That in this post discussed picture is owned by Getty Images. On request, we were unfortunately forbidden to use it, even in a heavily alienated form. Editorial team amerika21
A US Customs and Border Protection official is pursuing two Haitian migrants to prevent them from entering Texas: it is the repetition of a colonial and racist past that is still not over.
This photo goes around the world. It worries the consciences of those of us who still follow it. As Eduardo Galeano said so beautifully: “It is not worth living to win, it is worth living to follow one’s conscience”.
The photo was taken by Félix Márquez (Associated Press) on September 19, 2021, but it takes us back centuries. It clearly shows us that humanity, especially the US, has not improved its treatment of Black men and Black women.
Being black becomes more than just a skin color: it replaces being human at the moment when the human being has already been taken away and the dignity inherent in it has been abolished.
The situation of all those who are victims of dehumanization in the world becomes black. As Achille Mbembe put it, it is as if there is a “blackening of the world”.
This tragic fate of tens and hundreds of thousands of migrants from Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia can be seen on the extensive border between Mexico and the USA, who try to get to this supposed Eldorado because there is chaos in their respective countries of origin – often with US complicity, as in the case of Haiti. For Haitians, the tragedy begins in Chile and Brazil and runs through Central America and Mexico.
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From a long-term perspective, the case of Black Haitians and women shows the discomfort that the memory of the hardest blow to the colonial and racial order in human history has caused and continues to cause in the western world. Haiti and Cuba are two historical stones that the big neighbor in the north has in his shoes and in front of his nose and which still bother him. January 1, 1804 and January 1, 1959, the dates of the Black Revolution in Haiti and the Revolution in Cuba, are two wounds that the US has not been able to heal and that are still open.
Photo shows a United States Customs and Border Protection officer on horseback chasing two Haitian migrants to prevent them from crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to Texas. One could interpret this painful picture for the Haitians and those who show solidarity with this people as a historical revenge of the USA.
What this sadly famous photo actually shows, however, is a certain reprint, updating and continuation of colonization in a country like the USA, which has not been able to overcome its colonial and racist past and where this despicable and unjust order of the world still exists . Yesterday George Floyd was the victim of that order, today there are thousands of Haitian migrants and the “blackening” of so many other migrants and refugees on the US-Mexico border, but it is the same blacks (or people treated as such) who either suffocated under the knee of a white policeman or being “chased” like animals by white “horsemen”.
In addition, it is the image of a country that has already freed itself from a xenophobic president, but not from a system, a state, a country, a history, a mentality, a world order that is deeply racist.
The picture should be shameful for the US and especially for its new administration, which is pursuing the same xenophobic migration policy; for the Haitian political class, which, with the complicity of the so-called international community, is helping to drive Haitians into exile; for our Latin American and Caribbean countries who are reluctant to express their solidarity with the Haitian, Cuban, Central American and African migrants stranded on the Mexican-American borders; and for international organizations such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States, which do not clearly and decisively play their role in protecting the human rights of persons on the continent and in the world.
Afro-Colombian Wooldy Edson Louidor is a professor and researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá
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