Roxane Gay doesn't give a shit about Haitians

Who is Roxane Gay really? And what family secrets hide behind her?

Roxane Gay supported Hillary Clinton. I mean really supported Hillary Clinton.

I am not overlooking anything. I see the whole of who Mrs. Clinton is and what she has done throughout her career. At their best, people are willing and able to grow, to change. Clinton is not the same woman she was twenty years ago, or ten years ago. Even during the primary, running against Bernie Sanders, she demonstrated an ability to move further left from many of her centrist positions. Mrs. Clinton, as she presents herself today, impresses me. I am choosing to believe she is at her best.

I mean like really, really supported Hillary Clinton.

And to be president of the United States, of any country, means making many impossible decisions, many of which will cost people their lives. As president, I know Hillary Clinton will make more decisions that appall me or make me uncomfortable. There is no such thing as an ideal president who never has to make life or death decisions. I can only hope that as president, Mrs. Clinton will make those decisions with grace and compassion.

I don’t even mean in some sort of compromising “anybody but Trump” sense, I mean she fucking loved Hillary Clinton.

I like, admire, and respect so many things about Mrs. Clinton. She is fiercely ambitious, intelligent, funny, interesting and complex. She prepares for everything she does like her life depends on it and in many ways, politically speaking, it does.

But there is one quote from Gay here in particular, however, that I find… interesting, shall we say. And I’ll soon explain why:

Hillary Clinton does not come without baggage, though I must confess, I cannot bring myself to give one single damn about the emails. As a woman, as a human being, I find some of Mrs. Clinton’s decisions unacceptable — her vote for the war in Iraq; some of the rhetoric she used during the 1990s; her stance, for far too long, that marriage equality was best left to the states. She has made decisions that treated marginalized lives cavalierly. It is difficult to reconcile such decisions with everything I admire about Mrs. Clinton.

Now let’s forget the revolting, saccharine nothingness of a statement suggesting that at the very least Hillary Clinton will do heinous and awful crimes “with grace and compassion” for a moment and focus on the list Gay provides of Clinton’s “baggage.” There’s the emails, which Gay doesn’t even care about, so I’m uncertain as to why she’d even list it in this “baggage” section in the first place. There’s her support for the Iraq War. There’s “some of the rhetoric she used during the 1990s” which is unclear but I imagine refers to those “super-predator” comments about Black kids. There’s Clinton’s legacy on gay marriage. Oh, and then… “treating marginalized lives cavalierly”… An interestingly broad statement. What might it include? See, it really makes me wonder, because Roxane Gay’s family is from Haiti, and the Clintons and Haiti have a rather storied history together. I’m “shocked” it didn’t even come up by name. After all, Gay cares so deeply about Haitians… right?

I mean, it would seem so—last week, Roxane Gay published an article in The New Yorker all about her concerns about Haitian-Americans and American policy on Haiti, spurred by Trump’s bizarre comments about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating cats and dogs.

Beyond her usual milquetoast writing style, the article runs through a number of the injustices Haiti has faced at the hands of America—Jefferson’s freezing of aid to Haiti, American reluctance to recognize Haiti until the 1860s, unjust immigration policies targeting Haitians beginning with Jimmy Carter and adapted in various forms by his successors—and uses these to frame the present racist pandemonium. Don’t get me wrong, Haiti may well be America’s oldest victim of its international evil, but… there is a very strange and rather glaring omission, and one that takes us back to where I’d started. At no point does Gay ever type the name “Clinton.” It’s particularly odd because, as I mentioned, she talked about Jimmy Carter’s horrible policies on Haitian immigrants, and she then goes on to mention similar policies taken up by his successors, naming Reagan, Bush the First… um… then it just sort of stops. Aren’t we missing someone in that progression? It’s very strange, because Bill Clinton actually ran claiming he’d fix the unjust Haitian policies and then put tens of thousands of Haitians in Guantanamo. It sort of seems like a pretty poignantly symbolic betrayal for an American president to break a promise like that, I’d probably have included that one, it seems like a sort of no-brainer rhetorically-speaking. There’s also no mention of what Clinton did to cripple Aristide… or what his wife did to Haiti under the auspices of the State Department… hmm…

I live in a city full of Haitians, and it doesn’t seem like any of the Haitians I’ve met and spoken to about politics can say the name “Clinton” without digging their nails into their palms so deep that blood starts dripping through their knuckles. The Clintons have a special reputation in Haiti, the kind of reputation that in most societies one day turns into folk stories told to scare children. Vampires, Krampus, Chupacabra, Bill and Hillary Clinton—this would be the lineup in Jay-Z’s “Monster” verse had the song dropped in the 25th century. It’s not hard to see why, considering how destructive the Clintons have been on the island through their respective presidency, secretary of state, and private “charitable” work, a long history which has led to the couple being called, without affection, the “King and Queen of Haiti.”

