The Colonizer Mindset
10 Americans from Idaho have been charged with abducting children in Haiti. The prosecutors alleges that these Americans took children from Haiti and were intent upon putting them in an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic. As it turns out, not all these children were not orphans, and it’s unclear what permission these Americans were or were not given when taking the children.
I’m going to give these Americans the benefit of the doubt. It seems unlikely that the parents of these children were able to communicate specifically what they thought was going to happen to their children. Some of the parents have said they thought their children were going to go to school in the Dominican Republic, not be placed in an orphanage. Because of this lack of communication, it seems unlikely the Americans had any idea what was going on; rather, they saw children who needed help and took them.
But what mindset is necessary to take that kind of action? Can you imagine yourself going to the site of a horrible natural disaster, or maybe a war zone, and taking off with children? Especially if you didn’t speak the language and didn’t fully understand what was the status of the children? I hope the answer is “no way,” because it would seem to go against every bit of common sense. Give the children food and shelter, yes. Put the children on a bus headed for a foreign country so they can be adopted by new parents, umm… not without a whole lot of verification and permission.
The mindset necessary for this type of action is one void of any common sense and instead endowed with an overwhelming sense of superiority. I call it the colonizer mindset – the feeling that your presence and actions in a country are morally justified because of your civilization’s natural higher place in the world hierarchy. In order for these Americans to truly believe they were doing the right thing, they had to feel pretty darn superior. To not check if the children’s parents were still alive means that the Americans had to think that no matter what happened to these kids, it was going to be better than their current situation. Parents alive or not, living in an orphanage was the best bet for these kids. It sounds an awful lot like attempts by Western colonizing countries to destroy local cultures in the name of “betterment” of children.
We’ll see how the court case plays out; good intentions may allow these Americans to get off easy. But good intentions can often go awry, and bad judgment is often at fault in the commission of crimes. Whatever lead to their colonizer mindset (be it their religious faith, extensive news coverage, or just stupidity), it is clearly the culprit behind their bad choices. This case has taken on greater symbolic meaning as well – finally, the colonized can prosecute the colonizers. Let the great healing of Haiti begin.
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