At the very moment when Haitians should have been celebrating the bicentennial of their revolutionary overthrow of the most powerful slave regime in the world, they instead found their country thrown into political instability and internecine violence with rival political groupings openly assassinating opponents. As if this were not enough, a tropical storm then devastated the country with massive flooding and mudslides killing thousands of people. This “unnatural” deluge—as much the product of economic policy as of rainfall—eerily echoes the violence that now embroils the ousted governing party, Lavalas, whose name also means “the flood.”1
Both the deluge that devastated entire towns and valleys and the waves of protest and political conflict tearing at Haitian society are closely linked to the racial inequalities that structure the current regime of globalization. The patterns of racially quarantined suffering, poverty and violence found in many parts of the Caribbean and the wider Americas are closely related to the histories of colonialism, slavery and exclusion that formed—or deformed—the contemporary world. A review of the racial politics of citizenship in the Caribbean brings into stark relief how racial boundaries have delineated the inequitable distribution of liberties, protection and justice, both locally and globally, from the early nineteenth century until today.
The struggle for freedom and full citizenship in the Caribbean remains incomplete. The project of liberation that began with the Haitian revolution was thwarted early on, and people of African ancestry throughout the Americas continue to be more vulnerable to environmental disasters, health threats and political strife. The completion of the revolution that began with a slave uprising in 1791 will require eliminating the exclusionary barriers built around race; barriers that have been assaulted many times and as many times rebuilt.
To understand the contemporary situation we must first recall the colonial-era struggles of Caribbean peoples to escape exploitation. These struggles are crucial to the entire story of the democratic expansion of freedom, rights and citizenship in the Western world. This history, particularly Haiti’s, offers lessons still relevant today.
By claiming the rights of citizenship before those rights were granted to them, as was done in revolutionary Haiti, Caribbean peoples pushed imperial states towards far more radical political projects than the framers of Western democracy had originally envisioned. The most marginalized people—enslaved sugar workers and domestic servants, washerwomen and coffee pickers, dockworkers and indentured laborers—seized the ideology of universal rights and the language of liberty and made them their own.
Alongside the U.S. and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution is finally being recognized as the third pillar in the making of modern citizenship and freedom. Black revolutionaries were the first to assert that enslaved workers shared in the liberty and equality that Enlightenment philosophy proclaimed as a universal natural law. In the face of a slave insurgency under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, white counter-revolution, British and Spanish invasions and civil wars in its colonies, the revolutionary French National Assembly took the almost unthinkable step of abolishing slavery throughout the French Empire in 1794.
But the revolutionary projects of democratic republicanism and slave emancipation only coincided for a brief moment. By 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte had deceived and imprisoned L’Ouverture, reinstated slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and was fighting a desperate and ultimately futile battle to hold Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti).
After defeating the French, British and Spanish armies, the Republic of Haiti emerged in 1804 as the first country in the world in which slavery was fully and finally extinguished, and all men (if not yet women) were beneficiaries of the rights of citizenship. It was also the first country in the world to abolish racial distinction in its constitution, which declared that all Haitians should be designated as “noirs” (“blacks”), no matter their color, and that all people of African descent could become citizens of Haiti. By recognizing a small number of Europeans who had fought for the revolution as honorary noirs, and by embracing all people escaping slavery as citizens, Haiti offered citizenship not on racial grounds but on the grounds of opposition to slavery. This “Black Republic,” as detractors called it, presented a beacon of hope to the millions still enslaved in plantation societies throughout the Americas, and it presented a galling example to the surrounding slave-holding empires.
The existence of a black-ruled country at the geographical heart of the slave system informed a century of both pro-slavery and anti-slavery struggle. Haiti’s radical break with the French colonial system was a unique rejection of the power of white European colonial rule. It fundamentally challenged the entire basis of the Atlantic slave economy—much as post-1959 Cuba posed a challenge and a threat to the late-twentieth century Western world order. France, Britain and the United States refused to recognize Haiti’s independence and their hostile reaction fed into highly politicized “racial formations.”2 Whiteness, for example, was consolidated as a racial identity partly through fear of Haiti, and was linked to the exclusion of free people of color from the rights of citizenship. Any step towards black emancipation was seen as a threat to the system of slavery that generated white wealth and European economic predominance.
