A Radical Profeminist: The Latest on Haiti in the U.S. press and blogosphere, oh, and Jon Stewart on the callous fools on TV

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Latest on Haiti in the U.S. press and blogosphere, oh, and Jon Stewart on the callous fools on TV

With on-going gratitude to Melissa @ The Feminist Texican, from which all that follows was copied and pasted.

Edwidge Danticat via The New Yorker: A Little While

The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said, why not me?

Judy’s World: How the Haitian tragedy is impacting pregnant women

Haiti already had the Western Hemisphere’s highest infant mortality rate, with 671 out of 100,000 women dying in childbirth, and that was before the earthquake struck. 7,000 Haitian women are expected to give birth in the coming month, and 15 percent of them are likely to suffer from potentially fatal complications.

The Women’s Media Center: Haiti: Absent in Life, Death and On the Evening News

Rather than providing their viewers with an examination of how Haiti came to be what it currently is—a nation of the descendants of slaves who carry with them the generational consequences of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and all of the political, economic and social insanity that goes along with that—the Western media remains content to share with its viewers only that Haiti is poor, illiterate and incapable of governing itself. Talk about blaming the victim.

Slate: Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?

By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti, something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I’m not talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called “looting,” which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I’m talking about the U.S. relief effort.

The Atlantic: Island of Lost Children

When the earthquake struck the impoverished island country last Tuesday afternoon, human traffickers suddenly gained access to a new population of displaced children. With parents dead, government offices demolished, and international aid organizations struggling to meet life-or-death demands, these kidnappers are in a unique position to snatch children with very little interference.

Jezebel: Does Haiti Need America’s Breast Milk? Probably Not.

Fueled by press releases from breastfeeding advocates, parenting blogs and even The Los Angeles Times’s health blog have been encouraging donations to milk banks to be sent to needy babies in Haiti. The trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any infrastructure available to transport or store it. According to an MSNBC report, donations are actively being discouraged.