Who’s responsible for the Haitian earthquake? The white God

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible whiteness is born.
- (apologies to Yeats)

For a long time, it was said about God that “besides, she’s black,” and we’ve been told both by liberal scientists and Afro-centrists that Eve and Adam were really black. Also, of course, black racialist churches have long held that the ancient Jews, including Jesus and his disciples, were really black. But if God and Christ are black, how can we account for the terrible evils in the world, such as the Haitian earthquake, without saying that blackness is the cause of evil? Thus is born the problem of black theodicy, the question of how to reconcile (a black) God with the perceived existence of evil, especially evil that God allows to happen to black people. It would be interesting to see what Jeremiah Wright has to say on this thorny issue.

However, as we learn from Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative, Maxine Beneba Clarke, a West Indian poet who lives in Melbourne, has escaped the problem of black theodicy by coming right out and declaring that God and Christ are not black after all but are really white, thus blaming the Haiti earthquake on the white God’s racist hatred of blacks. Here is a poem Clarke has published at a leftist literary website in Australia:

Earthquake in Haiti
Posted by Maxine on 14-01-2010

seems jesus
& his big daddy
both white men / to me

else what the hell do that pair / have
against the poor
& brown
& free

the pale trinity
hz crushed haiti in their fist
did it feel as good as phuket
tsunami / quake / or lava
what jacks them off the best

long bone fingers at the throb
aiming down on new orleans

jesus is a white man / i’m sayin
jesus is now a white man / to me

- end of initial entry -

Adam S. writes:

I read with some amusement your entry on the Haitian earthquake being the fault of a “white god.” This theological indecision on the part of black radicals is reminiscent of the logic of some anti-Semites (there was no Holocaust … oh, wait a minute, yes there was, but Hitler did the right thing). In some cases, evidently, contradictory hypotheses can be entertained, so long as the right people are always blamed.

Once we get past this illogic, though, I was wondering whether we—and I speak here of race-realist theists—aren’t subject to some theodicy problems of our own. In short, how do we deal with the manifest fact that one group of people seems to have been endowed with intellectual and temperamental equipment that puts them at a persistent disadvantage in relation to the others? Now of course most decent people deal with this question by denying the reality of its central premise. Your website provides a valuable service by consistently demonstrating the futility of this head-in-the-sand reaction. Others, though, enjoy reveling in these race differences. Their triumphalism seem to me incompatible with proper Christian feeling.

Being between these extremes, though, leaves one (at least this one!) with a distinct sense of unease. Sure, it would be odd to think that all human groups would simply come out the same, as the race-deniers would have it. And there is also the notion that certain kinds of people might be suited to different environments. These thoughts are age-old. But they assuage the basic sense of bad feeling only if we first assume that God intended some very complete kinds of separation. And even then, the utter gulf between black-run societies and the others (which seem to fit more easily into a kind of continuum of difference) is highly troubling.

I wrestle with these things to little avail, but I was curious to see what’s on your mind. Paternalism and non-interference both seem to be practical corollaries, but deciding between them is no easy matter.

LA replies:

I’m going to start by giving an answer out of Brave New World: Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons like being Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. They don’t have to do all that hard mental work and carry all those responsibilities like the Alphas and Betas. They have more fun in life. Alphas and Betas don’t have fun. They’re thinking and worrying all the time.

Seriously, we know from numerous studies that blacks have much higher self-esteem than whites. So why should we worry about them? They don’t worry about us. And we know from observation that blacks regard themselves as superior to whites in that they enjoy life more, have more sex, are less suppressed emotionally and so on. So why not recognize that the black nature has its own integrity and “works” for black people, just as our nature works for us?

Assuming that life on earth reflects, however imperfectly, a divine plan, the question why there are different human races with such different qualities and abilities is a mystery that we will never be able to answer. It’s just a given, like many other givens, that we have to work with. Also, while we shouldn’t worry about the fact that some races have lesser abilities than others or see that as a contradictions of God’s creation, at the same time the existence of this human diversity does create serious problems. Namely, how is a more advanced race to relate to an obviously less advanced race when it encounters it, as the Europeans encountered the blacks in Africa hundreds of years ago? Should they enslave them? Colonize them? Give them welfare? Set about raising them to the more advanced race’s civilizational level? Give them Affirmative Action? Leave them alone and keep Africa as the Dark Continent? (But is it at all practicable to seal off an entire continent from rest of the world?) And what should the white world do now with regard to the black world? These are deep dilemmas. While I don’t have an all-purpose answer, I would suggest certain principles to guide us:

• We should recognize the reality of racial differences and not feel guilty about them or believe that the relative backwardness of other peoples is our fault.

• We should also not be arrogant about own relative advantages.

• We should recognize that diversity is part of God’s plan and not worry about it.

• We should recognize that God’s diversity plan, as presented in the story of the Tower of Babel, is that each people have its own land and culture; that God wants mankind to be organized into distinct nations, each with its own glory and higher destiny, as stated in the Book of Revelations (see my discussion at end of this article).

Aaron S. replies:

Thanks, and I agree with your general principles.

That said, I wonder, for instance, whether we should be so sanguine regarding the mental happiness of blacks living in these hells-on-earth like Haiti. If you told me that such a proposition is true of, say, a bushman, or even for some blacks living in the U.S., then there seems to be little trouble. This is not to blame whites for the present misery of the others; but if we raise the possibility that some people may be “made” for simpler modes of existence then it makes sense to consider that the intrusion of modernity and contact with others has hurt them, no?

Hence, it seems to me that there has to be a choice regarding these questions:

… Leave them alone and keep Africa as the Dark Continent? (But is it at all practicable to seal off an entire continent from rest of the world?) And what should the white world do now with regard to the black world? These are deep dilemmas.

… and our choice rests upon how we are to view God’s plan. is it our mission to lift them up? Or are they to be left to their own devices? It seems to me we can’t play “helper” and “leave them alone” at the same time. Isn’t this the absurd contradiction to which liberalism brings us in the first place? We end up shoveling billions of dollars and manufacturing volumes of guilt, while pretending the relationship is one of peers and rights of self-determination (which in turn means more harmful expenditures and more guilt, ad nauseam).

So I suppose this was the dilemma motivating my question. I was first thinking of it in response to your saying in an earlier entry:

If Haiti is unable to govern and maintain itself at a level that the conscience of mankind can accept, which may especially be the case after this calamity in which so much of its structure and infrastructure has been destroyed, then it may simply be necessary for outside forces to govern the country.

Fair and logical enough … can we say you’re coming down on the “helper”/”lift them up” side of the dilemma? (Even if we’re nominating the French!)

LA replies:

My answer is that if governance by an outside force is seen as necessary, then I would be open to that, but ONLY if is understood by all parties that the outside force is running things BECAUSE the Haitians are not capable of governing themselves. If this new colonialism is instituted under liberal premises, i.e., that Haiti’s problems are the white man’s fault, and that the white man in helping the black man is making restitution to the black man for the harm he’s caused him, then I am against any benign white interference or new colonialism in Haiti or other black countries.

Again, I am not supporting a new colonialism. I am saying that I am in principle open to the idea of a new colonialism, but only on the condition that it is done on strictly non-liberal premises. However, since there is no prospect in the foreseeable future that the white world can do anything that is not based on liberal premises, for the foreseeable future I am against any new colonialism.

Aaron S. writes;

You wrote:

My answer is that if governance by an outside force is seen as necessary, then I would be open to that, but ONLY if is understood by all parties that the outside force is running things BECAUSE the Haitians are not capable of governing themselves.

Amen! Would that this be the case in domestic race relations as well!

If this new colonialism is instituted under liberal premises, i.e., that Haiti’s problems are the white man’s fault, and that the white man in helping the black man is making restitution to the black man for the harm he’s caused him, then I am against any benign white interference or new colonialism in Haiti or other black countries.

Again, I am not supporting a new colonialism. I am saying that I am in principle open to the idea of a new colonialism, but only on the condition that it is done on strictly non-liberal premises. However, since there is no prospect in the foreseeable future that the white world can do anything that is not based on liberal premises, for the foreseeable future I am against any new colonialism.

How much improvement might we see if benevolence and equality could be decoupled as concepts in people’s minds? Of course this would mean the end of liberalism and the reappearance of a more traditional, pre-modern brand of Christian ethics and politics. In the meantime, you’re right. As a practical matter we should just say no.

Kristor writes:

“Who’s responsible for the Haitian earthquake? The white God”

How very … gnostic.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2010 10:18 AM | Send