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As a foreigner, one of the points that interested me most while visiting Haiti, was that people regardless of their stature in society, always referred to the Haitian mentality. I understood it as an ambiguous clause in an imaginary document used to articulate one part of a complex problem that has kept Haiti from political, social and economic progression. In America we tend to think about our social conscience as a multicultural hybrid, born of puritanical roots, weighed against the success and failure of assimilation. Within this paradigm we have political divisions of right and left, yet both sides are assured the potentiality of economic upward mobility. In Haiti it seems that everyone rich or poor, light or dark skinned, acknowledges that the cornerstones of slavery, sovereignty, dictatorship, and revolution have contributed to a mass consciousness that defaults to stark divisions, and that coagmentation between the privileged and the disenfranchised is nearly impossible . While visiting eminent sociologist Laennec Hurbon, with journalist Michael Deibert, both experts on Haiti and it’s rich culture of art, music and worship, as well as its social ills, I asked Laennec to describe how and why the Haitian mentality has developed as such.
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