Op-Ed: The West owes a centuries-old debt to Haiti (via latimesopinion)
The treatment of Haitian refugees at the U.S. border last month — some chased by horseback agents, others huddled by the thousands under a bridge — is tragic. For reasons that are less obvious, it is also ironic. Although Americans’ centuries-long debt to the Haitian people is untaught in our schools and unacknowledged in our public discourse, the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people created the United States we know today.
Napoleon exclaimed in defeat: “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” Robert Livingston, one of Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators in Paris, was as exuberant as the dictator was dejected. “From this day the United States take their place among powers of the first rank,” he correctly assessed. The impact of the Haitian Revolution was just as dramatic on the other side of the Atlantic, especially for Britain.
The symbolism of Americans corralling Haitian refugees could hardly be more tragic or ironic. Haiti not only bequeathed the world historical events laid out above, but also, with nearly a million enslaved Africans brought to the island after 1680, was one of the premier sites in the development of chattel slavery as an institution in the so-called New World.
Both men saw the prospect of Black freedom in Hispaniola as a source of nightmarish horror that would threaten the tranquility and prosperity of white people by undermining slavery in the United States. And while Jefferson spoke of an expansionist America as an “empire of liberty,” even as slavery spread westward, Haiti’s revolutionary leaders took that very same language and enshrined it in their constitution, immediately giving it universal substance.
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