Unity in Colorism and Class Ideologies

Class is the terrain on which both the privileged black and the privileged mulatto perform their distinction from Haiti’s poor and culturally marginalized subjects. They share a corpus of class ideologies, which include color ideologies and in aggregate regulate social stratification. Theorizing not-black as effectively the social color of relatively dark-skinned privileged Haitians in everyday life, through literary productions and the ethnographic moment, the chapter maps discursive ways in which bilingual privileged blacks and mulattoes—Western bourgeois subjects—alternately blacken the poor Haitian and distance themselves from social blackness. It ends with a critical reading of the moment in 1960 when noiristes and mulattoes of the privileged classes celebrated the “crowning” of Claudinette Fouchard, a daughter of the mulatto elite, as a “beauty queen” on the global stage. The analysis reveals the transcendent unity of the privileged classes and the externality of the peasantry in that celebration of the nation’s bourgeois pedigree.