Faced with an international embargo strangling the country’s economy, Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer agreed in 1825 to pay French bankers 150 million francs over five years to compensate for property lost by colonists during the revolution, including self-liberated slaves. The agreement also opened Haitian ports to foreign trade, with France receiving preferential low tariffs. Marking the first major debt crisis of a “Third World” nation, Haiti paid a heavy price in both symbolic and real terms for its revolution. Indeed, protesters at the time accused the government of “selling the country to the whites.”
Even after achieving the fundamental recognition that they were human and not chattel, black people in post-emancipation societies of the colonial Caribbean faced ongoing struggles to conquer the full rights of citizenship. This was especially true for women. Although they were central to on-the-ground struggles for land, child welfare and education, justice for the poor and protection by the law throughout the last two centuries, most Caribbean women did not gain voting rights until the mid- to late-twentieth century. Afro-Caribbean women faced even greater obstructions. In colonial ideologies, black women were contrasted against “white ladies” and subjected to defeminization, while “brown” women were sexualized and often accused of provoking lust, miscegenation and white “racial degeneracy.”
These racial and sexual ideologies were used to place limits on the rights and freedoms of black women through a kind of moral policing that sought to contain female “respectability” within the patriarchal family and to marginalize women who deviated from this norm. The notion of masculinity was also central to the construction of colonial ideologies of citizenship. Centered on the free white male individual, this version of masculinity was rooted in the bourgeois patriarchal family. Caribbean deviation from the white bourgeois norm of the patriarchal family was used to deny full political freedom to former slaves. When Caribbean women had children out of wedlock, or moved from one partner to another, some Europeans charged that black men were incapable of ruling their families and hence were also incapable of ruling their countries.3
“Disorganized families” and “open profligacy” were used as excuses to deny equal civil and political rights to emancipated peoples.
More generally, the guarding of white privilege in the colonial Caribbean was achieved through the policing of racial boundaries and the exercise of prerogatives of color in what some have called a “pigmentocracy.” Today, as in the post-slavery period, color remains a measure of status. In much of the Hispanic Caribbean, for example, an ideology of blanqueamiento (whitening) prevailed, which encouraged marrying “lighter” in order to improve a family’s social standing. Yet there were also laws that protected “whiteness,” such as those in nineteenth-century Cuba that barred most marriages between whites and non-whites.4 In much of the Caribbean there is a tripartite racial hierarchy (black/brown/white) in which the color of one’s skin or the straightness of one’s hair can help one gain access to education, health care, jobs and other rights of citizenship that should be accessible to all.
Nevertheless, throughout the Caribbean in the nineteenth century there were repeated efforts to lay claim to “national” politics, identities and rights of citizenship in the name of the non-white majority. These social mobilizations for inclusion were often followed by a backlash of exclusionary repression and retreat from democratic politics. In Jamaica in the 1840s and 1850s, for example, “emancipated laboring people of African descent” (as some began to refer to themselves) took up the democratic tools of voting, public meeting, petitioning and demonstrating to press their claims for real freedom. They asked for simple things that were under threat from the white-controlled government and courts: access to education, the right to vote, a say in taxation, a fair legal system, and the protection of the sanctity of their homes and families. They demanded their rights and fair treatment as “Her Majesty’s Sable Subjects” and insisted on proclaiming their ardent love for liberty, the nation and the Queen.
Government suppression of these claimants led to the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, to which the state responded with executions, arrests, the burning of homes and the abuse of prisoners. After the rebellion, the elected House of Assembly was abolished and Jamaica came under direct rule as a Crown Colony. The measure revoked many of the rights of enfranchisement that freed people had begun to exercise and sought to maintain white control of the government. This backlash is similar to what happened in the United States when Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan assaults dashed the hopes of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And in Cuba, the Independent Party of Color was vilified and its members attacked in 1912 for their race-based organizing, which white nationalists believed would lead to “another Haiti.”5
As Caribbean peoples continued to battle for universal citizenship, their struggles were fractured by inequalities of gender, race, color and class. Besides the distinctions of color within post-slavery societies, powerful imperial rivalries and internal cleavages further pitted one ethnic group against another. African-Caribbean claims to citizenship, for instance, were often set against the contested rights of indentured laborers or foreign migrants. Native-born Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Guyanese of African descent resented the East Asian indentured workers who were brought into their countries by government schemes to provide cheap labor for sugar plantations after slavery was abolished. By encouraging inter-ethnic rivalries and hatred of “heathens” and “foreigners,” white plantation-owners could better maintain their grip on power.