When Gay wrote that breathless puff piece on Clinton back in 2016, she claimed she “didn’t care about the emails,” as cited above. That’s very interesting, because the emails are, in fact, very pertinent to issues in Haiti, especially considering the emails revealed open admissions that Hillary and her team had rigged the Haitian election with the help of business interests:

It’s really bizarre, frankly, that this wouldn’t be something of a concern for someone who is of Haitian descent and who claims to care about Haitians. Unless… haha, oh, I don’t know… unless, say for instance, Roxane Gay came from a family that benefited directly from the Clintons! That would be pretty out there, wouldn’t it?

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…Wouldn’t it?

PART 2: WHO ARE THE GAY FAMILY?

I bet you didn’t even know that you were reading a “part one.” Consider this running by the logic of The Godfather, or, perhaps more illustriously, The Hangover—the “part one” is now “implied” retroactively. This part is called “WHO ARE THE GAY FAMILY?” (stylized in all-caps for effect) but the previous part doesn’t have a similar monicker, it’s just “part one.” Got it? Okay. Let’s answer that all-caps question.

Roxane Gay’s brother was the late Joel Gay, CEO and President of Fortune 500 enterprise “Vanguard Renewables,” a portfolio company dedicated to green tech now owned by BlackRock. Wow, what a couple of high-achieving kids, you might say to yourself, I wonder what their parents’ secret was? Well, you’re not the only one—a profile on the parents of these two wunderkind was actually conducted by People to answer that very question. Both Roxane and Joel show up in the video to talk about their feelings about it. “They were very invested in raising Black children who could succeed in the United States, and so schoolwork was really important,” says Roxane. Joel mostly talks about himself, frankly, but he’s sporting a killer combo of bold blue statement socks that match his tie with cognac loafers so I forgive him. I can’t help it, I’m a Canadian—a love of statement socks is the only reason Trudeau got elected in the first place.

As you can probably tell by now, the profile is in video form, and what’s so fantastic about that, aside from Joel’s sock game, is that you get to hear these idiots pontificate about all the reasons their kids turned out so successful while they sit in a fucking house that looks like this:

So meet the real source of the kids’ success: Roxane and Joel Gay are the children of construction magnate Michael Gay, owner of GDG Béton et Construction, the biggest concrete company in Haiti. Their first cousin is Claudine Gay, infamous former President of Harvard until her untimely (and politically-motivated) firing for plagiarism,¹ and the daughter of GDG Béton VP, Sony Gay.

GDG Béton et Construction is big enough that they are likely involved in countless construction projects, but they provide us a handy list of the ones they’re most proud of:

A nice and concise list. The United States Embassy is on there, let’s put a pin that one—how about Digicel, who are they exactly? Well, Digicel is a Carribean-based mobile service provider, and it happens to be the biggest provider in Haiti, and GDG Béton helped build their headquarters, as well as their cell phone towers and switching stations, which they maintain.

Digicel is owned by an man named Denis O’Brien, who also happens to be one of the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation (Roxane’s dad Michael happens to also be a donor). O’Brien is also a noted historic lover of bribes, and it certainly looked like he was laundering bribes when he was paying for those outrageously over-priced Clinton speaking engagements (which quite frankly always sound like laundered bribes) and flying Bill all over the world while USAID—an agency which at the time was receiving its primary directives from Bill’s wife Hillary in her role as the Secretary of State—invested millions into Digicel via an initiative to bring “mobile money” to Haiti as a relief effort, and then paid a tip to Digicel for “doing it so well,” although they had to split some of it with some other company partnership.

GDG Béton also provides construction services for Unibank, how about them? They were… in the aforementioned other partnership aside from Digicel’s that split the USAID tip for the mobile money initiative… they then merged their operation with Digicel’s into a single one called MonCash after Digicel acquired Unibank’s partner less than a year later… huh. They were also named in a suit as having helped former president Michel Martelly embezzle millions of dollars via executively-imposed fees in exchange for a personal cut of the profits. That suit also names as a co-conspirator… Digicel… huh. Digicel’s O’Brien made some off-hand comment when confronted with the scandal about pushing for an audit to keep everyone accountable, but then walked back those comments and a few days later flew Martelly to Davos with him on his private jet.

Many readers will know the story of subterfuge and general ratfuckery that led to musician Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly becoming the President of Haiti, but I recommend reading along as I weave that saga into this developing tapestry. In 2010, Haiti was hit with a disastrous earthquake, killing tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of people and postponing the Haitian election. When the election finally occurred, the Organization of American States (OAS) denounced the results without evidence (because bogus claims about elections is their job), and American diplomats threatened the nation with withholding of aid for earthquake relief if they didn’t modify the run-off election to exclude sitting-president Préval’s party Inite and include “business-friendly” Michel Martelly, which they did.

