Rich Benjamin
Appearances
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Oh, Terry, the hate mail. Where do I begin? And often, Terry, I would measure my success by the heat and the volume of the hate mail. So oftentimes, if I felt that I bested Bill O'Reilly in a debate in his prime time, my social and my inbox would blow up. And you could summarize the
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
That vitriol, in a couple words, it's always like, and I knew that the media appearance in my words had been successful to the extent that it got under people's skin. So the response was often vitriolic. And to me, it didn't faze me. Oftentimes, I could get such a vitriolic response and then sleep like a lamb.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
My mother taught me some very profound and useful lessons about race. And that is that I was not to be defined by my skin color, and I was not to allow others to define me by my skin color. And she always had this wonderful, sometimes unspoken lesson for me is, as a black person, Richard, you don't pick a fight. because of your skin color, but you also don't run from one.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And so race is just one aspect of who I am. So both her and her father also thought in terms of class and poverty, and not just colorism. But colorism is a fascinating thing, and it still exists to Haiti to some extent. And as you pointed out, Terry, it's Those who look more European from the colonial descendants often had more money and financial advantage in birth.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Terry, first of all, it's great to be here. It's great to have you. Thank you. Thank you. What I learned in writing this book is that executives of American corporations after my grandfather assumed Haiti's presidency called the White House directly to ask them to intervene. In those phone conversations, they called him a rabble-rouser. They said he wasn't fit to be president.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And the dark-skinned masses tend to be the laborers who are working the fields, who are working the factories, who are working as domestics in people's home. And those were the brawn and substance of my grandfather's labor unions.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Yes. So during those high school years, she was off in Africa, as my father was. And Terry, you think about kind of the yearly rituals that any high school person has. The annual birthdays, the annual homecoming dances, the football games and whatnot. And so they were gone for all of that. And they were gone, albeit helping the world and helping other people's children. They had humanitarian jobs.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
She ran UNICEF programs. And it's a refrain I noticed because my grandfather said Haiti was his one greatest love. And my father said helping other people was also his greatest love. And so it's just a tension in this book about helping other children versus the ones under your roof.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
My whole life Haiti has been associated with dread. You know, we remember in the 1980s the Haitian boat people. We remember the accusations that Haitians bought AIDS to the United States.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Exactly, exactly. But that was a thing when I was growing up. So it was, you know, Haitians with AIDS, Haitians who were boat people, And the other stigma was a kind of condescending pity for Haitians. And perhaps that was the most important. And so my boyfriend in the cab at the time, he said, oh, my God, a Haitian nanny raised me. Poor, poor people. But what a resilient people.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And I think that was characteristic of many people's attitude at the time is on the one hand, there's this Deep antipathy and anti-Haitianness. But on the other hand, there's a kind of cloying and condescending pity for the country. And so for those reasons, I didn't care to be associated as a quote unquote Haitian American.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Returning from Haiti in 2010, when I could actually visit the place, when I could actually understand through my research, through the CIA files, through my grandfather's life, through my mother's life, that's when I changed my mind about Haiti. I think part of the joy of this book is it's really not a trauma memoir. And I hate that word trauma. It's really about survival.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And I think a lot of their gripe was he had been a labor leader on the ground. And also, what was fascinating is looking at the national security meeting held at 8 a.m. in the White House the day after my grandfather was inaugurated. Eisenhower was there. Dulles, the head of the CIA, was there. The other Dulles, his brother, who was Secretary of State, was there.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It's really about people stumbling and rising through America. And it's really the ways that my mother is such a resilient survivor. And so those two are linked in my mind, Terry. Learning what resilient survivors my grandfather was and my mother was, that changed my mind about Haiti.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It's ironic to think about. In looking back, I think I pledged that fraternity for the beer and the more beer. And there were some nice guys in the fraternity, but also there was this atmosphere of secrecy and confidentiality. In that fraternity in particular, but all fraternities. And that appealed to me. That appealed to me.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Yes, but fraternities are also, you're not meant to discuss what happens inside the hollow halls of a fraternity. And so it was just another layer of confidentiality and secrets and privacy that really I liked at the time. You know, being a young man. And of course, I'm tricking my face off. Of course, I'm doing kegs dance. Of course, we're dancing to De La Soul dance.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
But it's also that idea, an atmosphere of privacy and secrecy that I loved.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Well, in fairness to the fraternity, I think looking back, a lot of people were performing. You know, you're a young guy, you're performing. Being a football player, you're performing. Being popular... For other people, I'm performing what I'm performing. And so college is just a life of a lot of performance, faking it till you make it, and many people just being... Different people.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
