A Liberal Dose, Sept. 19, 2024 “My Experience With Haitian Immigrants”

A Liberal Dose

September 19, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“My experience with Haitian immigrants”

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, I served in two French-speaking congregations -the first in West Palm Beach and the second in Brooklyn. This was 1987 to 1989, when a wave of Haitian immigrants came to the country to escape the political turmoil in their country. Most went either to Florida or the NY/NJ area. I had done really well in my three years of high school French at WCHS, with the late and extremely lamented Mrs. Sarah Jane Thurman, and this was an opportunity to do mission work without leaving the country. Turns out high school French is not quite the same as Haitian Creole, but after two years of daily exposure to the language I became conversational. In my New York congregation I was one of only five non-Haitian members out of over three hundred. I developed a deep love, and admiration, for the Haitian people and their culture.

Many of these folks had risked their lives on rickety boats to reach America. They had good reason to leave, as the Duvalier family (a father-son dictatorship) ruled ruthlessly and cruelly over their own people. I will never forget a conversation I had in Florida with a man, probably in his sixties, who had witnessed his adult son being killed in the streets by the machetes of the Tonton Macoute- the Duvaliers’ secret police. As he was telling me the story his own mother, who had been silent up to then and had to have been at least ninety, leaned forward and said -in a deep, foreboding voice –“Sang est le couleur d’Haiti.” Blood is the color of Haiti.

The Haitians I knew considered themselves incredibly lucky to live in the United States. I worked among them daily, translating for them and helping them do things like fill out job applications. Those people were workers, let me tell you. Many of the Haitian immigrants I knew had two or three jobs, yet maintained their joy of life and cheerful dispositions -and their warm, welcoming attitudes toward me. They were patient with my efforts to become more fluent in their language, even as they were doing the same with mine. Rarely have I felt as loved and accepted as I was by the members of La Congregation FrancaiseCentrale de Brooklyn.

In both locales, families from the congregation took turns feeding me on Sundays after services. I remember one family that was well-off introducing me to Haitian delicacies such as lambi, deep-fried conch meat that is very pricy in the coastal areas of the U.S. where you can even find it and which I still love (though, alas, from afar, as it is hard to get in Tennessee). Most families were not so well off, and some were impoverished, but they still shared with me what little they had.Every meal started with beans and rice, usually followed by pikleez, sometimes just called salade, which consisted of pickled and julienned carrots, cabbage, and peppers. Pikleez had a very strong flavor, and I never quite acquired the same taste for it as I did for lambi. Fried plantains were a popular side dish. I ate a lot of griot fritailles- spicy, fried pork nuggets. I bought a plate of griot fritailles and plantains at a Haitian restaurant during my recent visit to Brooklyn. I also ate quite a bit of goat, especially when invited to family barbecues.

Know what I didn’t eat?

Dogs and cats. Because Haitians don’t eat dogs and cats.

Now, I had a very good friend in Brooklyn who was Cambodian, and he ate cat every chance he got, because it was a part of his culture. “Cat is very good, my brotha,” he would say, “It makes my heart rejoice.” But he did not go around catnapping people’s pets and eating them. This friend, by the way -his name was Sophan -had barely escaped his home country with his life, and had seen most of his family killed by the Khmer Rouge.

All these people I have described had risked everything to reach the “land of the free,” where they could live their lives and support their families and be treated with dignity and respect. Just like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, almost all of whom are here legally and are productive citizens of their new community.

All this insane, ridiculous, malicious slander being tossed around about them, solely to stoke up racial hatred and anti-immigrant hysteria in order to gin up votes for Donald Trump, an American Duvalier, is going to get some of them killed. Shame on you if you repeat it; shame on you if, without any proof or any knowledge of these people and their culture, you believe it.

What we give to the poor, the Haitian proverb says, we lend to God. 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 12, 2024 “What a Crazy Ride This Summer Has Been”

 

A Liberal Dose

September 12, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“What a Crazy Ride This Summer Has Been”

 

Things have been pretty hectic and unpredictable this summer in the presidential election cycle. Trump and Biden had their first of several planned debates on June 28, and Biden supporters were left clutching their chests like Fred Sanford by their candidate’s feeble demeanor and weak performance. Then, two weeks later on July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt (though a member of his audience did not). The dramatic image of Trump pumping his fist defiantly seemed likely to seal his election victory. Just two days later, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate. While still close, the GOP ticket seemed to be pulling ahead in the polls.

