Restavek - "One who stays with" is the word for a child slave in Haiti.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Ignoring Haiti and its problems is par for the course in the United States, even when the U.S. has played a role in creating them. There was a flurry of concern around the time of the January 2010 earthquake, with monies raised by a variety of charities...some legit and some suspect, but Haiti news fell out of the headlines, and for the most part is ignored. Before the earthquake there were a host of problems and some have worsened since then. Such is the case of the "restaveks," nearly 300,000 children who work in a state of indentured servitude which has been deemed modern day slavery by international rights organizations.
Restavek is a form of modern-day slavery that persists in Haiti, affecting one in every 15 children. Typically born into poor rural families, restavek children are often given to relatives or strangers. In their new homes, they become domestic slaves, performing menial tasks for no pay.
In the Creole language, "restavek" means "to stay with." Yet for the children who are called restavek, that definition is incomplete. For them, it means:
To stay with... humiliation and abuse.
To stay with... alone, in a family that offers no love.
To stay with... an incessant and knawing hunger.
To stay with... the feeling that no matter what, their voices, their lives, will never count.
The reasons that the restavek practice persists in Haiti are complex - ranging from harsh economic conditions to the cultural attitudes toward children. But every morning another child wakes up to begin his or her life of hardship, it becomes all the more urgent that this practice be stopped.
Ask the children what they need, and many of them will offer a simple reply:
"All I want," they say, "is to be human."
As more and more human rights organizations world wide, investigate and try to stop
slavery and human trafficking, more attention is being paid to the practice of child slavery in Haiti.
On the Global Slavery Index, Haiti is currently ranked Number 3.
Jean-Robert Cadet, is a former Restavek and author of the book "Restavec: From Haitian Slave to Middle Class American."
When Cadet was 15 his owners immigrated to the United States and he joined them, again as their domestic servant. He was turned out of the house when his owners realized that domestic servitude was stigmatized in American society and that he would be required to attend school alongside their own children.
Despite this abuse within his own culture and the racism he faced from American society, Cadet went on to finish high school, join the United States army, finish university, get married and start a family and earn a master’s degree in French literature.
Published in English in 1998, Cadet's memoir, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle Class American, contributed significantly to the slim body of literature written by survivors of contemporary slavery. Especially striking is Cadet’s bravery in so frankly describing his experience since, “In Haitian society, [being a restavek is] the lowest possible status. It’s like being a dog. And no one wants to reveal that he was once a dog.”
The book depicts the lasting psychological and social damage inflicted on those held in slavery and the suffering that persists from constant physical and emotional abuse. Cadet's overwhelming sense of not belonging—in society, in family, in relationships—is the most acutely painful reminder that he, in his own words, “never had a childhood.”
Organizations like Restavek Freedom are working to address the situation of Haiti's children.
These children wrote a letter to current President Martelli 2 years ago.
Appeals to the Martelli regime, and organized grassroots pressure, finally began to have an effect last August with a new law:
Haiti Enacts World’s Newest Anti-Trafficking Law
”After about a decade of effort, we finally have an anti-trafficking law in Haiti,” says FTS Haiti Coordinator Smith Maxime. “It is an important milestone,” he adds, “but we have a long road ahead to get this law implemented. A national committee against human trafficking has to be formed. Law enforcement officers have to be trained and the public has to be informed about the new infraction.”
How does this law confront restavek slavery?
By defining the existence of “trafficking in persons” for minors as exploitation of any variety against those who are under 18 years of age, the law recognizes a person’s inherent vulnerability because of their minor status without the burden of proof on the use of force, fraud or coercion. This confronts restavek slavery in that minors are shown as naturally vulnerable, unable to give their voluntary consent to labor and easily put into a position of exploitation. For those who have reached the age of 18 within restavek slavery, this law also add protections through the definition of “servitude” as the submission status or a condition of dependency of a person unlawfully forced or coerced by a person providing a service to an individual or others, and who has no other alternative than to provide such service, with the law directly including domestic services
Are there still gaps in Haitian law that need to be addressed to end restavek child domestic slavery?
While the new Haitian law sets out a clear understanding of the crime of trafficking in persons and the potential punishments for perpetrators of this crime, it is still unclear how the National Committee will implement prevention and awareness campaigns, as well as how victim services will be executed. It is also, unclear on how to deal with children who are currently in servitude.
Comprehensive victim services require a strong infrastructure to ensure the physical safety of victims through law enforcement, the psychological safety and recovery of victims through health services, and employable skills, education and basic housing and needs of victims through social services. If a victim is not properly reintegrated into society then there is the possibility that the individual will be placed in a situation of exploitation and trafficking in persons again due to their continued situation of vulnerability.
There are efforts in Haiti to organize and educate rural families about the practice, and to supply agronomists to help with increasing food production, which will alleviate pressure on rural parents who think sending some of their children to the city will reduce the number of mouths to feed.
Haiti's Model Communities Fight Restavek Child Slavery from Free the Slaves on Vimeo.
The Model Communities program has prompted parents to retrieve their children from restavek slavery, and it has prevented other children from becoming restaveks. This video features deeply moving interviews with families who are taking a stand against child slavery.
Other problems entwined with the restavek situation are deforestation, and erosion, the undermining of the Haitian rice economy...and one of the greatest social problems is
violence against women.
Please do not forget Haiti. Lend a hand by sharing this information.
"Men anpil, chay pa lou."
Many hands [make] the load lighter.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Joseph Rivers set out on a train trip from Michigan to Los Angeles, unfortunately, he fell victim to a legal form of government highway robbery. The Grio: DEA steals $16,000 from black man, assuming he is drug dealer.
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On April 15th, 22 year old Rivers changed trains at the Amtrak station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with bags containing his clothes, a few other possessions and an envelope that contained $16,000 in cash that he had raised with the help of his family.
The Albuquerque Journal reports that’s when agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration got on and began looking for people who might be trafficking drugs. It is routine for agents to randomly stop passengers and ask them what their destination is and their reason for travel.
However, Rivers was the only black person on the train, and according to witnesses – his interrogation went much further than anyone else’s. The agent on board requested to go through Rivers’ bag – and when the young man complied his money was seized under suspicion of being linked to the sale of narcotics.
Rivers pleaded and even offered to get his mother on the phone, but his appeals fell on deaf ears.
“These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me,” Rivers told the Journal. “I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that.”
The incident put his dreams to a grinding halt and he is now back in Michigan.
What’s happened to him is called civil asset forfeiture; a legal tool that has been criticized as a violation of due process and a contradiction of the idea that criminal defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
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How a group of black social-media activists built the nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement. New York Times: ‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’
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Mckesson crouched down and angled his phone. On its screen, I could see the dramatic shot he had composed: the faces of police officers, flat and impassive. As the police marched their way up the street, Mckesson posted a Vine, a photo and a 30-second video to his 85,000 Twitter followers. “What in the world is going on?” he asked. “There’s, like, how many hundred cops for 40 of us? This is wild.” He walked backward at a slow pace, eyes on his screen.
“It’s strange to come home after all that time in St. Louis,” he said, calmly. “I know it’s a cliché, but it’s really driven home the saying: ‘There’s a Mike Brown in every town.’ ”
Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.
We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people. Among many black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims — Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray — because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles.
In the process, the movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem that, until now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from it. Statistics on the subject are notoriously poor, but evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that the movement has sustained.
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An announcement made Saturday made Liberia the first of the hardest-hit West African countries, including Guinea and Sierra Leone, to bring a formal end to the epidemic. New York Times: Liberia Is Declared Free of Ebola, but Officials Sound Note of Caution.
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The World Health Organization declared Liberia free of Ebola on Saturday, making it the first of the three hardest-hit West African countries to bring a formal end to the epidemic.
“The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over,” the W.H.O. said in a statement read by Dr. Alex Gasasira, the group’s representative to Liberia, in a packed conference room at the emergency command center in Monrovia, the capital.
Just before Dr. Gasasira’s statement, Luke Bawo, an epidemiologist, showed a map depicting all of Liberia in green with the number 42 superimposed on it. This represented that two maximum incubation periods of the virus, a total of 42 days, had passed since the safe burial of the last person confirmed to have had Ebola in the country, fulfilling the official criteria for concluding that human-to-human transmission of the virus has ended.
The room, packed with reporters, workers from Doctors Without Borders and other aid agencies and dignitaries, including the American ambassador to Liberia, Deborah R. Malac, burst into applause, and some people cried, according to health officials who were present.
Women celebrated in Monrovia, Liberia, on Saturday as officials declared the Ebola outbreak in their country over. Credit Ahmed Jallanzo/European Pressphoto Agency
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Although research has suggested that medicine may structurally neglect certain populations, there’s still a lot of work to do to reveal the gaps, let alone fix them. FiveThirtyEight.com: Racial And Ethnic Gaps Remain A Big Question in Medicine.
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But even when Hispanics make it to the doctor’s office to seek treatment, they may run into another problem. The medicines that they need were rarely tested on people like them. Some medicines act differently or are appropriate at different doses for particular demographic groups, so being left out of trials can prevent these benefits and side effects from being noticed. As of 2011, Hispanics were 16 percent of the U.S. population but only comprised 1 percent of clinical trial participants. African-Americans are also underrepresented, comprising only 5 percent of the clinical trial participants even though they are 12 percent of the population.
Missing out on trials can mean missing out on medicine. In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration approved a heart drug, BiDil, specifically for use with African-American patients. The drug had produced insignificant benefits when it was tested in a general population in its first study, but appeared to have a more pronounced effect among African-Americans, so the FDA asked the manufacturer to run an additional trial, confined to self-identified black patients. Based on that second trial, the FDA approved BiDil for black heart-failure patients.
Under-representation in clinical trials doesn’t just cause patients to miss out on benefits, it sometimes produces direct harm. The FDA had to revise its recommended Ambien dose in 2013, because the old dose worked fine for men, but was too much for most women because they metabolized it differently. The FDA came up with a new women’s dose that was half the previous recommendation.
When population groups wind up with different medical outcomes, it’s not necessarily a matter of biology – it may be bias. A 2008 study in Academic Emergency Medicine found that women who came to the emergency room with abdominal pain were less likely to be given strong pain medication than men. Even when controlling for age, race, and pain level, women were 13 to 25 percent less likely than men to receive opiates in response to their symptoms.
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US first lady speaks out on her experiences as an African American amid racial tensions between black communities and police.
The Guardian: Michelle Obama: I was 'knocked back' by race perceptions.
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The first lady, who grew up in humble circumstances in Chicago and became a successful corporate lawyer, has rarely discussed race during her husband’s two terms in office.
But recent cases of alleged abuse of African Americans by police officers, and related unrest in Baltimore, made it hard to avoid.
“As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others,” Obama said in a frank address at Tuskegee University in Alabama on Saturday.
“Was I too loud or too angry or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?” she asked, at the historically black university.
For the first magazine cover featuring Obama in 2008, The New Yorker parodied her as a radical and a terrorist.
“It was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and a machine gun,” she recalled.
“Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I’m really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder just how are people seeing me.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
What does the eye see? Does the eye see a world of glass shards refracting light in a prism of color shafts? Or does the eye see the shadow, the light only an outline of sharp relief?
As the pupil grows in the growing darkness, the eye can see the crow in flight between darkened clouds. The eye can see the stationary cobalt monolith in the city square and the swaying hidden form in the night of the...
Black Gentleman
(O fly away home, fly away.
— Robert Hayden)
There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see
what the world sees seeing him.
They know an image of him they themselves created.
He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger,
each limb adjusted, because it’s had to,
to achieve finally flight —
though what’s believed
in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down,
as any swamp-mess of water I’m always thinking of
might draw down again the washed-up body
of a boy, as any mouth I’ve yearned for would take down,
wrestler-style, the boy’s tongue with its own ...
What an eye can’t imagine
it can’t find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees
of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man’s dream —
Let’s have his nature speak.
What will the incredible night of him say here, to his thousand
moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?
-- Rickey Laurentis
"Black Gentleman"
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