All that being said, college is also where I and many people, you're most authentic because they really take the guardrails off and you let loose. You have no parental supervision. And so I formed some really close friendships in college because we're very much ourselves. We're all having our hair down and we're living far from home among each other for the first time.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Yes. For me, that was also a harrowing aspect of survival in that any time I got a cough, any time I got a scratchy throat, any time I got a pimple, which I would think was a lesion, I would go into this panic. Do I have HIV? And it was, yeah, it was an awful time to come to one's sexuality. And I have to keep perspective. I have to have gratitude because the generation before me
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
All of the national security team was, and they discussed what to do about this predicament.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
They were literally going to funerals once a week. They literally lost whole dozens of friendships to the pandemic. And that didn't happen to me. I'm HIV negative. And I was able to really come into my sexuality at the end of it. And now they're drugs anyway. But still, it was not pleasant.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Yes, indeed. You know, when I was young... There was this atmosphere of hedonism and death. There was a sense that I would not live past 40. And so I had this mentality, burn the candle hard at both ends, live fast, die young, in the way you think of James Dean or Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. So I went at it hard. I went at it hard.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
But also, I was born with a blood disorder called sickle cell anemia. And when I was born, the life expectancy for children with sickle cell anemia, assuming they survived their childhood, was 40 years old. So I grew up not taking life for granted and kind of thinking I'd be dead by 41 anyway. So you might as well enjoy yourself, right?
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It was one of these classic gay Manhattan nights on the town. And we'd been in a club called the Roxy that has three floors. And I was just in this kind of lucid state.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
elusive luster and I just saw a Mercedes that looked like a spaceship to me at that time in my hallucinatory state and I remember the dashboard was gleaming and it looked pretty like a spaceship and I tried to mount and get in the Mercedes but its owners were feet away to my detriment and they yanked me out of the car and And they proceeded to pound the crap out of me.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And I'll never forget this as long as I live. The cell was tiny and there were four people crammed into the cell. And there was a latrine in the middle of the cell. And I'd never been to a cell like that. So it was especially more stark and jarring. And so it stank like feces. There's empty rolls of toilet paper. And there I was in the middle of the cell.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
He was. My grandfather became a major labor leader in 1946, and he was in charge of unions that represented factory workers, that represented the farmhands who plowed the fields, who cut the sugar cane, bus drivers and hair cutters. And in many cases, Terry, he was able to garner them better wages. And he also represented laborers who worked for Standard Fruit,
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And I remember there was plaster coming off the walls. It was horrible.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
The funny thing is, it felt like I was in jail for three days. But when I documented, because I went back and got the police record, in fact, I was only in jail for 36 hours. So it did change my life. It changed my life. I understood leaving that jail, that my life was on the wrong trajectory. And also, at that point in my life, it was just a confluence of forces that really shook me up.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
and made me put my life back on track. And that was my twin sister gave birth to her firstborn, and my best friend gave birth to her firstborn, and I became the godfather of both children. And to me, that was a deep, profound spiritual blessing. And it told me it's one thing if I was going to ruin my own life and set that off course, but I wasn't going to do that to godchildren.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And so I got on the straight and narrow, and since then, I haven't had any trouble.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I literally delineated the fastest growing and widest communities in this country. And once I did that, I packed my bags and embarked on a 27,000 mile journey that lasted two years to the widest, fastest growing communities in America.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It was. It was a lot of travel. I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. And I just embedded myself. It was a project of hanging out. It was a project of deep immersion. And I just wanted to learn what these communities are like, why they were growing so fast, and why they were so white.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I learned about racial segregation that largely wasn't consciously racial. People were lured by these towns for better homes, more home for your dollar, beautiful natural resources, lakes, running trails, hospitals. And yet there was a lot of implicit bias. It was kind of white flight 3.0. And these places are Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Forsyth County, Georgia, St. George, Utah.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
There are a lot of white-topias in Wisconsin and Minnesota. And so some experts call these the excerpts, but they're not just the excerpts. They're white excerpts that are getting even whiter. And the prescience of this book was to understand what a big deal immigration is to these residents, these white voters, and to learn how dissatisfied they were with the ways this country was going.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Oh, my goodness. For example, when I was in St. George, Utah, I sat in on a local group called the Citizens Council Against Illegal Immigration. And every week, local people would convene to figure out how they could combat immigration. And I interviewed them, and they would say things like, the California of my youth isn't what it is now. And I'm using their words now.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It's just overridden and infested by immigrants. And so they were battering down the hatches. They felt that... Places like California, Texas and Florida were becoming too brown and too immigrant. And so they would go to these white topias and they would discuss immigration.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
