Paternal Pains

Response 2. Taking Haiti. 

     Mary A. Renda's Taking Haiti examines the inner workings of the United States' take over and occupation of the Haiti in the early 20th century.  Within this analysis, she notes an overarching sense of racial and social arrogance, which takes form as imperial paternalism.  White paternalism was moralized within the psyches of United States leadership, emphasizing its own importance in "helping progress" entire races, cultures, and countries to "civilized" or "liberated" status in the eyes of the Western capitalists.  

     In order to impose United States' powers within the political and economic domains of foreign, often geographically or economically lucrative, nations, a sense of moral duty had to flourish.  President Woodrow Wilson took the reigns as both executive head and moral compass for his country, as Renda explains, "...Wilson disclaimed all territorial ambition and cast the apparent territorial grabs of the past as selfless acts of paternalist obligation..." (Renda, 92).  Paternalist ideologies within the realm of international politics are not new today, but Wilson was in the process of indoctrinating his nation with the racist and classist notions in order to achieve occupation of seemingly "primal" states.  Under the presumptuous cloud of paternalism, Wilson directed the United States in a more imperial and racially hostile locale.  In regard to U.S. African Americans, Wilson reified their separate, but "equal" status as pseudo-citizens; "...developmentalist racial framework enabled Wilson to embrace a notion of 'equality' for all, while effectively reserving the full measure of citizenship to Americans of European...ancestry" (Renda, 111).

Presupposed ideas of race and class intertwined with  imperialism and free-enterprise capitalism to form the power structures that both sought occupation of Haiti and sustained it.  Placing importance within monolithic, white, paternal notions of morality and civilization development allowed the United States to empower their own form of government and economy, thus belittling and delegitimizing "others."  As Renda states, "...his [Wilson's] vision of international cooperation and justice rested on metaphors of human development that infantilized some and accorded mastery to others" (Renda, 129).  This flagrant ethnocentrism has plagued the international relations of the United States, and continues to arise within current affairs.  No longer simply protectors of democracy for "the Americas," but also democracy deliverers across the globe, will the United States look back at its habitual paternalism and reexamine its current foreign involvement, or is it doomed to stagnation?