Just six days later, on July 21, Biden dropped out of the race, and his biggest detractors in his own party hailed him as a hero for it. Within days, Vice-President Harris had become the heir-apparent of the Democratic Party, which infused many Democratic voters with -first, relief -then hope and energy. She had the best week of fundraising in presidential history. Less than a month later, the Democratic National Convention amped up that energy. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance either made, or was learned to have made in the past, one colossal public relations blunder after another, making many women voters even madder about the prospect of a second Trump administration (and many were plenty mad already). Also meanwhile, Trump has been even more incoherent than usual, showing his (very advanced) age, and has been even more combative and nasty. And… the race still seems to be neck-and-neck, and anything could happen as we go into the final lap of the election season.

And all this happened in the space of two months.

I have rarely in my lifetime seen such a succession of seismic political shifts happen so quickly. The complete shift in global mood 23 years ago on the day of September 11, 2001, certainly counts, as does the unexpected collapse -over a four-month period -of the Soviet Union in 1991, but those were events that existed apart from (although certainly affecting) U.S. politics. My mind has been boggled this summer, and I’m sure yours has, too.

And in only two MORE months, it will have all been played out and decided (we hope). I find myself hoping that the fact election day falls on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K. and a symbol of anarchy and destruction, winds up being purest coincidence and not prophetic. After all that rapid change, it almost feels like -now that the pieces have all been put in place -time has slowed down to a standstill. Like we’re in the eye of a storm. Of course, by the time this column (which I am writing Sunday night) comes out, we will have seen the debate between Trump and Harris -and who knows what other seismic shifts may have occurred.

One thing is for certain. We are no longer living in the same world we inhabited nine years ago when Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator. Much as we probably all long for a return to normalcy, even many of his supporters, I am not sure how “normal” life can be in a (hopefully!!) post-Trump era. I thought his candidacy was a joke in the summer of 2015. As he ran away with the Republican primaries, I found myself almost joyful about it -I couldn’t believe my party’s good luck, that the other side was going to put forward a buffoon with absolutely no chance of actually being elected by the American people, unlike a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio. It was only when I started to notice people I knew, liked, and respected starting to talk admiringly about him that I started to worry. Wow, what I’d give to be able to return to that sort of naivete. Of course, knowing just how naïve those thoughts were is, in itself, a protection against overconfidence and against letting up before the final whistle has sounded.

Buckle up, we’ve still got a bumpy ride ahead.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 5, 2024 “The Tide Is Turning for Unions”

 

A Liberal Dose

September 5, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“The Tide Is Turning for Unions”

 

I hope you all enjoyed the recent Labor Day weekend. And I hope you saw the meme that goes around this time of year: “If you enjoyed having Labor Day off, thank a union.” In fact many, if not most, of the rights and perks workers have in this country came about due to years of hard work and dedication from labor unions. This used to be widely recognized, from WWII (when posters decorated with American flags and featuring heroic-looking welders said “Free Labor Will Win”) to the 70s and 80s, when I was growing up -anyone my age or older will immediately remember the tune of the pro-union song from the ad “Look for the Union Label.” Unions took a hit in the 1980s, though (as did a lot of things), from Ronald Reagan. Things largely went downhill from there for a long time. Union membership in the United States had gone from 13% at the midway point of the Great Depression (1935) to a high of 33% in 1953, but by 1983 was at 20.1%. Last year it was 10%, a number at which it has hovered for a few years.

Nonetheless, in the past few years unions have had an infusion of energy. There have been several high-profile, and successful, strikes, and new unions have been organized in several industries (and since 2022 Tennessee has had the biggest increase in union membership of any state in the, well, union). Most telling, perhaps, is the change in how Americans view unions today. In 2009, right after the economic crash, Americans’ approval of unions was at an all-time low of 48%, after cruising for a while at 58 to 60% before that crash. For the last couple of years, that approval rating has hovered around 70%... the highest it has been since 1964, when it was 71%, and only a little short of the all-time high of 75% from the first half of the 1950s. In this year’s poll, only 23% of Americans DISAPPROVED of unions -the lowest number since 1967.

The Biden/Harris administration has been remarkably union-friendly. Joe Biden was the first president in U.S. history to stand beside striking workers on a picket line. And standing by unions means standing by workers. It is an easily verifiable fact (I wish I could show you all the charts on here) that so-called “right-to-work” states, where state laws restrict the abilities of unions to operate effectively, are overwhelmingly the states with the lowest average income and the highest poverty rates. 13 of the 14 states topping those lists are right-to-work. The same holds true for the 14 states with the highest divorce rates (13 of 14- economic issues are the number one cause of divorce). The same holds true of the 14 states with the highest percentage of uninsured people (13 of 14). The list goes on. Tennessee, by the way, appears in all those lists.

