Material Unity in Privilege

The chapter explores spatial and temporal dimensions of the unity of privileged Haitians across the boundary of color in the articulation of class reproduction. Among research participants contingently encountered in the field, it draws intersecting diachronic genealogical trajectories that link the Haitian rural elite and urban privilege in Port-au-Prince and the Western metropolis beyond. The chapter delineates a cohesive sociality that encompasses blacks and mulattoes from the middle classes and the economic and political elites in professional relationships, or in friendships forged as children in a genteel neighborhood where they still live. To illustrate cogently the material unity of the two colorized formations of privilege as a modality of class formation, the chapter concludes with an ethnographic moment, in which a prejudiced mulatto entrepreneur enacts the reproduction of his class situation in concert with that of a black peer at the expense of his poor, monolingual, creolophone workers.