/2001).

Thus was set off a year-long struggle to regain the station and the network for People‚s Radio. The struggle ended in victory thanks both to a legal challenge and to the tireless activism of thousands of listeners whose creative agitation eventually wore the usurpers down. A new national board has been put in place, and those who had been fired and banned from the airwaves have been reinstated.

The court settlement calls for elections to be held for each of the five local station boards as well as for the national board. And so it has been necessary to develop a plan to ensure that the new governing boards will reflect Pacifica's peace and justice mission. In the process, however, it has become increasingly clear that the battle we have been fighting for a progressive Pacifica is far from over. Two groups among the Pacifica activists have emerged with quite divergent concepts of what democracy is all about. One group, of which I am a member, sees Pacifica's mission to be giving voice to the voiceless. We believe that the governing structures should incorporate the traditionally unrepresented and under-represented, the the exploited and oppressed, poor and working people, communities of color, and marginalized constituencies such as the immigrant, prisoner, disabled, and gay and lesbian communities. In fact, we believe it is essential to prioritize those communities since, being the main victims of social injustice, those communities have the greatest stake in Pacifica's peace and justice mission and the greatest stake in progressive social change.

We are encouraging those communities to become actively involved in the upcoming election process, to select candidates from among their midst who genuinely represent their interests. We want to ensure that there will be a true diversity of communities represented on the local board because the board will have an important say in establishing programming philosophy, in selecting management personnel, and in ensuring close ties between the communities and the radio station.

Further, we do not want the right to vote to be conditioned on making a financial contribution. We call this a "poll tax," which in U.S. history has been an important device to disenfranchise the poor, especially African-Americans.

Our opponents are horrified by our vision. Primarily white and middle class, they pay lip service to diversity but insist that it is undemocratic to try to guarantee representation of people of color. To them, democracy is an exercise in free competition. They do not recognize that the more comfortable and self-confident, those accustomed to having some measure of power that comes with income and education, those not burdened with issues of survival, tend to be better organized and tend to vote in greater numbers. Further, despite being members of the progressive community, there are still whites who are often reluctant to vote for people of color.

The internal problems facing WBAI and Pacifica may appear rather remote to the Haitian community faced as it is with the dire situation on the island and beset by a host of survival problems here in the U.S.. Precisely for those reasons it is crucial that the community have a broadcast vehicle which speaks to the community's needs in the U.S. and which champions the cause of a progressive and truly free Haiti. It is important not only to have a regular program on WBAI - and WBAI is moving in that direction - but it is essential that WBAI reflect progressive Haitian interests in all their programming and not limit itself to airing a single hour of Haitian programming each week.

Some have asked us why Haitians should be represented when there are so many other national groups in New York. Other groups, to be sure, will be represented. But the Haitian community deserves representation because it is one of the most progressive communities in New York, is largely working class, has worked to create bridges to other key oppressed communities such as the African-American community (as, for example, in the struggle against police brutality and in opposing the Giuliani administration), and has a particularly rich experience in confronting U.S. imperialism.

The Haitian community needs WBAI. But WBAI also needs the Haitian community. It needs Haitian listeners; it needs the community's financial support. But it also needs the community's input and advice on how to draw still closer to the masses of the working people of New York, and especially to the immigrant communities which now make up almost half of New York City's population.

There will soon be board elections. It is important that the community begin to mobilize in order to have an impact on those elections. The community needs to begin the process of selecting a progressive representative and then to ensure the victory of that representative as well as the victory of progressive representatives of working people of other historically marginalized communities.

For further information, call Marquez Osson of the Haitian Collective at WBAI at 718-451-1189 or Ray Laforest at 917-603-0227.

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Joe Kaye is a New York-based political activist and writer who has worked with progressive causes for decades.

by Danyel Peña-Shaw

Like Palestinians in Israel or Muslims in Bosnia, Haitians in the Dominican Republic are demeaned, harassed, and victimized in both extraordinary and mundane ways. They are subjected to a wide array of demeaning stereotypes. El Anti-Haitianismo, anti-Haitian racism, is but one symptom of the colonial mind-set in the Dominican Republic.

The Dominican people are flooded with intense propaganda denigrating all that is Black/African and glorifying all that is White/European. Many Dominican parents jokingly threaten to send their kids in a sack to a Haitian boogeyman if they misbehave. Haitians are accused of stealing animals, or even children, and sacrificing them. In the mass media, Haitians are identified with hunger, AIDS, political turmoil, and black magic.

Imbued with the myth of their cultural and racial superiority, many Dominicans have turned their backs on Haitian language, history and culture. Popular educators now have the task of reeducating the Dominican population about the Haitian reality and raising awareness of the dangers of anti-Haitian hysteria.

I will analyze just three dimensions of El Anti-Haitianismo to show how the Dominican state, whose policies are reminiscent of apartheid, has a vested interest in harassing the Haitian population.

Dominican President Hipolito Mejia's government invests substantial financial and human resources into persecuting Haitians who come to the Dominican Republic. Military checkpoints, one every 15 miles, line the route towards the interior of Santo Domingo. National Guard searches of popular transportation serve to publicly humiliate Haitian migrants and remind them of their status as unwanted visitors to the Dominican Republic. The Dominican military intentionally provokes Haitians by aggressively searching through their belongings, mocking their language, dress, and skin color, and demanding that they pay ridiculous fines. Dominican state police have converted crossing the border and traveling into the interior into a business fueled by bribes and corruption. The most aggressive guards carry out illegal deportations and beatings if Haitians do not give into extortion. Rhetoric about the need to patrol for Haitian arms and drug traffickers serves as the eternal justification for this aggression.

Even Dominican citizens sometimes contribute to this persecution. One Sunday afternoon on a bus returning from the border town of Jimani, I witnessed a young Haitian man being forced from the front to the back of the bus on the charge that he had "el grajo," or body odor. A group of Dominicans waved their hands in front of their noses as if to say that he could not sit close to them. The man was robbed of his right to take an empty seat on a six-hour bus trip.

In counterpoint, the Dominican population is trained to be servile and obedient to German, Spanish, Italian and North American tourists. White Western "grajo" is an afterthought and not a bias permanently attached to their ethnic identity.

The dynamics of "el grajo" is just one element of an aggressive fear of Haitians that goes against the humble nature of the Dominican people and secures their role as the carriers of a necessary racism. "Necessary" because as long as Haitians are viewed as sub-humans, they can more effectively be exploited by international high finance. Racism provides the cloak and justification for their super-exploitation.

The Dominican state apparatus has assumed the leading role in labeling, stereotyping, and scapegoating the Haitian community. The principle figure behind El Anti-Haitianismo was former president Joaquin Balaguer, who dedicated his intellectual and literary talents to defaming Haitians. In his book La Isla al Reves, Balaguer stomps vulgarly on the dignity of Haitians, absurdly blaming them for the spread of venereal diseases across the Dominican Republic, among other things. He plays on Dominican society's historical paranoia that Haitians will try once again to unify the two countries under one government as happened from 1822 to 1844. Inaccurate recounting of Dominican history under Haitian military rule is still used today to whip up anti-Haitian hysteria. In truth, the Haitian occupation brought freedom to Dominican slaves and broke up the monopolization of land and wealth by colonizing Spain and the Catholic Church. Any mention of the Haitian occupation today in the Dominican Republic begins with a wild tale of vicious Haitian soldiers throwing children into the air and chopping them up with their machetes as they fell. We must struggle against this distorted historical memory which has been imposed on us and begin to rescue the Dominican and Haitian people's history of solidarity.

Why would an intellectual like Balaguer attack Haiti? Political opportunism. The Haitian people have long served as the easiest whipping boy in the DR, easy to blame for social crisis. They are blamed for many things, from AIDS to unemployment. If it were not for these ideological escape valves, the manipulators of truth would have to invent another enemy or confront the structural dynamics of gross class and national inequalities in the Caribbean region.

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