From François Duvalier to Jean-Bertrand Aristide: The Declining Significance of Color Politics in Haiti

Abstract

In this chapter I will argue that one of the major casualties in the struggle against dictatorship and for a democratic alternative in Haiti since the 1980s has been the interpretation of Haiti’s political history as a struggle for power between the mulatto and black factions of the dominant class rather than a conflict between this factionalized dominant class and the subordinate classes whose exploitation they relied upon for their wellbeing. The former argument has been most compellingly defended by David Nicholls, whose seminal work From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Color and National Independence in Haiti remains essential reading for all serious students of Haitian history. Much of Haiti’s postindependence history, Nicholls argued, “must be seen as a struggle between a mulatto, city-based, commercial elite, and a black, rural and military elite” (1979, p. 8). These two elites, moreover, do not constitute two distinct classes but are part of a single but factionalized class. In other words, Haitian history has been mostly an intra-class rather than an interclass conflict. However, Nicholls suggests, during the US occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, which favored the mulatto faction, an urban working class and a small but important black middle class emerged and henceforth began to play a significant role in Haitian politics.