With Martelly winning the run-off, real reconstruction in Haiti could begin. The man who had previously been in charge of reconstruction had been tourism minister Patrick Delatour, and he went about allocating funds in a rather intriguing way. 95% of the funds wound up going to American firms, leaving Haitian companies in the dust—a very weird move when part of the process of reconstruction would, one imagines, involve trying to use some of that aid to kickstart the economy back into gear, and this would have seemed like a rather obvious opportunity to do so. In fact, early on, the only twenty-three contracts awarded to Haitian firms were doled to just six firms in total, with just three pocketing the lion’s share of the resources! Just take a look!

…hang on a second.

Hey it’s that company that Roxane Gay’s dad owns! Crazy coincidence! What is another coincidence is that the minister in charge of reconstruction, Patrick Delatour, owned a 5% share of their company. And is Roxane’s dad’s cousin. $1.2 million may seem paltry to the giant sums American companies received, but it is still a disproportionate amount of all the money given to Haitian firms. It is also worth noting that Gay himself says that 95% of his work is corporate anyway, and not public, but the lining up of the stars here is very convenient. Delatour was from the cabinet before Martelly’s, but this should establish a trend with GDG Béton of “interesting associations.” Not that I’m accusing Michael Gay of shit like corruption or bribery. Michael Gay doesn’t take bribes. I know this because he says as much.

Gay says it is possible to do business in Haiti without resorting to bribery. “I've been doing business there for 10 years and I never paid a penny to anybody,” he says. That's because he says he hasn't had to and is quick to point out that corruption can't work without two willing participants: The one who asks and the one who gives.

It’s hard to say how much GDG Béton made after the change in administration, because a lot of the spending in Haiti is eerily opaque, but it’s not as though they didn’t still have connections. For instance, he had some work building some big important hotel project “financed by a group of Irishmen.” That sounds a lot like that hotel that Denis O’Brien, the Irish owner of Digicel, was building! The one that his friend Bill Clinton told him to build!

When President Clinton spoke to us about the opportunity to build a hotel here — and then the Marriott people were here in the same meeting, we just said within a half-and-hour, ‘Yeah, let’s go and do it.’ But we wanted to make sure the hotel was a Haitian hotel with all the best of Haitian artisan work.

Wow, okay, so GDG Béton and Digicel do have a bunch of connections to one another. And Digicel owner Denis O’Brien has a lot of connections to the Clintons. And also Digicel was in charge of election information services in 2010-11, yes Digicel, the same company that a few years later was alleged to have bribed voters. Also Denis O’Brien was immediately given a national award by President Martelly right after Martelly was elected, and Martelly also gave one to US ambassador Kenneth Merten (also Merten once said O’Brien’s Digicel was “critical to ensuring the sustainability of [US] investments [in Haiti]”). Whatever, I mean, it isn’t like Michael Gay has connections to like… US foreign policy interests or the State Department though. I mean, sure, Gay built the US Embassy as previously mentioned. And he also works for the US Navy. But that’s neither here nor there.

Martelly has since been discovered to be a ganged-up drug trafficker, and so was the President of the aforementioned Unibank, which really helped set the stage for the situation Haiti finds itself in presently. One of Haiti’s current most notorious gangsters and FBI Top-10 Most Wanted luminary Vitel’homme Innocent actually said he turned to organized crime because the corrupt government ratfucked his attempts to start businesses in order to cater to their corporate backers and leaving him no other choice, thereby making the corporate interests that upkept this corruption in order to protect their monopolies were directly responsible for his turn to a life of crime. I guess we’ll never know which specific businessmen representing specific industries in this scheme should take the blame. Oh, by the way, his business ventures? A construction company and a hotel! Hey, those sorts of ventures sure sound familiar!

Roxane Gay is the benefactor of a criminal network of gross corruption and exploitation that holds Haitians hostage, the real gangsters who held the country at gunpoint all these years, the new ones are merely them with the mask off. Of course Roxane Gay loves Hillary Clinton, because Hillary Clinton is the American face of Haitian kleptocratic interests. Roxane Gay doesn’t give a shit about actual Haitians and she has some fucking gall pretending as much. Her family feeds off of their suffering.

BURNETT: I don't mean this to sound harsh, but you're in a position to make a great deal of money now.

Mr. GAY: Well, its possible, but to be frank with you, I’ve done that. I’ve been there. I’ve done that.

It’s fitting that the Gay family mixes cement for a living considering that Charlemagne Péralte, one of Haiti’s greatest heroes of liberation, was murdered and buried in concrete.

1. A hysterically-funny excerpt from a Guardian article on the controversy says: “That Ackman, Rufo et al would use plagiarism to take Gay down seems a throwback to the days of Reconstruction, when conservative lawmakers leveraged vagrancy laws to funnel free Black people into chain gangs.” Firstly, the firing was obviously not motivated by Gay’s fucking race, it was motivated by Gay not being a frothing enough Zionist. Secondly, the insinuation that Claudine’s “struggle” could be anything remotely like the lives of former slaves living during Reconstruction (Gay herself cynically used some similarly disingenuous words when she pulled an uwu smol bean “daughter of Haitian immigrants” line as if that changed how much richer she is than you or I) will only get funnier as this blog post goes on.