Equality - Haiti Observer Blog

The government of Haiti (GOH) guarantees women many basic civil rights, but in truth the female gender suffers blatant discrimination in many areas. The island, unlike many developed countries, remains a steadfastly patriarchal nation. Although many laws exist that acknowledge women's parity with men, they are not well-written and unlikely to be enforced.

The GOH does not take seriously any of the legal protections afforded women for gender equality. It has signed many international conventions, yet Haiti is listed as 158th among187 countries surveyed under the Human Development Index.

In social, work, finance, and family matters contradictions appear between what is written and what is practiced. For example, the social role of men is as leader of the family, empowered to make all financial decisions. But statistically, 42% of women are the primary decision-makers in their homes. In work situations, women's labor is subsidiary to males, frequently resulting in no wages due to their inferior social status.

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Cap-Haitien-born Anténor Firmin was one of the earliest scholars to write on the subject of negritude. Conceivably the first anthropologist of color, he introduced the notion of human anthropology as allied with the study of racial characteristics.

During the late 1800s, a strain of thinking pervaded U.S. and European intellectual circles, arguing the African race as low on the evolutionary scale in comparison to Caucasians. The French were dominating the conversation of the African race as intellectually inferior, due to misguided assumptions of racial differences. A prominent French author, Count Arthur de Gobineau, published "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races" that posited supremacy of the Aryan people over Africans and other dark-skinned races.

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