Politics & Power Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat is naming an American paradox with a novelist’s precision: abundance has not bought us curiosity. The line pivots on that blunt “In fact,” as if she’s correcting a comforting national self-image. The “struggle” isn’t poverty or even ignorance in the cartoon sense; it’s a narrower kind of scarcity - limited contact, limited imagination, limited stakes. She frames it as structural, not moralistic: in a country “as rich as this,” the default posture is still provincial because daily life can be arranged to avoid the rest of the planet.

The subtext is about how power insulates. Americans don’t need passports to feel central; global supply chains, military reach, and cultural exports let “the world” circulate around us without demanding reciprocal attention. Interaction becomes optional, and optional things are easily deferred. Danticat’s phrasing, “unless the world comes to us,” is the tell: global reality is rendered as an intrusion, not a relationship.

Then she sharpens the critique with “in a very shocking way.” The world enters the American living room not through neighborly exchange or sustained listening, but through rupture: terror attacks, pandemics, refugee crises, disasters. Shock is a poor teacher. It produces adrenaline, not literacy; charity, not solidarity; spectacle, not context. Coming from Danticat - a Haitian-American writer whose work tracks migration, displacement, and the afterlives of empire - the sentence reads like a warning about narrative habits. When Americans only meet the world at its most catastrophic, we train ourselves to see other places as emergencies instead of histories, and other people as headlines instead of counterparts.