Blaming the victim --- AGAIN

One of the first websites I check out each day is Alternet and this morning I was greeted with a headline that appalled me: "Hey David Brooks, How Dare You Blame Haitians?" Of course, I'm not really surprised that David Brooks would do such a thing. The smug, self-satisfied manner with which he expresses his predicatable conservatism has annoyed me for years. Here's the lead on that article (re-printed from The Nation, by the way):

Armchair commentators like David Brooks, who know nothing about Haiti, have rebuked suffering Haitians from the comfort of the U.S. and Europe.

The writer, Amy Wilentz, refers to the "genteel racism" that has bubbled up to the surface following the Hatian disaster. She says the following:

I've never seen victims so roundly blamed for their fate. David Brooks's recent column in the New York Times--one of the paper's most e-mailed articles the week it was published--blamed Haiti's culture for the quake's violence.

Please go read the article. It will catch you up on the history of Haiti and give you a much greater perspective than the likes of David Brooks.
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