Many of the processes associated with globalization today were already well underway in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century, including offshore production, labor migration and transnational capital flight. Racial and ethnic distinctions were a crucial part of the mechanisms that enabled this first wave of globalization to succeed. Workers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds were often brought in as temporary migrants to undercut the wages of local organized workers. Linguistic and cultural differences usually prevented workers from organizing and gave employers an advantage, as workers turned against each other and deepened ethnic and racial divisions rather than cooperating across them. Black migrant workers who left their islands to build the trans-isthmus railway and later the Panama Canal, or to harvest sugar in Cuba and later in Florida, were set off against local populations who considered themselves “more white.” Racial tensions on the Haitian-Dominican border led to numerous purges and even massacres of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic, where the population largely defined itself as “Indian” rather than “black.”6 These rivalries leave their legacy today in the tense communal politics of Guyana and Trinidad, in clashes between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and in the general exclusion of foreign migrant workers from legal protection in many Caribbean countries.
As the region has experienced the latest wave of globalization in recent decades, inequalities based on race—as well as class, gender and sexuality—remain inescapable features of Caribbean societies. Like nineteenth-century liberalism, today’s neoliberalism also claims to provide a level playing field, even though restrictions, controls and exclusions continue to hold down the weakest participants. And race continues to be a key determinant of who wins and who loses in the global marketplace.
Caribbean participation in the global economy and global civil society is beset by restrictions and unequal treatment that often rest on racial barriers. The U.S. “war on drugs” and more recent post-9/11 legislation have imposed heavy burdens of surveillance, arrest and deportation on those traveling from and returning to the Caribbean. Racial profiling subjects many Caribbean people to difficulties in traveling, whether driving down a street in the United States or trying to cross an international border. And the interception and return of refugees from Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a tragic story of loss of life and inhumane treatment of people simply on the basis of being the wrong nationality and the wrong color. These forced immobilities are in stark contrast to the ease of movement of primarily white tourists and their cruise ships through the Caribbean, not to mention the easy movement of Northern capital through “offshore” banks and tax havens.
For many Caribbean countries, tourism is a key economic sector, bringing in a large proportion of gross domestic product and much-needed foreign direct investment. Tourist economies often protect the liberties of vacationers at the expense of local, largely non-white citizenries, who are excluded from their own public beaches, policed out of gated resorts, and priced out of access to basic resources such as clean water, electricity and sewage systems. Foreign whites often own the hotel chains, the most valuable coastal land and the cruise lines with few of the profits being returned locally. Caribbean states, meanwhile, pressure their citizenry to be productive, to tighten their belts, to buy local goods and to present a smiling face to the tourists.
As in the colonial period, Caribbean citizenship has come to rest on a discourse of respectability grounded in self-discipline, an achievement orientation and fire-and-brimstone moral strictures. This is promulgated both as a response to decadent influences from outside and as a way of promoting tourism and attracting investors.7 Yet contradictory forces compel some people to sell themselves as “embodied commodities”; black or brown bodies offer white tourists a kind of exotic experience of the Caribbean, whether as so-called “Rent-a-Dreads,” participants in holiday “romance” flings or outright sex workers.8 Meanwhile, global racial inequalities also allow new birth control devices to be unsafely tested on poor black women in countries like Haiti, while the boom in sex tourism lures growing numbers of tourists to dabble in easily affordable interracial sex.9
A differential valuing of white and black bodies is one of the most enduring legacies of slavery. And it manifests itself in the global economy’s devaluation of black lives, the international community’s undermining of black citizenship and the Euro-American marginalization of the disinherited descendants of Africa.
