By Nic Harris (ebonyicons)
I.
I work in violence.
That is the plainest way I know to say it. I am a trauma social worker in Saint Louis, funded through an effort to reduce violence in one of the most dangerous cities in America by nearly every metric anyone bothers to keep. I sit with people on the worst day of their lives — after the shooting, after the assault, after the thing that will divide their life into a before and an after. My city has been working to bring the numbers down, and it has: an Office of Violence Prevention, community intervention, homicides at their lowest in over a decade. Real work by real people who believe, as I do, that violence is not weather. It is not inevitable. It is produced, and what is produced can be prevented.
So I understand why the meeting was arranged. I understand, on paper, the logic of it.
We hosted a delegation of Haitians, brought to the United States through the International Visitor Leadership Program, a program of the U.S. Department of State, and administered by World Learning. They had come to study our approaches to gang violence, weapons trafficking, and community safety. The project had a title about protecting security. The stated goals were about best practices — how our agencies coordinate, how we dismantle criminal networks, how we counter the tactics of armed groups while protecting vulnerable communities. They had come to learn from us.
I want you to sit with that sentence the way I had to sit with it in that room. They had come to learn, from the United States, how to reduce violence.
The delegation asked us direct questions. The kind of questions that are not really questions but instruction — asked by people who already know the answer and are waiting to see if you will say it out loud. Why, they asked, do you not simply change the laws that produce this violence? Why does a country with this much death not legislate its way out of it?
I found myself unable to answer cleanly. Because the honest answer is that in this nation, industry is prioritized over human life, and there is no number of dead children that has yet proven sufficient to move the people who profit from the machinery of death. I know this. I work downstream of it every day. But saying it plainly, in that room, to those people, felt like confessing something the whole architecture depends on us never confessing.
Then a participant asked our team a simpler question. Who here has experienced violence — the kind we work to prevent. Assault. The things we sit with others through.
Two of us raised our hands. Myself, and the one other person of color in the room, a Black man.
And a member of the delegation asked us directly, through the translator, why. Why was it that only the Black people representing this organization had survived the violence we are paid to address. They asked if race was the reason.
I do not believe that question was asked in confusion. I believe it was asked the way their other questions were asked — as a lesson, delivered gently, for every white person in that room who needed to hear a thing said aloud that they had spent their careers arranging not to notice. The delegation kept returning to the guns. Haiti does not manufacture weapons, they reminded us. Haiti produces no guns, no ammunition. So how, they asked — how do the armed groups tearing their country apart come to be so heavily armed? Where does a nation that makes no guns get its flood of guns?
They knew. We knew. The question was never for the answer. It was for the room.
I have become too fluent in that navigation — the work of managing a moment so the room stays comfortable while the truth gets said sideways. Of carrying a knowledge you are not permitted to state directly. It is exhausting in a way I have stopped being able to fully describe.
And I have to name one more thing, because it belongs in the record of that day. Our trauma department’s medical director had, in the lead-up, made derogatory comments about Haiti — jokes, the kind that include a remark about the country needing a dictator. But during the actual conversation, during the delegation’s careful and devastating account of history and intervention and cause, he was silent. His medical expertise, considerable as it may be, said nothing whatsoever about his ethical or historical understanding. These are the men and the environments I move through to do this work. I will come back to them.
I found the whole experience almost unbearably emotional. I want to explain to you why.
II.
Here is what the room already knew, laid out plainly.
Haiti is the first free nation of the Americas built by formerly enslaved people — the only nation in human history born of a successful slave revolution. For that crime, it has been punished without pause for more than two centuries.
In 1825, France sailed warships to the Haitian coast and demanded that the formerly enslaved pay their former enslavers for the crime of having freed themselves — an indemnity so enormous it would strangle the new nation’s economy for over a hundred years. Haiti was forced to borrow from French banks to pay France, a double debt, and it made the final payment generations later, having transferred a fortune in today’s terms out of the pockets of free Black people and into the pockets of the people who had owned them. The world’s first Black republic was made to purchase its own freedom, at gunpoint, and then made to pay interest on the loan.
Then the United States occupied Haiti for nearly two decades in the twentieth century, took control of its finances, and rewrote its laws. And across the decades that followed came the interventions, the installed and removed leaders, the support for dictators when dictators were useful.
And the pigs. I keep returning to the pigs, because they explain everything. In the 1980s, the United States, fearing a swine fever that threatened the American pork industry, oversaw the extermination of nearly the entire population of Haiti’s Creole pigs — a hardy breed, adapted over centuries to the specific climate and conditions of the island, that functioned as the savings account of the rural Haitian family. The pig was how you paid for school, for a wedding, for a funeral, for survival. They killed almost all of them. They replaced them with imported pigs that could not survive Haitian conditions without expensive feed and care most families could not afford. An entire rural economy, dismantled — to protect an American industry from a risk. The nation’s self-sufficiency was treated as an acceptable cost of someone else’s profit.