Recently, Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz appeared at a meeting of unionized firefighters and was given a standing ovation. J.D. Vance then appeared before those same firefighters and was met with resounding boos. Why? For the same reason the DNC has put up billboards that say “Trump’s an Anti-Union Scab,” quoting UAW president Shawn Fain. When Trump was in office he signed off on multiple laws weakening the ability of unions to protect the rights of their members. Just recently, he praised Elon Musk for illegally firing striking workers. “They go on strike and you say ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone’,” Trump gushed at Musk in their infamous X interview. There is a photo of Trump, in 2004, crossing a picket line of striking stage hands to film an episode of The Apprentice. Beyond all that, on a broader policy level, virtually everything Trump did while in office served to benefit other super-wealthy people like himself -and now, suddenly, he and his running mate are trying to pass themselves off as pro-worker.

Meanwhile, drawing from the conservative playbook that has been used for over a century, such politicians paint anything truly pro-worker and pro-labor as communism. Listen -looking out for the little guy and making sure he or she has a fair shot and gets a square deal is not anti-American or anti-freedom. But it is, and very much so, the opposite of Donald Trump’s whole life record.

As the old labor song sung by striking coal miners in the 1930s (maybe your grandparents!) put it: “Which Side Are You On?”

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is the Tennessee Tech representative of United Campus Workers and former state president f the American Association of University Professors, and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

  Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Aug. 29, 2024 “A Brief History of Israel and Palestine, Part 7”

 

A Liberal Dose, Aug. 29, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“A Brief History of Israel and Palestine, Part 7”

So much has been going on politically lately that I haven’t picked back up my narrative on Palestine in a month. The good thing about that (or, more accurately, the sad thing) is that this particular subject can be revisited any time and still be relevant, because it is always in the news (and almost always bad).

It has been so long, I should probably refresh your memory about where we left off. By the late 1800s, Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire (based in Turkey) for centuries. An Arab nationalist movement, seeking independence from the Turks, was developing by 1900. Meanwhile, due to massive antisemitic violence in Russia and other parts of the world, many Jews felt the need for a homeland where they could feel safe. A large number wanted that homeland to be in Palestine, site of their ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This movement for Jewish settlement in Palestine became known as Zionism. It was also called, in Hebrew, Aliyah (ascent, as in “going up” to the traditional region of Israel). The Ottomans sold land to Jewish settlers. In the “first aliyah”, 1881-1903, about 25,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, mostly from Eastern Europe and Yemen. In the second wave, 1904-1914, 35,000 Jews arrived, mostly from Russia and Poland. The majority of Arabs and minority of Christians in Palestine grew increasingly concerned about the ever-growing number of Jewish immigrants.

The Ottoman Empire sided with the Germans in WWI. British operatives gained military support from Arab nationalists in the area by promising that, once the Ottomans were defeated, the British would back the creation of a large Arab State in Palestine (as mentioned before, this was the plot of Lawrence of Arabia). However, just a year or so after making that promise, British prime minister Lord Arthur Balfour issued “The Balfour Declaration” of 1916, promising to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Jewish nationalists viewed this as a promise they would have their own state soon, while Arab nationalists viewed it as a betrayal by the British. British forces defeated the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Megiddo (a name whose significance  Sunday school scholars should immediately recognize) in September, 1918, and the whole war ended a couple of months later. Instead of an Arab state, the whole Middle Eastern region was carved up by the victorious allies at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. In 1920, Britain was given the mandate to control Palestine for the League of Nations, beginning the “British Mandate” period that would last until 1947. Semantics aside, what it really meant was that Britain now ruled Palestine, which seemed like even more of a betrayal to Arabs. Meanwhile, Britain allowed an even higher rate of Jewish immigration than the Turks had- 450,000 by 1939 (many fleeing the Nazis). Palestine was 3% Jewish in 1878, 11% by 1922, and 31% by 1947.

There was increasing tension between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem, with Arab protesters chanting threats that reminded many Jewish settlers of the lead-up to the European pogroms they had once experienced. The British had far fewer soldiers in the city than the Turks had usually stationed there, and did not respond to Jewish requests for more military protection. Under Ze’ev Jabotinsky, about 600 Jewish men of the city started training militarily. Many were veterans of the Jewish League, an all-Jewish unit that had fought the Turks as part of the British forces in WWI.

