Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.–Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation by Jeffrey Sommers (review)

January 12, 2015. The date marked the fifth anniversary of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck just outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing or injuring more than 500,000 people and displacing at least 1.5 million survivors. The anniversary came amid even more death, frustrations, and setbacks. Three days before, a United States district court judge had ruled that the United Nations (UN) was immune from a lawsuit brought on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians killed or made sick by cholera introduced by Nepalese soldiers from the International United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH). "The court's decision," one lawyer from the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti lamented, "implies that the UN can operate with impunity. We don't think that is the law."¹

Except that in Haiti, it was. Since its authorization in June 2004, MINUSTAH had taken a leading role in squashing popular demonstrations against Haiti's foreign-backed politicians, failed to prosecute so-called peacekeepers who operated child sex rings, and become a reliable source of remittances for countries including Bangladesh. It was no more accountable to Haitians than members of the global aid community who profited from relief work in Haiti. While the American Red Cross spent 25 percent of all money donated after the earthquake on internal expenses and USAID gave less than a penny of every dollar to Haitian organizations, MINUSTAH, under a pretense of altruism, continued to operate with the support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. "The stabilization work which was entrusted to the mission did in fact produce positive results," the head of MINUSTAH proclaimed proudly.² Success presumably came despite widespread corruption, endemic rape, and a cholera epidemic. It was the supposedly providential result of an ostensibly humanitarian mission that resembled unending occupation.

In Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.–Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation, Jeffrey Sommers unravels the historical links among self-professed humanitarianism, racism, capitalism, and US imperialism. He does so through a case study of the US military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. For Sommers, writing at the centennial of that event and in the midst of what scholars and activists named the humanitarian occupation of Haiti, "Haiti and the United States, along with their relationship to each other, can only be understood in its totality through an analysis of culture, economics, politics, and race" (viii). Put simply, to comprehend why and how the international aid and business community occupied Haiti in 2015 requires an understanding of an occupation initiated by similar actors and excuses one hundred years earlier.

Following a brief introduction cowritten with Patrick Delices, Sommers begins with an analysis of the perceptions of Haiti in the antebellum United States. It largely substantiates the arguments made by scholars including Matthew Clavin, Alfred Hunt, Rayford Logan, and Brenda Gayle Plummer. As those scholars and Sommers make clear, representations of Haiti in the United States varied according to regional and economic interests. One thing was constant, however. In the United States, the white press often viewed Haiti and its people through a racist or, at the very least, racially deterministic lens. They bent the image of both to their will.

As Sommers shows in his second chapter, the US press also played a significant role in the subsequent building of the postbellum US empire. During the decades after its Civil War, the United States pursued territorial expansion in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Popular magazines, Sommers shows, promoted those imperial pursuits. In periodicals including National Geographic and Outlook, writers characterized Haiti as virgin soil ripe for US investment and a premodern nation in need of modern civilization. As one Marine officer put it, "we owe it to ourselves as a Christian nation to help them over...