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Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
A successful revolution that’s constantly being punished for that success.
Highlights
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Haiti is the birthplace of the only successful slave-led revolt in the “New” or “Western” world. Like everywhere else in this hemisphere, enslaved Haitians asked for their freedom, agitated for it, and were willing to negotiate terms with the enslavers for their emancipation. Unlike everywhere else, when those negotiations, and political dealings resulted in nothing more than the continuation of permanent chattel slavery, Haitians stopped talking and started rebelling**—**and by 1804 had liberated themselves from their suddenly-not-so-superior captors
✏️ Successful revolution… against all odds. 🔗 View Highlight
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White people have never forgiven us for being free. The French demanded “reparations” from the Haitians for taking their property—that property being the formerly enslaved Haitians themselves—as the price for their freedom. And the Americans, under the presidency of inveterate slaver Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize Haiti or its independence, and imposed a trade embargo on the fledgling nation.
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By the 1900s, America switched to an imperial model, forcibly occupying the country in the 1920s and ‘30s and then continuing to meddle in Haiti’s internal politics by propping up regime after brutal regime.
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It was the first modern country to establish a government and society that was not based on race or status at birth.
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Haiti and Haitians, even after all this time, remain a threat to the essential narrative of white supremacy: it’s a country that exists without appeals to whiteness. It didn’t ask for white permission. It doesn’t exist because whites want it to.