In April, 1920, tensions came to a head. There are conflicting stories about what the inciting incident was, but a four-day riot ensued in which tens of thousands of Arab protesters attacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Jabotinsky’s armed Jews did not participate in the defense, as they were held outside the walls of the city by British troops to prevent escalation of the violence- violence the British did a poor job of containing, with fewer than 200 troops on hand. Five Jews and four Arabs were killed, but ten times as many Jews as Arabs were injured, many rapes were committed, and much property was destroyed.

Arabs continued to grow angrier at the increasing losses of land to Jewish settlers, and Jewish settlers stepped up efforts to organize their own defense forces instead of relying on the British.

To be continued -off and on, as I will usually be talking about the upcoming election the next couple of months.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Aug. 15, 2024 “Weird How the Tide Is Turning”

 

I am going to say something that might shock you.

I don’t care much for Donald Trump.

I think he is a self-centered authoritarian who cares nothing for the country, the Constitution, or his own supporters. Everything is transactional, and everything is centered on him. He is the most venal, dishonest, and treacherous person ever to occupy the Oval Office, and in my opinion, and that of many historians and political scientists, a genuine threat to American democracy.

That said, about 30-35% of Americans absolutely love him. Another 15% or so have issues with his behavior, but are willing to hold their nose and support him, some out of distaste for the political left and others out of concern for their own immediate financial needs. For a lot of those voters, those concerns outweigh any existential talk about long-range threats to democracy or short-range threats to various minority groups that do not include them. Such voters overlook some of his disturbing threats, considering them mere bombast (“that’s just how he talks”) or exaggerations by his political opponents.

Sometimes, those threats do penetrate the fog. Take the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy guide for the early months of a conservative presidency (that foundation is probably the most powerful conservative think tank, and has been for half-a-century). They put those things out every election cycle, and no one pays much attention -but this time it has a lot of stuff in it that is disturbing, or downright terrifying, to most Americans, and it DID get attention. More and more people have been looking into it the past couple of months and it makes them very nervous. How do we know it has penetrated some of the fog? Because Trump has started denying any association with it, or any knowledge of what it is -which is ridiculous, because most of the people who wrote it are former members of his administration, and those who were not are expected to be appointed to the next one if he wins. For some of that aforementioned 35% percent, his denials count as gospel (“I mean, really, would a guy like Donald Trump LIE?”), but for the rest of us, we know what it means when he doth protest overmuch.

Still. That’s not enough to turn the tide. I, and people like me, have talked until we’re blue in the face about the very real dangers of another Trump presidency. People who are already inclined toward Trump rarely pay any attention -if anything, they double down harder.

Many studies in recent years have shown that a significant proportion of die-hard Trump supporters are generally inclined toward wanting an authoritarian “strong man” leader. Now, don’t twist what I’m saying- I’m not saying all Trump supporters, or even necessarily a majority, but rather a significant proportion -significant enough to make a difference in an election. For those folks, if their Fearless Leader is besmirched by smarmy intellectuals like myself, that is points in his favor. It reinforces the idea of us-vs.-them, and plays into the victimhood and persecution complex that always gives strongmen ammunition to grow stronger.

Which is why I think the Harris/Walz campaign is really onto something with their new approach of calling Trump and Vance “weird” over and over again. Nothing undermines authoritarians more than laughing at them. It takes their power away. Painting them as a diabolical threat (even if they are) makes certain of their followers admire them even more, because they are clearly STRONG to scare people so badly. Portraying that strongman as ridiculous and irrelevant, that’s a different story.

When I was in middle school, I was a scrawny little brainiac with a smart mouth. Bullies gravitated toward me, seeing me as easy prey. I didn’t physically fight them unless I had to, to defend myself, because I would’ve had my butt handed to me. Nor did I kowtow to them. No, I cut them down, insulted them, and laughed at them. Pretty soon the whole class was laughing at them, even their own sycophants, and they’d slink away… and usually never bother me again. I bet some people reading this column remember some of those moments.

When people start to become embarrassed by the very bullies they have clung to, they no longer want to be associated with them… because they don’t want to be weird, too. Trump is flailing now, freaking out at his (very) sudden reversal of fortune. I think he is losing potential votes every day -not from them flipping to Harris, but from them being so embarrassed by him they stay home on election day.

Let’s keep it up.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE