To The Contrary

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

Critical Race Theory.

How, How would you define that?

Because it doesn't seem to have a uniform definition.

Well, what I usually tell students is that it's the legal and juridicial basis of racism in the United States that has its origins in the slave system.

{MUSIC } Hello.

Welcome to To the Contrary, I'm Bonnie Erbe.

For this Black History Month, we turn to two critical topics.

The first is the importance of the Haitian Revolution in black American history.

The second is how government restrictions on the teaching of African-American history, such as those signed into law by Governor DeSantis of Florida, will impact the education of children in Florida.

With us to talk about this is historian and Yale University professor Marlene Daut who teaches black history at Yale University.

Welcome to you, Professor Daut And thank you for making time for us.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right.

First, tell me about the importance of the Haitian Revolution, how it started with slave rebellions and grew from there and why it's so critical to American history and why it's not being taught.

Absolutely.

So the Haitian Revolution refers to a collection of slave revolts and rebellions, military strikes, actually, that take place on the French controlled island of Saint-domingue in the middle of the Caribbean, which is, of course, today Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, shared with what is now the Dominican Republic.

And so this initial revolt and rebellion began in August of 1791, and it's one of the most remarkable events in world history.

Enslaved Africans rose up, set fire to the plantations and really overturned the plantation system that was enriching France based on profits from sugar, from land worked by enslaved individuals.

And when the French essentially tried to kind of quell this rebellion, they sent a series of commissioners and one group of commissioners in August 1793 has to take extraordinary action.

They actually have to abolish slavery on the island at that early date.

And if you recall that France is in kind of revolutionary turmoil in this time period back home, the French metropolitan government does something else that's quite extraordinary.

In February of 1794, they abolished slavery in all of their colonies.

So it seems like the goal of the revolution has been met.

But yet another astonishing event in world history takes place when Napoleon Bonaparte comes to power in France and essentially makes it his mission to bring back slavery.

And he sends a huge expedition to Saint-Domingue as the island was then called to reinstate slavery.

And this is where the revolutionary heroes like Toussaint Louverture more forcefully enter into our frame as they attempt to prevent these forces from reestablishing slavery in the process.

Toussaint Louverture will find himself arrested, deported to France, where he dies cold and alone in a terrible death in a French prison.

But back home on the island, the revolutionaries led by a man named Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

lead the island not just to independence from France, which is what happens on January 1st, 1804, but to the permanent end of slavery and Haiti actually becomes through its Declaration of Independence and its subsequent constitution of 1805, the first modern nation to permanently abolish slavery.

This event is extremely important, not just in world history because of the precedent it sets, but also because Napoleon, you know, kind of feeling the loss of this colony in his pocketbook, is forced to sell the Louisiana territory to President Thomas Jefferson of the United States.

And this almost doubled the size of the United States.

So really leaving out this history is actually to kind of make critical and crucial events in U.S. history have less sense or make less sense.

They need this added historical context, both because of the world significance of the Haitian Revolution and because of the domestic significance here at home in the United States.

So why isn't it part of more what you want to talk in high school and college or both?

Yeah.

So it's starting to be What's interesting is the Haitian Revolution is starting to be taught more.

But for a long time, these events were really passed over in silence.

And I think one of the reasons that it's not taught more, even in progressive contexts, is that teachers themselves are often not instructed in the history of the Haitian Revolution.

And it becomes difficult to talk about and to properly historically contextualize these very, very difficult and violent events that are not about simply black people wanting to kill the people who are enslaving them, but is actually about spreading the goals of freedom and independence and liberty and equality that are mainstays of the age of revolutions in general, including the American Revolution throughout the world.

And it becomes difficult to discuss that in kind of racially charged atmospheres, especially if teachers don't necessarily have the training to be able to deal with the complex emotions that will come forth in students from whatever their background, when they learn the treacherous history of slavery on the island of Saint Domingue where planters practice some of the cruelest punishments in all of the Atlantic world.

And then they will learn the corresponding violence that enslaved individuals felt was necessary to overturn that system.

So it takes a lot of sensitivity, historical contextualization, and really a lot of proper teaching methods to to introduce this to students in a way that will encourage understanding, empathy, and really kind of further the knowledge of the radical aims of the revolution rather than kind of painting it as this kind of fear based event, that that was a sad moment in world history.

How did they communicate?

There were that the slave holders were very strict about making sure that slaves from enslaved persons from different plantations weren't able to talk to each other, that they needed letters of permission to even leave the plantation if they could.

How did they how did they coordinate with each other back then?

They would have.

Often a series of meetings at night, and in fact, it's a series of meetings that take place in the middle of the month of August 1791.

That leads to the formal beginning of the Haitian Revolution, what is called the ceremony at Bois Caiman which is typically written about and understood by historians as a kind of Vodou ceremony, a spiritual gathering where enslaved individuals and their agents so each plantation would send a couple of agents to the meeting to gather the intelligence kind of came together and really said, we outnumber the enslavers.

There were more than 400,000 enslaved individuals on the island.

There were about 20 to 30000 white planters, probably about the same number of free people of color, some of whom were were also planters.

So they really were outnumbered.

And the enslaved gathered together and they spread the information from person to person in this manner by having meetings at night on various plantations until the moment when they found that it was, you know, convenient to strike, which happened in the week of August 23rd of 1791.

And that is how the revolution spread across the colony from there, from the first plantations being set ablaze.

What are the parallels between, for example, the the liberation movement, the revolution in Haiti and Black Lives Matter?

The Haitian Revolution was all about claiming a space for formerly enslaved people who, the vast majority of whom identified as black Africans from the continent of Africa.

An extraordinary number, upwards of 60% of the people enslaved on Saint-Domingue at the time of the revolution had actually been born in Africa and had only been in the colony for about 2 to 3 years.

The death rate is extremely high, such that at the time the revolution started in 1791, the French had forcibly transported nearly 900,000 captive Africans onto the island and only over 400,000 remained.

And that's including the ones who were born there.

So you have this population of people who really remember what it's like to be free.

The memory is fresh and they essentially say we are also human beings and we're standing up for our own work, for our own emancipation.

We're not waiting for anyone to liberate us.

And when you read the documents that emerged out of the Declaration of Haitian Independence, the various constitutions they all start out with, every person is equal under the law, and they mean every person.

And this is really at the heart and core, to my mind, of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is to say black people are equal individuals.

They have dreams and desires all their own.

And those do have to be recognized apart from a sort of broader society that wants to deny that reality.

Are there other things in that Haitian constitution that have moved that much farther forward and and thinking that it came in the beginning of the 19th century or the, you know, very early in civilized history, I would say that that set it apart from other constitutions, including our own.

One of the most remarkable articles in the Constitution of 1805, which builds off of a statement made in the Declaration of Independence, the Haitian Declaration of Independence, is an anti conquest clause.

It essentially says Haitians are concerned with their own sovereignty and business in affairs of their own island, and that conquest abroad is forbidden.

We sort of take it for granted today that one country should not try to take over another country, especially if that is a neighboring country.

But in the early 19th century, of course, hardly any other country believed this, let alone legislated it.

And it's very interesting because at the time of Haitian independence, technically the entire island was in French hands.

So Dessalines was really trying to say, we're just going to concern ourself with consolidating this little island.

And if the rest of the world would kind of leave us alone, we will also leave them alone and we will not export our revolution abroad.

And this is really a very kind of different conception.

It's sometimes students ask me, for example, why didn't they try to, you know, spark revolt and rebellion in the United States?

And one of the most kind of prominent Haitian memoirists, a man named Edwidge Danticat where he wrote a memoir of the Haitian Revolution that was published in 1804.

And he said at the very end to the slaves of all other nations, I want to address to you this history of Dessalines He says you will learn from this great man, essentially how to be free.

But the keys to this liberty are in your own hands.

Why didn't anyone else emulate Haiti?

Haiti was considered by many to be a pariah nation, quote unquote, in the sense of Great Britain, the United States, many other countries.

Denmark, for example, the Netherlands continued to trade with in the 19th century independent Haiti, but they refused to formally recognized patient independence.

And the idea was that the Dutch and the British and certainly the United States government, they thought that if we recognize Haitian sovereignty, we're essentially sanctioning a form of independence and sovereignty that grew out of slave revolt and rebellions.

And then what would prevent enslaved people?

We are enslaving on our own shores that were in our own colonies from doing the same.

And so there was a lot of fear around the language of the Haitian constitutions.

And in fact, on the floor of the U.S. Congress under the presidency of Monroe, for example, earlier under Madison, they would say we cannot recognize Haitian independence because what would happen in our southern states here, we cannot continue.

Some people even said we can't continue to trade with Haiti because that is due to de facto recognized Haitian independence.

So these debates were ongoing and it takes a really long time for the rest of the world to essentially catch up.

And in fact, Haitian authors pointed this out.

A Haitian author by the name of Dany Laferriere wrote a book in 1866 called Democracy and Color Prejudice in the United States, in which he said, you know, the mistake that the U.S. government made was not mandating equality and outlawing racism as the Constitution of 1805 also does.

Immediately after the end of the Civil War, because you said that the civil War was in the name of the freedom and liberty of the blacks.

But in the end, did you allow them to become citizens immediately?

Did you outlaw color prejudice?

Did you try to take out the legal elements in the law that allowed for a black person to be considered 3/5 of another person?

Did you literally and forcefully legislate that not just assume that with the Emancipation Proclamation that those ideas would naturally fall away, which of course, we know that they did not.

I'm wondering if any student has ever asked you whether Haiti is a good role model while what it was doing in the 19th century or even the end of the 18th century in terms of its history, in terms of enslaved persons, emancipation of their own power, a tiny island versus all of Europe, you could say.

But today, Haiti is not a good place in terms of how poor most of its people are, how corrupt much of its government has been, how much of that is Haiti's fault or the outside world's fault in your in your view?

And do you think it's a good example because of what's going on there now to emulate to students?

Teaching 19th century Haitian history is difficult, especially its relationship to the present, because there is so much to cover.

France, they had been working throughout actually the 19th century to reconquer Saint-Domingue.

They persisted to call the island by its colonial name, and that meant to bring back slavery.

And they really didn't make that a secret.

And when they figured out that they really weren't going to be able to bring back slavery or to reconquer the island without a great loss of French lives, they cooked up another scheme, and that was to force Haiti to pay an indemnity for their freedom.

The Haitian people ended up paying more than the 110,000 francs to the French government, which has been calculated today with all the interest and fees levied to be about 22 billion U.S. dollars that France would owe to Haiti in restitution.

And we really can't understand Haitian poverty, so to speak, without also understanding the role of this indemnity.

It's the Haitian people who are forced to, through their blood, sweat and tears, pay back this money and not get things like schools, roads, hospitals, not be able to benefit from the industrial revolution, not be able to get the things that taxes would normally pay for.

And then I can't let it pass without mentioning the US occupation from 1915 to 1934, which is widely seen as a watershed moment in Haitian history.

The United States government impounds all Haitian government revenue to protect U.S. fiduciary interests that are caught up in the repayment of fees for this indemnity I just mentioned.

And then after this, they installed a pro-U.S. president.

And this really leads to a terrible sequence of events whereby Haitian sovereignty is essentially in name only.

And this is what has led to the Haiti that most of my students are familiar with today.

All right.

Let's shift now to critical race theory.

How how would you define that?

Because it doesn't seem to have a uniform definition.

Well, what I usually tell students is that it's the legal and juridical basis of racism in the United States that has its origins in the slave system.

So, for example, I mentioned the 3/5 clause that that other persons would be considered 3/5 of a human being.

And it's the idea that that laws like that have a legacy that persists to this day.

And it's a really important legal theory for that reason.

It is not about an interpersonal relationship that one neighbor has with another neighbor.

It's about an entire system of racism that functions independent of who is in charge.

And that is that is extremely important because it means that you can change the pieces and the players, but the system will largely remain the same unless the system is reformed.

And there are many, many attempts to kind of introduce reforms into that legal system.

Affirmative action being one, the Voting Rights Act be another.

And but we see that we still need to go farther.

Equal housing.

We need policing.

We need to go.

We need to take it further.

So the beginnings, we're still at the kind of beginnings of the dismantling of the legalistic framework for racism that exists.

Let's also jump to efforts by states like Florida, which I think is one of around ten states that have passed laws to limit the teaching of African-American history, which would, of course include the Haitian Revolution, but also includes a lot of lynchings of black people, murders of black people, suppression of African-American rights, etc.. Is that still a white backlash to the freedoms attained not just by the the the Haitians against the French government, but also gains that African-Americans have made since the civil rights movement?

It's interesting that at a time when the Haitian Revolution is now being taught more than ever before in a wider variety of contexts than ever before, we also are seeing a backlash against teaching something that the detractors are calling critical race theory, which is completely different from what I describe the one that exists in their minds, but which is really a backlash against teaching black history and African-American history.

And some of the arguments that I've seen for the pushback is it will make white students feel uncomfortable.

It will make them feel guilty.

But I actually wonder if the people making those claims have ever been in the classroom to teach these materials, because in my experience, it's actually the African-American students and the students of color who have the most affective responses to this material.

And they're not angry responses.

They're deeply uncomfortable.

They're sad.

The white students take it in stride and are able to kind of absorb this history and ask poignant questions and don't necessarily feel guilty at all.

And I think part of that is misunderstanding the way that race operates in our society.

The majority of white people actually don't feel guilty.

Research shows, for things that other white people do, whether that's historically or whether it's a crime that's committed in their neighborhood.

But because black people have been made a monolith and have been made representative for each for one another, when a black person commits a crime, other black people will also often feel ashamed or they'll feel like this is going to lead to stereotypes against them.

So I find that my students of color and my black students in particular really absorb this material to heart and sometimes will even shy away from wanting to participate in discussions about slavery and especially lynching because of how deeply uncomfortable it is.

So it's interesting to me that that fragility is supposed to be that this white students are going to somehow, you know, lead an insurrection after learning this material when instead they really just come away with a better understanding of why certain laws have come to pass, why we needed affirmative action, why needed equal rights, housing act, why we need some of the things that seem like, well, should we not need that anymore because we're in the 21st century?

They come away with an understanding, a much better understanding of the contradictions that exist in their own country, not with a condemnation.

There is a movement for reparations, which I think is also making a lot of white people nervous about what that might turn into and how much it might cost.

And in most instances where there's a history of a university such as I think Georgetown University was found to have been built in large part by enslaved persons here in Washington, D.C. and what they have done is opened up scholarships and slots for African-Americans to try to make up to the community.

It so injured and so abused hundreds of years ago.

But to make it up in a way that's not costing taxpayers anything.

And yet there are a lot of white taxpayers saying, well, my family didn't even come here until way after the Civil War.

Why should I have to pay for something that took place that my family was not in any way, shape or form involved in or benefited from?

Certainly, this is an argument that exists, but it is also one that, you know, when when you teach the historical context of these events leading up to the present day, by which I mean kind of the conquest of the Americas institution of chattel slavery, civil rights movement, all of this from a North American context, from the United States context.

Then students can see, especially white students, that they don't have to have participated.

Nobody in their family has to have participated for them to benefit by being here from the legacy of racist institutions that continue to exist in the United States.

For example, in many school systems that are in economically depressed areas, because that's based on the taxes of the people who live in those areas have less opportunity.

You have less resources than schools in areas with where parents have higher socioeconomic statuses.

And we can see that socioeconomic status in the United States directly linked to race can be all the way folded back to the history of slavery in this country and segregation that a lot of people who say my family didn't even come here until this such and such date still benefit from kind of an invisible white privilege, even if the groups that they were part of were not initially considered to be, quote unquote, white.

For example, the Irish, the history of the Irish.

And there are lots of studies and books about how the Irish became determined to be white in the United States and how that benefited the group of people as a whole.

So what I would say is and the other thing I always say is our tax dollars go to things all the time that don't directly benefit us.

So to kind of single out this one element, this one thing is to kind of misread and mis remember the history that leads to reparations being necessary in this way.

And it's one thing, one reform that we haven't tried.

We have tried so many things to get rid of inequality in our society.

And reparations really isn't one of them.

Because just as in the case of Haiti, reparations were initially for enslavers in Washington, D.C. in particular, white people who enslaved other people got reparations for their lost property after emancipation.

So this history is long and complex, and it needs to be taught precisely so that students and lawmakers and educators can understand that it's not a zero sum game.

It's not one group of people get something and another group of people gets nothing.

It's about kind of rebalancing the playing field.

Thank you so much, Professor Daut for joining us.

That is it for this edition of To the Contrary.

Let's keep talking on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter