Haiti

Haiti

Once a French colony populated largely by enslaved Africans and Creoles, Haiti won independence in 1804 when the enslaved population and the colony’s free-blacks and mulattos united to expel European colonial powers. Over the next two centuries, however, scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics repeatedly challenged Haiti’s legitimacy as an independent nation.

For example, in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1853), Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat, cast doubt on the Haitian people’s capacity to govern themselves. Since they had African blood, Gobineau claimed that they were lazy and violent by nature (1915).

In the late nineteenth century, Haiti’s own intellectuals, such as Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911) and Hannibal Price (1841-1893), criticized Gobineau’s ideas, which many Social Darwinists had since adopted. The most impressive response was De l’égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races, 1885), a book by Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), a native anthropologist. Firmin closely analyzed the evidence used by scientists like the French anatomist, Paul Broca (1824-1880), and exposed the absurdity of a racial hierarchy based on ambiguous criteria like skull sizes. Dead men’s “skulls cannot tell us about the great ideas they once held,” he quipped (1885). “[This] is not a science!”

The so-called sciences nonetheless insisted that the Haitian people were barbarous, and thus in 1915, the US government had a pretext to invade and occupy Haiti (Hurbon, 1987). The US instituted a national “Hygiene Service” to combat diseases like syphilis and “cleanse” the country. Discourse about cleansing, however, ultimately led to mass extermination in 1937, when the Dominican military, largely built by the US, tried to massacre every Haitian who had crossed into the Dominican Republic.

The US occupation and the 1937 massacre provoked a nationalist response in Haiti, and native ethnographers, led by Jean Price-Mars (1876-1969), looked to the African customs preserved by Haiti’s peasantry to construct a uniquely-Haitian identity. “Noiriste,” or black nationalist, intellectuals like François Duvalier (1907-1971) took these ideas to an extreme. They agreed with Gobineau on two points, that there were psychological variations between human races and that Africans needed a unique political system unlike democracy in the US and Western Europe (Nicholls, 1971).

Duvalier insisted that Haiti’s unique genetic make-up necessitated “totalitarian humanism,” and when he became president in 1957, he constructed a brutal dictatorship that claimed legitimacy based on the so-called sciences (Smith, 2009). While Duvalier blamed Haiti’s poverty on the country’s mulatto population and French inheritances, his private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, persecuted anyone, black and mulatto, who opposed his authority.

Despite his dependency on a discourse akin to eugenics, Duvalier was largely ambivalent toward sterilization, which many eugenicists advocated in response to a spike in world population in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

In 1971, François Duvalier’s son and successor, Jean-Claude, asked one such physician, Ary Bordes, to work with the US Agency for International Development (AID) to establish the government’s new “Division of Family Hygiene.” When AID asked the Division to carry out indiscriminate sterilizations, however, Bordes strongly opposed the idea.

International discourse about Haiti’s “barbarity” and the impulse to “cleanse” did not go away. In the late 1970s, it reemerged in response to Haitian refugees who sailed to the US in makeshift boats. It became even worse in the early 1980s, when the US medical community mistakenly blamed HIV/AIDS on Haitians (Farmer, 1992).

-Adam M. Silvia

  • Farmer, P. (1992). AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  • Firmin, A. (1885). De l’égalité des races humaines. Paris, France: F. Pichon. Retrieved from http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00093347/00001

  • Gobineau, A. (1915). The Inequality of Human Races. (A. Collins, Trans.) London, United Kingdom: William Heinemann. (Original work published 1853)

  • Hurbon, L. (1987). Le barbare imaginaire. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Éditions Henri Deschamps.

  • Nicholls, D. (1971). Biology and Politics in Haiti. Race & Class 13(2), 203-214.

  • Smith, M.J. (2009). Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Haiti

Once a French colony populated largely by enslaved Africans and Creoles, Haiti won independence in 1804 when the enslaved population and the colony’s free-blacks and mulattos united to expel European colonial powers. Over the next two centuries, however, scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics repeatedly challenged Haiti’s legitimacy as an independent nation.

For example, in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1853), Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat, cast doubt on the Haitian people’s capacity to govern themselves. Since they had African blood, Gobineau claimed that they were lazy and violent by nature (1915).

In the late nineteenth century, Haiti’s own intellectuals, such as Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911) and Hannibal Price (1841-1893), criticized Gobineau’s ideas, which many Social Darwinists had since adopted. The most impressive response was De l’égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races, 1885), a book by Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), a native anthropologist. Firmin closely analyzed the evidence used by scientists like the French anatomist, Paul Broca (1824-1880), and exposed the absurdity of a racial hierarchy based on ambiguous criteria like skull sizes. Dead men’s “skulls cannot tell us about the great ideas they once held,” he quipped (1885). “[This] is not a science!”

The so-called sciences nonetheless insisted that the Haitian people were barbarous, and thus in 1915, the US government had a pretext to invade and occupy Haiti (Hurbon, 1987). The US instituted a national “Hygiene Service” to combat diseases like syphilis and “cleanse” the country. Discourse about cleansing, however, ultimately led to mass extermination in 1937, when the Dominican military, largely built by the US, tried to massacre every Haitian who had crossed into the Dominican Republic.

The US occupation and the 1937 massacre provoked a nationalist response in Haiti, and native ethnographers, led by Jean Price-Mars (1876-1969), looked to the African customs preserved by Haiti’s peasantry to construct a uniquely-Haitian identity. “Noiriste,” or black nationalist, intellectuals like François Duvalier (1907-1971) took these ideas to an extreme. They agreed with Gobineau on two points, that there were psychological variations between human races and that Africans needed a unique political system unlike democracy in the US and Western Europe (Nicholls, 1971).

Duvalier insisted that Haiti’s unique genetic make-up necessitated “totalitarian humanism,” and when he became president in 1957, he constructed a brutal dictatorship that claimed legitimacy based on the so-called sciences (Smith, 2009). While Duvalier blamed Haiti’s poverty on the country’s mulatto population and French inheritances, his private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, persecuted anyone, black and mulatto, who opposed his authority.

Despite his dependency on a discourse akin to eugenics, Duvalier was largely ambivalent toward sterilization, which many eugenicists advocated in response to a spike in world population in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

In 1971, François Duvalier’s son and successor, Jean-Claude, asked one such physician, Ary Bordes, to work with the US Agency for International Development (AID) to establish the government’s new “Division of Family Hygiene.” When AID asked the Division to carry out indiscriminate sterilizations, however, Bordes strongly opposed the idea.

International discourse about Haiti’s “barbarity” and the impulse to “cleanse” did not go away. In the late 1970s, it reemerged in response to Haitian refugees who sailed to the US in makeshift boats. It became even worse in the early 1980s, when the US medical community mistakenly blamed HIV/AIDS on Haitians (Farmer, 1992).

-Adam M. Silvia

  • Farmer, P. (1992). AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  • Firmin, A. (1885). De l’égalité des races humaines. Paris, France: F. Pichon. Retrieved from http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00093347/00001

  • Gobineau, A. (1915). The Inequality of Human Races. (A. Collins, Trans.) London, United Kingdom: William Heinemann. (Original work published 1853)

  • Hurbon, L. (1987). Le barbare imaginaire. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Éditions Henri Deschamps.

  • Nicholls, D. (1971). Biology and Politics in Haiti. Race & Class 13(2), 203-214.

  • Smith, M.J. (2009). Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.