Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 87

The Global Debt to Blackness: What We Must Learn from Haiti

Aug 26, 2022

Happy Friday family —

Tuesday was International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, celebrated on the 23rd to commemorate the start of the Haitian revolution. Today’s Opinion section discusses the significance of Haiti and the intersection of our respective calls for reparations.

Some news you might want to peruse...

President Biden released his plan to cancel a portion of student debt. What does that mean for the racial wealth gap?

Providence’s Reparations Commission delivered a report with recommendations for how the city should advance reparations. The recommendations include funding for home repairs, financial literacy programs, and increasing aid to Black and Indigenous organizations.

In 2021, a branch of the Jesuit church pledged to raise $100 million for a reconciliation effort with the descendants of people once enslaved by the Catholic church. A new letter penned by the leader of the descendant group calls out the church for lagging on its promise.

The New York Times published a stunning piece on Michael K. Williams, his legacy, and the impact of his work in Brooklyn.

Voters in five states will have the chance to amend state constitutions allowing enslaved and involuntary servitude for incarcerated individuals.

Dr. Amara Enyia, the Manger for Policy and Research at the Movement for Black Lives, penned an op-ed arguing that reparations must be seen as more than just monetary payments.

Vanuatu, an island country between Australia and Fiji, plans to sue countries like the U.S. for climate reparations.

More anti-history attacks. A Texas school district is restricting how teachers talk about race and gender. The New York Times published an amazing interactive to show what is being taught in history classes.

More calls to endow Black-led organizations.

With radical love,
Trevor

Opinion

Every year on August 23rd, the world celebrates International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. The 23rd is significant as it marks the start of the Haitian Revolution, the only rebellion of enslaved Africans during the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade that successfully led to self-governance.

Led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the uprising lasted for 13 years between 1791 to 1804 and is regarded as one of the most significant challenges to European settler colonialism in the New World.

As the movement for reparations in the United States continues to gain traction, what might we learn from the history of Haiti?

Reconsidering Reparations

In the very first sentences of his latest book, Olefemi Taiwo argues that “injustice and oppression are global in scale because Trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism built the world we live in. If we want reparations, we should be thinking more broadly about how to remake the world system.”

Truer words have never been written.

We tend here in the United States to place ourselves at the center of all issues. But as Taiwo alludes, the fight for reparations in the United States is inherently tied to the fight for reparations globally.

It was, after all, Blackness that served as the basis of enslavement in the logic of transnational policies and norms. This, and a host of other factors, have entrenched anti-Black stereotypes and ensured the destabilized position of Black populations globally.

Should we then see reparations as both a domestic and international policy issue?

Haiti’s Reparations to France

Earlier this year, the New York Times published a deeply researched series titled ‘The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers.” The reporters recount how France forced Haitians to pay their former enslavers 150 million francs, estimated to total $21 billion in today’s dollars.

While the billions that Haiti has paid to France over the years is undoubtedly the most significant factor in the issues, the country faces today. The New York Times headline lets the United States off the hook for its role in further subjugating the Haitian people after it gained its independence from France.

While Haiti became the first and only independent country founded by formerly enslaved people, it also became the first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid reparations to those that enslaved them.

Source: New York Times

According to the Haitian historian Beaubran Ardouin the first payment of 30 million francs was six times Haiti’s entire revenue that year.

Source: New York Times

Over the course of 70 years, Haiti paid $112 million francs, or about $560 million in today’s dollars, according to the New York Times. France, then engaged in what can only be described as neocolonialism — exerted further economic control over Haiti’s treasury, exemplified by the fact that by 1911, “$2.53 out of every $3 that Haiti earned from coffee taxes went to paying debts held by French investors.”

U.S. Occupation of Haiti

It should go without saying, but, despite its historic nature, the revolution did not bring an end to global settler colonialism or anti-Blackness. America was very much still a slaveholding nation and refused to recognize Haiti as a legitimate country for decades.

Then in 1915, one of the most racist President’s to hold office, Woodrow Wilson, ordered U.S. Marines to invade Haiti in an occupation that lasted 19 years.

Source: Mary A. Renda ‘Military Occupation & the Culture of U.S. Imperialism

A report commissioned by the NAACP to investigate the conditions in Haiti under U.S. military rule found “Haiti’s political classes muzzled, its assembly deprived of power, and its economy wrested away from Haitian control.”

U.S. marines bragged of torturing and murdering Haitians and hunting Haitian guerilla soldiers for sport. In all accounts, it was as close to a return to slavery under French rule.

The report named a single institution and, more specifically, a specific individual within this institution as responsible for the harm the U.S. was waging; the National City Bank of New York and its vice president Roger Leslie Farnham.

Dr. James Hudson, a UCLA historian and author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, argues that “for Farnham and National City, their interest in Haiti was not simply about the extension of markets and the search or new frontiers for U.S. finance capital — their interest in Haiti was in the establishment and reproduction of white supremacy.”

An argument that can be backed by the following statement by Farnham in a public statement during a 1922 congressional investigation into U.S. involvement in Haiti:

“I think the Haitian can be taught to become a good and efficient laborer. If let alone by the military chiefs, he is as peaceful as a child, and as harmless. In fact, today they are nothing by grown up children, ignorant of all agricultural methods and they know nothing of machinery. They must be taught.”

The National City Bank, with the backing of President Woodrow Wilson and the State Department, would go on to set the terms of racial capitalism and vision for control over Haiti.

In 1915, Farnham called on the U.S. State Department to provide military support to transport most of the Haitian government’s monetary reserve back to the United States. According to the New York Times, “marines strolled into Haiti’s national bank and walked out with $500,000 in gold (worth $11 million today) — their loot was in New York within days.”

The National City Bank is now globally known as Citibank — a firm with over 2,000 branches in 19 countries and assets of over $2 trillion dollars.

Reparations: A Worldmaking Process

I saw all of this to make the point that the poverty that Haiti has historically faced is tied to both French and American imperialism.

A claim for reparations here in the United States must be situated within the broader context of settler colonialism and imperialism and the call to bring all former and current colonial powers to account. These processes require not only the extraction of value in the land but also some formation of slavery and/or labor exploitation.

Doing this, and viewing reparations as the construction project which Taiwo calls for, might then bring forth the new world that we are so desperately in need of.