“By creating a society in which all people, of all color, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world” p 7

Growing up, I never really knew much about Haiti. I knew that it was in the Caribbean, it was a third world country, and that an earthquake devastated the island a few years ago. Now, I’ve been exposed to the cultural side of Haiti and the Dominican Republic from friends, but I don’t know anything about the history and it’s relevance to America. My parents never taught be because we have no connection to Haiti. But the more I started reading, the more I realized how closely connected the Haitian Revolution is to American history, especially when dealing with race relations and silencing history.  

              In Silencing the Past, Trouillot states, “ As sources fill the historical landscape with their facts, they reduce the room available for other facts.” The importance of an event or figure doesn’t always receive the amount of attention it deserves when it is written about because others overshadow it. In the Americas and Caribbean, “colonization transformed European ethnocentrism into scientific slavery”, creating a culture that will be based on race and class distinctions to determine citizenship. I thought it was interesting how in American history, slave rebellions are rarely mentioned let alone that they have been successful. Yet, the Haitian Revolution was one of the biggest slave rebellions, acknowledging that Blacks are people. Trouillot says, “ to acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibilities that something is wrong with the system” (p 84). 

            This got me thinking why this history was never discussed in the US. Slave rebellions in the US were often kept a secret or described in a way to make whites the victims. This often cause slave owners to become stricter with their slaves so their slaves won’t partake in the rebellion or believe that rebellion will not accomplish anything.  Rebellions grow because the leaders are able to connect to oppressed people through a mob mentality. Because the Haitian Revolution was a success, if the Americans got wind of this, it might give the slaves hope and motivation that they can overthrow power there. I wonder if slaves in America new about this rebellion, mobilizing and the mindset of slaves would have been different. Would whites view slaves as capable beings that can govern themselves-which a justification for slavery was that Blacks were incapable of being “civilized”? If whites viewed Blacks in a different way would stereotypes and perceptions of Blacks be different? No one knows, but it would be nice to get a history that is relevant to all my identifiers except one, American.