By: Anja VanderZee
This week I will be discussing the issue of ethnocentrism along with eurocentrism and how those affect human rights issues in Haiti. Farish Noor defines ethnocentrism as “the tendency of individuals and cultures to view themselves as well as the environment around them from the perspective of their own culture” (Noor, 1996). This demonstrates to us that ethnocentrism means that one views the world solely through the belief that their country’s customs and values must apply to the rest of the world as well. Because they are living in that specific circumstance they believe that those same principles and lifestyles must adhere to the rest of the world’s population when in reality that isn’t the case and is very detached from the truth. This perspective can be very dangerous and predatory when we begin to think about the impact that countries who believe themselves superior can have on others. Eurocentrism as explained by Noor, “denotes the emerging perception within the European cultural, historical experience of European identity as good and all other forms as less good or less advanced.” This mindset is also dangerous because it leads nations to look down upon others and feel the need to make them more “civilized” and more to their standards. For Haiti, the US felt the need to “stabilize” the country, when reading into the US archives they use language such as that and describe the torment the Haiti experienced before they intervened. As the United States tells the story, they wanted to prevent german intervention and protect Haiti. In reality from the other side of the story, not from a eurocentric lens, the Washington Post shared that the “U.S. forces executed political dissidents and implemented a system of forced labor that ravaged Haiti’s peasant population. Thousands of people died” (Suggs,2021). Seeing Haiti as a place in which to add military bases and use their people, this idea of bettering a country really only served the States and hurt the people in Haiti.