This is the pattern. Not an accident repeated, but a design maintained.
And the guns. The delegation was right, of course. Haiti makes no weapons. The flood of firearms arming the groups that terrorize Haitian communities comes overwhelmingly from here — trafficked from the United States, from our uniquely armed and under-regulated market, into a country that manufactures none of them. We are, and have been for a century, the largest arms dealer on earth. There was a book published in the 1930s called Merchants of Death, about the weapons manufacturers who profit from war, and the phrase has never stopped being accurate — it has only stopped being said. We arm the world. Our largest corporations grow fat on conflict. When the wars rage, their stock prices soar. The business of war is one of the few things this country still manufactures at scale, and it is booming.
So the delegation came to learn how to reduce violence, from the nation that floods their streets with the guns, that starved their economy, that extracted their freedom at cannon-point and called it a debt.
The audacity of the framing is total. And it is not accidental audacity. It is the specific, practiced audacity of empire — the ability of powerful white institutions to position themselves as the experts, the helpers, the teachers of best practices, while remaining the arsonists. It takes a particular kind of liberal confidence, the confidence of people who have never once been asked to examine the source of their own authority, to convene that meeting and believe yourself the one with something to teach.
III.
I told you this experience was emotional for me, and I promised to explain why. Here it is.
Because I recognized it. All of it. The mechanism scaled up, but the mechanism was the same one I live inside every day.
I sit in rooms like that one — professional rooms, respectable rooms, rooms full of credentialed people doing ostensibly good work — and I do the exhausting labor of navigating a knowledge I am not permitted to say plainly. I manage the comfort of men like our medical director, who joke about a nation needing a dictator and then fall silent when that nation’s actual history is laid on the table, whose expertise in one domain is mistaken, by them most of all, for wisdom in every domain. I endure the accepted humor and the accepted misgendering and the accepted invasions and the endless non-good-faith conversations that begin from the assumption that I must defend my own humanity before anything I say can count.
My lines keep getting eroded. A little more each time. This is tolerable, that is just a joke, this is not worth the fight, that is the cost of the room. And I have watched myself shrink to fit — make the knowledge sideways, keep the room comfortable, survive the meeting.
I am not saying my suffering is Haiti’s suffering. It is not. My exhaustion in a well-funded American nonprofit is not the suffering of a fragmented nation flooded with our guns, and it is not the suffering of people living under a racial and religious hierarchy in an apartheid state, and it is not even the suffering of the people in my own city living in the most violent conditions this country produces. I will not flatten those distinctions. They matter.
What I am saying is that they are the same story. Told at different scales. The same question, asked in every register.
The question is this: whose suffering do we look away from? Whose do we fund? Whose have we quietly, collectively decided is acceptable — not in what we profess, because we profess all the right things, but in what we pay for and refuse to see?
We are very good at never again. We say it at the memorials. We built a whole moral vocabulary out of it. But never again has always, in practice, meant never again to the people we have decided are people. Never again for some. The Haitian delegation understood this about us better than we understand it about ourselves, which is why they did not lecture. They asked questions, and let the answers indict us in our own mouths.
The violence we tolerate — the enormous and the small, the flooding of a nation with guns and the joke told at a conference table, the murdered child and the eroded line — these are not separate phenomena. They are the same permission, granted at different volumes. The same decision about who counts. Empire does not only live in the warship and the trade embargo and the trafficked rifle. It lives in the room. It lives in the silence of the man who mistakes his silence for neutrality. It lives in every small tolerance that trains us to look away.
And this is the thing I have finally understood, the thing that made that meeting almost too much to bear: you do not get to opt out of this by staying comfortable. Not everyone has to stand on the front line. But if you stand for nothing — if you tolerate the person beside you being placed in chains because the chains are not yet on you — it will cost you everything in the end. It always does. The looking away is not safety. It is the arrangement by which the machine keeps running, and the machine has never once stopped at a border it did not intend to cross.
To those Haitians: thank you. For your commitment to your people and your patience with a project built on a lie. For teaching a room that thought it was teaching you. I am more grateful than I can say.
And to everyone else in every room like it — including the version of me that has learned to shrink to survive them — I have arrived at the only conclusion I can live with.
The violence of shrinking to stay safe in this world is a violence I can no longer endure.
Because it was never safety. It was only my turn to be spared.
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