If you spring from a culture born to freedom, you tend to mirror that. If you spring from some culture born to slavery or dependence, you tend to mirror that too.
Case in point, and it's a sensitive one, but here goes.
The prevalent African-American culture in the USA is a toxic culture, based on entitlement, affirmative action and race-envy.
Children who grow up in that culture tend to adopt its toxic elements. They have free will, and they have ways out of that culture. Nevertheless they have to work hard if they want to beat it. They have to do work that e.g. Whites and Asians don't have to do.
Also: your Government offers them heavy enticements to fail. Diversity hires, affirmative action, the 'soft bigotry of low expectations'. These are like the free rice offloaded onto the Haitians: they undermine and distort meritocratic rewards.
Most of us don't have to deal with that. So, yes, we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back. We really don't know the burden they're carrying.
Neither - of course - should we affirm that people with non-meritocratic backgrounds 'can't help it'. They can leave the plantation, and we can help them - simply by constantly affirming that what they do, and how they get on in life is indeed up to them.
Excellent post. My larger point is that behavior which is like a second nature to an American is not obvious for Haitians, precisely because of the two nations’ different histories and cultures. This does not mean that Haitians “cannot help” making bad decisions, but that the assumption that the right decision is so obvious to anyone that people who make the wrong one are either stupid or evil or both is an unwarranted one.