There was a huge gun culture in Whitopia. In Kootenai County, there were more gun dealers than gas stations when I was there. And so there's this... idolatry of guns and the Second Amendment. And surely enough, after I wrote in these books, these issues of immigration and property values and guns just blew up.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
which was a global corporation, and they weren't too pleased with him in terms of his ability to get them better wages and better working conditions. And he became a popular labor leader through his voice. He had this beautiful command of Creole, the native tongue, and he would give these beautiful speeches, these fiery speeches, labor speeches that really aroused people's passion.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And by the way, I learned a lot about people's antipathy towards the government in these communities. And so what the book does is It really is prescient in terms of the Tea Party movement that would come about, and it was prescient in terms of Trumpism.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
At the time on my journey through Whitopia, I learned that people liked diversity and only in cultural forms, in terms of what television shows they were watching, in terms of what food they could eat. But when diversity came in the form of actual human beings, that's when things got sticky. And so another thing that the book could really suss out is the antithopy towards diversity and
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
that would really flare in these communities. At the time, I remember vividly interviewing people and I would hear things like, what's the wrong with homogeneity? If neighborhoods shake out like this, What's wrong with that? And they would say things like, diversity is a challenge to excellence. It's all about the content of character.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
So in those days, there was a refusal to think about things like implicit bias. There was a refusal to think about how communities are zoned and designed. to exclude people, i.e. apartment owners. And so diversity was this thing that was poorly discussed, and it's not surprising that it's under attack now.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It was very dissonant because on one level, people were kind. I did go golfing. I did go bowling. I did go fishing with a lot of these residents, and they really did open their homes to me. And it just brings up this caustic saying, one black man is a delightful dinner guest, 50 black men is a ghetto. And so, as I said, managed forms of comfortable diversity are okay in these communities.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
But when you think about tipping points and diversity that they can't control, that's when it becomes scary and authoritarian.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I do. I do. Because when he was ousted in 1957, that was a tender moment in the life cycle of that country. And I think those 40 years, let's say from 1957 on, were critical. And I think if those 40 years had gone in a different direction, I believe the country would have been better off. And would he have been the best president of Haiti? I don't know.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It galvanized them politically. And for that, he became known and he kind of came under the surveillance of U.S. operatives in Port-au-Prince.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
But I do know that Haiti went in that wrong dictatorial direction precisely at the wrong moment. Because Haiti was on an upward trajectory. It was... It was a vacation destination to rival Jamaica at the time, to rival Cuba at the time. It had glamour. People were educated. People read. It had all this foreign tourism.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And so had he been president and had the country not lost those critical 40 years, it would be way better off. And also the brain drain. So many capable Haitians were either murdered or they were just ousted from the country. And so all these countries, especially America and Canada, are benefiting from these Haitian Americans. And actual Haiti is not.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And it's difficult to calculate that devastating loss of brainpower, devotion, and human capital that Haiti lost under the dictatorship. And in part, we're seeing the consequences of that. And it's not at all to say that they're not educated, capable, intelligent people there now. Clearly, they are. But I'm talking about volume and magnitude.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you also.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
The role that the Eisenhower administration played was, first, they were aware that the coup would happen. We know this through secret CIA cables. But also, they granted this couple, without the couple's request... The couple being your grandparents. Yes. They granted them visas to enter the United States without the couple's request. And so... They knew that it was going to happen.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And so that's critical in their hatching the coup. In other words, they know this man is going to be deposed. They know he's a legitimate leader of Haiti. And yet they're granting him visas to facilitate his being kidnapped and ejected.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
It was very swift, his dictatorship. Once he kidnapped my grandfather, it was barely two weeks before he sent the military into the city's capital, and he mowed people down through submachine guns. He killed people. So he wanted to squash the dissent by violence and by murder immediately. And subsequently, he ruled from 1957 to 1971. And then, as you point out, Terry, it was a reign of terror.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
He broke the press. He broke academics. He broke his opponents. And he became a dictator for life through sheer violence.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I found out subsequently through a different visit to Brooklyn. When we talked about it. But the main thrust of this story and the main discovery of this story is just growing up, I had no idea, period, about what went on in Haiti. I had no idea about this man's rule. I had no idea about what her childhood was like in Port-au-Prince.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I had no idea what her life was like as an immigrant to New York. And technically, she's not an immigrant, by the way. She's a refugee. When you've been expelled, you're a refugee, not an immigrant. So none of this I knew growing up.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
