The Racist Sunglasses Theory of Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Did colonial white people in French Haiti, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution in 1789, wear special eyewear that obscured the potential for independent action of colonial slaves? Did this eyewear, worn exclusively by whites, blind the wearer to the possibility that slaves could participate in either malevolent or benevolent conduct? Was this eyewear so powerful that, when worn, it blinded the wearer to the potential that a hand of labor – pressed to the sugar cane or the coffee plant- could ever become a hand of aggressive violence? According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “yes.” A tower of theory still stands tall in Haitian historical scholarship, but I, a skeptical observer, declare The Theory of Racist Blindness to be The Racist Sunglasses Theory. To Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), French colonial whites were self-deluded into a false sense of security, believing the overwhelming majority of Haiti’s colonial population – enslaved blacks- could never take independent action, least of all coordinated revolution. The crux of Trouillot’s argument, in the opening of Chapter 3, is supported by a handful of quotations (whose authenticity is not in doubt) revealing an innocent belief of selected whites that Haiti’s slaves were too peaceful to rebel. From these selective quotations, a tower of theory is hastily constructed: self-emancipation of slaves was “unthinkable” to whites. The tower rests on a shaky foundation: could these selective excerpts (among them the thoughts of the French colonial La Barre) have revealed an isolated innocence or foolishness of particular whites, whose published thoughts may have been unrepresentative of general white opinion? No alternative interpretations are pursued. To Trouillot, whites were simply wearing racist sunglasses. The tower of Trouillot’s theory is embellished as the chapter proceeds. In defiance of evidence, with weak support, Trouillot presumes to know the minds of colonial whites ( every last one of them). The African, in the imagined mind of the colonial white, could never “envision freedom.” If Michel-Rolph Trouillot had only opened Code Des Colons De Saint Domingue, the record of laws regulating French colonial Haiti (from its founding to the year 1789), this tower of nonsense would have collapsed before it could reach even higher into the skies of over-reaching presumption. The colonial white administration never wore sunglasses that magically obscured the potential of slave rebellion: slave movement was regulated, slave ownership was prescribed, and precautions were routinely taken to limit the independence of slaves. Was slave rebellion “unthinkable” to the royal French government when, in June of 1736, masters of slaves were proscribed from freeing their human property without the written permission of the colonial governor? Was slave rebellion “unthinkable” when the Council of Cap Francois, in 1738, forbade the possession of chemical substances, under penalty of death, in the hands of slaves? Was independent action of colonial slaves “unthinkable” in 1778, when a royal ordinance forbade the transportation of slaves in France without strict prior registration of these individuals? It’s an interesting touch of Trouillot, as with so many Haiti scholars, to reduce independent forces to a blur of “white” colonial power. Rarely does he distinguish between laws of the King, those regulations of colonial assemblies, and the conduct of landless whites of lesser influence. Cracks in the Tower of Trouillot The white man simply did not understand the aspirations of the African slave for freedom. This is the conceit of Trouillot, as developed in the section “Prelude to the News: The Failure of Categories.” So fervent is the author to underline the slave-tolerant hypocrisies of Western liberals (think:Thomas Jefferson), so avid is he to deplore the complacency of 18th century Europeans in the face of slavery, so righteous is he to indicate the racialist vocabulary in which the pens of these men were steeped, that Trouillot conveniently neglects the voice of French Haiti’s most prominent free man of color, Julien Raymond. This is a convenient omission for Trouillot. When the published words of this non-white slavemaster are disclosed, it appears that even free people of color resisted slave emancipation with the same ferocity of reaction and intolerance as their white counterparts. Raymond speaks loudly in Chapter 2 of The Devil Lives in Haiti, and I here reproduce some of his most memorable defenses of the slave system that had made him as rich as any white colonial of Saint Domingue. This free man of color abhorred the slave insurrection unfolding before his eyes, and he addressed the rebel slaves in the following terms: The submission to laws, and the good order which must result from it, are the only things that the nation demands to unite you to the benefits that the nation is preparing. Return promptly to good order, lost men, and wait in respectful silence for the laws which must regenerate you. If only Trouillot had opened the published proclamation of Raymond, the author of Silencing The Past would have discovered the self-deluded elitism of this colored prince of slaveholding: How many of you would not be happier than them? You, situated under a sky forever pure; You, having never to suffer the rigors of winter, with all the miseries and needs that accompany it; You, lastly, who cultivate with half the trouble a land that produces for you a hundred times what they cultivate [in France]. If self-delusion is the theme of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s tower of theory, the self-delusion of free people of color, such as Julien Raymond, enjoys convenient inattention. The Rhetorical Twister Game of Trouillot If a white man referred in a figurative sense to colonial oppression as “slavery,” such as Diderot did when he celebrated the American rebellion against King George III, this means he was blind to the racialized slavery of the European empires. If the French national anthem, The Marseillaise, referred to Old Regime France as a time of figurative slavery, this also means Europeans could not tell the difference between the slavery