The comment about cultural factors is a touchy one – partly because there are elements of truth to it that we might not like to face. But culture isn’t created in a vacuum — and one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about this line of thinking is that it can pretty easily excuse ways that past actions and injustices helped shape the conditions of the brokenness in cultures.
It seems to me that some of the dialogue about corporate sin and redemption that get lifted up in the civil rights struggle might apply here.

Brooks says, “Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.”
If only we’d given a bunch of money to China, we’d know our aid was working!
Like a lot of Brooks’ columns, the points are interesting but the logic seems sloppy and circular.

As a Haitian, I find Brooks comments mere conjecture and speculative – at best. The comparison with Barbados and the DR are inaccurate, which proper historical research will show. To say that Haiti’s poverty has a cultural underpinning and that it is “progress-resistant” is saddening. Many parents in Haiti do all they can to make sure their kids go to school and get educated, and if need be, make ways for them to come to the US or another foreign country for education in order for cultural progress to made. There is more I can say, but I will stop here.

As a Haitian, I find Brooks comments mere conjecture and speculative – at best. The comparison with Barbados and the DR are inaccurate, which proper historical research will show. To say that Haiti’s poverty has a cultural underpinning and that it is “progress-resistant” is saddening. Many parents in Haiti do all they can to make sure their kids go to school and get educated, and if need be, make ways for them to come to the US or another foreign country for education in order for cultural progress to made. There is more I can say, but I will stop here.

http://anthropologyworks.com/?p=1100
Nothing matches up in Brooks? linkage of Harlem and Port-au-Prince ? the comparison is a total clunker ? nothing matches up, that is, other than a discourse of veiled white supremacy designed to blame Blacks for whatever ill God and man throws their way and to provide a white-dominated state with a standing excuse for doing too little, too late.

Even if there is a little sliver of truth to Brooks’ claim of Haitian fatalism, lack of responsibility, and social mistrust (and, having some personal experience in Haiti, I have seen some small evidence of this, as well as much evidence to the contrary as well), we have to ask how exactly it got that way. Could these attributes be a result of Haiti’s long history of paternalism and manipulation directed at them from the United States and US-supported dictators, rather than anything innate in the Haitian people themselves?