The insight I do have is as human beings, we expect our parents to protect us. And in his case, he failed miserably. He failed miserably to protect her from the emotional harm. He failed to protect her from the physical harm and the violence. And he was in a sort of denial and disbelief and anger at what had happened to her. And this was never resolved, in my opinion.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And so as you point out, once he's finally able to return to Haiti in 1986... She's put in the difficult, ironic position as his eldest daughter to lead the funeral procession for him. So we can imagine what a complicated position that is, because on the one hand, your father has died. You're attending his funeral.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
But on the other hand, you're asked to mourn a deadbeat who had left your mother and you for a younger woman. And throughout his whole life had failed to protect her from violence.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Including his own. Terry, I want to return to this other point you made of his being popular and beloved. But that's outside his house doors and less popular and cruel inside his house doors. To this day, he's still beloved. To this day, you can go to Haiti and find older Haitians who will say, I remember this man. I remember what he did.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
For my family, and to this day, you can meet Haitians in Boston and Washington and New York who say, this was a beloved hero who I looked up to. I was at a book signing at a New York public library. A woman came up to me and she said, my name is Danielle. And when my mother was pregnant, she was cheering in a vocal fan of your grandfather, Daniel Fignolet. And therefore, my name became Daniel.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
This woman is still in Brooklyn. And so he was this beloved, popular figure outside his home. But inside his home, he was a bit of a monster and a ghost.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Yes. Duvalier made it a crime to speak that man's name, to print his name, or to reproduce his image. And that's what happens in autocracies. They were fierce, fierce rivals. But Terry, when I did return to Haiti in 2010 on this discovery to do this research, I had no idea that there was a high school named after my grandfather, Daniel Fignolet. And what a surprise. So I couldn't help myself.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I went to visit that high school and see what it was like. Sadly, that high school had suffered devastating casualties after the 2010 earthquake. So at one point, it was a very prestigious high school. It was considered one of the best public high schools in Haiti. But once the earthquake struck, you know, it was reduced to kind of rubble.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And there I was myself to visit the high school, to visit with the students, and to see what it was like. And it was devastating.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
My mother taught me that education is not meant to be safe. And she meant this in a double braided sense. Education is not meant to make you feel safe. And once you are educated, you are meant to make others feel unsafe. In other words, power is knowledge. And you don't just use education idly. You use education to make the world a better place. But we never believed in safe spaces.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Education wasn't safe for her father. Education wasn't safe for her. And education wasn't meant to be safe for me.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Oh, my goodness. My... Education was not safe for my grandfather because when he became a professor, he was a vocal critic against various regimes. And he was such a vocal critic against one of the regimes, the Lescaut regime at the time, that he was fired for his teaching. He was fired for being a pro-black, pro-working class professor. And so education wasn't safe for him in that sense.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And education wasn't meant to be safe for me in the sense that I was always encouraged to get out of my comfort zone, to learn things that might make me uncomfortable, to learn things that might make me unsafe about other ideas, about other people, about other culture. But then I wasn't just meant to, you know, make money What do you mean by that?
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Well, by that I mean you don't sleepwalk through the current moment. You don't sleepwalk through current affairs. You don't accept the narratives that your government is telling you about how things should be. You speak out. You teach others. That's what I mean by that. And frankly, Terry, now it's a very good lesson to have had in these days.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I did. I worked for a progressive think tank that was deeply devoted to democracy form, that was deeply devoted so that more voters can vote. It was deeply devoted to improving voter access by all kinds of means. And then it was also devoted to economic opportunity. What can we do in this society so that there's not these vast disparities of wealth inequality?
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
the minimum wage being the most obvious example. And when I speak out, Terry, another example was from 2008 to 2014, I used to be a regular commentator on Fox News on the calculation that that network had a sliver of its audience that was reasonable, fair-minded, and persuadable. So I would go on Fox News to talk about everything from
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
Sensible regulation on Wall Street, police brutality, raising the federal minimum wage, immigrant rights, you name it. And so these are examples of using an education to be useful in the world.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
I did. I did. And the measurement of that, Terry, was the emails I would receive. Sometimes, and I shouldn't even say sometimes, often I would receive emails from Fox viewers who said, hey, I hadn't thought of that. You made me think of this issue in a different way.
Fresh Air
A Family Forged By Haiti's Coup
And if I'm frank, I once got a handwritten note from a Fox News host who said, thank you for presenting the issues in a way that I respect, even if I may not always agree with you and that my viewers can respect. And by the way, that happened to be Neil Cavuto. So. I did always try to use my voice in a productive way. And sometimes it worked. And sometimes I do better.