Undated: (Mulatto, the Colonial Caste Category for People of Mixed African and European Ancestry, Whose Intermediate Social Position Between White Planters a…

Undated: (Mulatto, the Colonial Caste Category for People of Mixed African and European Ancestry, Whose Intermediate Social Position Between White Planters and the Enslaved Majority Became the Fault Line of Haitian Politics From Independence Through the Duvalier Era): The word mulatto derives from the Spanish mula, meaning mule, the offspring of a horse and a donkey, and that etymology tells you exactly how the colonial mind conceived of mixed-race people: as a biological category defined by the logic of animal husbandry. In eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, mulattos were typically the children of white male plantation owners and enslaved Black women. They occupied a painful middle position: granted social and economic privileges denied to the enslaved, but shut out of the political rights reserved for whites. Many were sent to France for education by their fathers. During the Revolution, many mulattos fought alongside Black revolutionaries for independence, but the alliance was always under strain. After 1804, mulattos became the nucleus of Haiti’s small but powerful elite, French-speaking, Catholic, and oriented toward European cultural models. That class position generated deep resentment among the Black majority, resentment that fueled the noiriste political movement in the twentieth century and that François Duvalier exploited with devastating effectiveness. Skin color in Haiti has never been merely personal. It is the residue of a caste system invented by slaveholders that the nation has been struggling to dismantle ever since.