Both despite and because of these persistent racial divides, the people of the Caribbean travel the world, inventing a new kind of transnational citizenship and struggling against new forms of social and political exclusion and economic exploitation. Many people of the modern Caribbean are deeply enmeshed in processes of globalization. Some are informal commercial importers carrying goods from Miami or New York to re-sell in Kingston or Montego Bay, “pink-collar” workers in the global informatics industry or domestic workers in the United States sending remittances to families back home. The Caribbean diaspora has become a global context for re-making both freedom and inequality in what Paul Gilroy calls “outer-national” forms: forms that are not simply “international” but that challenge and surpass national boundaries by creating solidarities independent of national location or formal citizenship.
Despite the setbacks their struggles have endured and the continuing insecurities generated by ongoing market restructuring, Caribbean people continue to carry the ember of the Haitian Revolution and its vision of self-liberation. Versed in labor struggles and political contention, many Caribbean migrants who had to leave their homelands throughout the twentieth century carried with them the flame of radicalism, and they contributed to the rekindling of struggles for black civil and political rights in the United States, in Africa and even in Europe. From Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to the first Pan-African Congress, from the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to the activists of the U.S. civil rights movement, from the reggae protest songs of Bob Marley to the power of hip-hop culture, Caribbean leaders, activists and artists have played a crucial part in advancing claims for universal freedom and human equality. With incredible outbursts of creativity, Caribbean literature has also contributed to the global conversation on peace, justice and freedom.10
Caribbean history teaches us the importance of not accepting the world the way we find it, making it ours by reclaiming our place in it. This history challenges us to re-make the institutions that govern our lives in a way that supports the dignity and humanity of all people. It challenges us to reach out to each other and build solidarities to resist the machinery of racial differentiation and de-democratization that threatens still to roll back two centuries of freedom.
These imperatives are all the more urgent today as “democracy” and “liberation” are pressed into service as justifications for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The abuse of these ideals is an affront to those who fought for them from the underside of history, against the entrenched interests and armies of supposedly civilized liberal democracies. The histories of the slaves and their descendants, who bequeathed to us a more expansive and radical vision of global equality and freedom, serve to remind us that democratization and liberation seldom come from the guns or goodwill of the powerful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Sheller is a senior lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Macmillan Caribbean, 2000); Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to Zombies (Routledge, 2003); and Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (Routledge, 2004).
NOTES
This article is indebted to the historical and anthropological work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Jean Besson, Laurent Dubois, Ada Ferrer, Carla Freeman, Aline Helg, Thomas Holt, Rebecca Scott, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Gina Ulysse and many others.
1. Haiti’s denuded landscape is largely the result of disastrous neoliberal economic policies that opened its agricultural markets, impoverishing rural families and leaving them little recourse other than cutting vegetation for sale as charcoal. The barren and eroded mountainsides make the country especially vulnerable to floods and landslides. The flood disaster was of human manufacture and “unnatural” in this sense.
2. I follow Michael Omi and Howard Winant who define “racial formation” as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 55.
3. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
4. Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).
5. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London and Oxford: Macmillan, 2000).
6. See Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, which deals with this.
7. Critics such as M. Jacqui Alexander have noted that states like Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas insist on a deeply regulatory heterosexual citizenship, which is written into law and “normalized” through the criminalization of lesbians, gays and prostitutes. Homophobia exists not only in popular music, but also in Sunday sermons and in parliamentary chambers, and infringes on equal rights and protection for all. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practices in the Bahamas Tourist Economy,” in M.J. Alexander and C. T. Mohanty eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997).
8. Jacqueline Sanchez-Taylor, “Tourism and ‘Embodied’ Commodities: Sex Tourism in the Caribbean” in S. Clift and S. Carter eds., Tourism and Sex (London and New York: Pinter, 1999).
9. Rosanne Auguste, “Health, Population and Family Planning,” Roots, 1, 3, 1995; M. Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
10. There has been a growing canonization of classics of Caribbean literature and poetry, with the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to St. Lucian Derek Walcott in 1992, and Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul in 2001, and the Prix Goncourt to Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau in 1993. There is renewed attention to authors such as Claude McKay, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Caryl Phillips, Maryse Conde, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Bosch and diaspora writers like Edwidge Danticat, to name but a few. These writers have contributed to the forging of Caribbean identities, public voices, and participation in a global conversation about the past, present and future of the region.
