[I]t is also true that, in colonies like Saint Domingue, the “people of color” – emancipated slaves and their descendants – constituted a major political and social force (in 1789 there were 30,000 whites and an equal number of people of color to about 500,000 slaves). Now, the majority of these free men of color were “mulattos,” who sometimes possessed plantation wealth and hundreds of slaves of their own. Moreover, the colonial administration preferred to recruit from among these mulattos when staffing the Maréchaussée – a police force that specialized in verifying the identity of slaves and tracking runaways in order to discourage any possible alliance between mulattos and
négres: dividing to conquer all the better… The mulatto is a profoundly ambiguous colonial figure, indeed the traitor par excellence. To be “mixed” means being condemned to betray at least one of one’s parents, either the one from the masters’ side or the one from among those enslaved. And there is always this lingering odor of bastardy that attaches to your skin, because in a segregationist society being mixed means being condemned to betray at least one of one’s parents, either the one from the masters’ side or the one from among those enslaved. And there is always this lingering odor of bastardy that attaches to your skin, because in a segregationist society being mixed means that you can be only the accursed fruit of rape or of an illicit love.
Thus, in order to defend the color line, that is, the line of demarcation between whites and blacks, plantation society established a correspondence between the chromatic scale and the social scale. This was done in such a way that access to valorized duties and status (domestic servant, artisan, or cook), access to a semblance of education, and even the possibility of emancipation depended on the degree to which one’s skin was white, in other words on the “purity” of one’s skin. In the eyes of the newly emergent colonial medicine, the norm of healthy humanity was effectively incarnated in the white male, with respect to whom the woman and the indigenous person (whether black or Native American) could only be unhealthy, impure, pathogenic bodies.[i] Because of the disturbance that it introduces into the social–racial order of the slave system, métissage – being of mixed race – represented a kind of pollution, a formidable political and biological peril that must be contained at all costs.[ii] This is what led the colonies to elaborate new kinds of taxonomies, subtle ways of calculating “the mixture of whites with négres.”[iii] Thus Moreau de Saint-Méry conceived of each individual as the product of 128 parts of “blood.” A mulatto, for example, would have sixty-four “white” parts and sixty-four “black” parts. On the strength of this axiom, people of color could be classified into thirteen categories: quadroon, mamelouc, griffe (“blend”), and so on. Ubuesque as this mathematics of colors might seem today, it nevertheless offered an efficient technology for identifying and sorting people, since it allowed free persons of color to be kept in a subaltern position through the simple application of a norm. Starting in the 1760s, therefore, thousands of people previously considered white were reclassified by the colonial administration of Saint Domingue as mulattos or as quadroons, which automatically denied them access to official positions, inheritances, education, professions, and even to certain types of clothing. This reflected an obsession with any possible confusion between the “mixed-blood” and the white.
As for the “white,” still a unified body, it could have only one name. By contrast with blackness, which shifts as often as a lie, whiteness is as unchanging as the truth. In the end, the color line is diffracted into a vast range of nuanced “black skins”: “cashew,” “caramel,” “raw sugar,” “prune,” peach,” “purple,” “chocolate,” “syrup,” “pistachio,” “ripe banana,” and so on. This inventory of Prévert’s – a sample of the designations employed in Saint Domingue – would be almost mouth-watering if it did not point to a sordid “zoo logic” of evaluating the humanity of human beings by their “lightness.” Whiteness is a sign of chosenness, blackness of malediction. To be of mixed race is a movement of ascension toward the light when one is attached to someone more light-skinned than oneself, a descent into the shadows when one is attached to someone more dark-skinned. In this respect, Malcolm X’s proposals have lost nothing of their sting: one has only to register the popularity, among Africans and their descendants, of “lightening creams” that, although toxic, continue to be viewed as purifying.
We declare slaves to be possessions [meubles] and to enter the community property as such, not to be mortgaged, and to be divided equally among co-inheritors.[iv]
In his pathbreaking analysis in De l’esclavage au salariat (1998), Yann Moulier Boutang shows that the prime mover in the history of capitalism is the freezing in place of a constantly fugitive labor force: the ceaselessly renewed effort to capture the landless peasant, the nomad bohemian, the runaway apprentice, the deserting soldier, the escaped slave, the incorrigible vagabond, everyone who resisted the imposition of discipline. Flight – and, more generally, resistance – is therefore primary in relation to power. Moreover, “one of the primary objects of discipline” (of disciplinary power, exercised in European factories as much as on Creole plantations) “is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique.”[v] Racism is nothing but the chemical agent that fixes the labor capacity of certain human beings when it fixes their color – not only on the surface but also at the greatest depth of their sense of self – as the ultimate truth to which they must submit. Color is fixation, both a shackle and an obsession. As I have already said, all enslavement proceeds from an animalization of human beings. But the reduction of humans to the color of their skin, which is to say their hide, is the properly colonial form of this animalization. Far more than a mere word, négre is the paradigmatic weapon of the chief reducer, the colonist. To every enslaved person tempted by flight, the black codes issue this warning: “you can run, but I will always find you again, no matter where you are… because you wear the mark of the slave, the mark of the beast, the mark of your damnation: a skin as black as your soul, if you even have one… You, my precious, my treasure, my adored ‘possession.’”
Run, nigger, run; de patter-roller catch you
Run, nigger, run, it’s almost day...
Dat nigger run, Dat nigger flew, Dat nigger lost his Sunday shoe.
Dis nigger run, he run his best…[vi]
The cimarrón is a runaway slave, tearing off a servile skin to take on the striated shadow of foliage in his or her mad sprint. His or her liberation comes about from a process of going wild, from an act of immersion in the forest, the sylve (from the Latin noun silva “forest,” which is at the root of our word “savage”) – an act that makes him into a forest creature, a “leaf-being.”[vii] The Businenge – a generic name for the maroons of Guiana – are nothing but “men of the forest,” as the etymology of this name indicates. In fact busi nenge comes from an alteration in the English phrase “bush Negroes.” But in Busitongo, which is the maroon language, nenge means “person,” not “slave” (négre). This detour of meaning, which creatively subverts the colonist’s language, constitutes a retort to the fixation of a defamatory identity in the soul and body of the enslaved person. In choosing to call themselves “Nenge,” the Boni threw the stigma, the insult, right back at the ones who spit on them: from this shameful color, el negro, they wove the flag of their liberation and their reconquered humanity.
Excerpt from “Return of the Maroni (Forest Secession)” in Fugitive, Where Are You Running?, 10-13, Polity Press, 2023.
[i] See Elsa Dorlin’s pathbreaking book La Matrice de la race.
[ii] The anthropologist Mary Douglas shows that phobias related to dirt, impurity, and mixture play the role of a system that symbolically protects social order. See her Purity and Danger.
[iii] Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique…, pp. 71–88.
[iv] Article 44 of the Code Noir promulgated in March 1685 by Louis XIV; see Le Code Noir ou Edit du roy. A properly colonial codification of social relations, racism is the nauseating fruit of the “black codes” of the slavery system; “juridical” codes which rationalized the unjustifiable.
[v] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 218.
[vi] Excerpt from “Run, nigger, run,” an African–American folk song of the 1850s (Louisiana version). For documentation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run,_Nigger,_Run.
[vii] A wild figure in the medieval West that symbolizes the return of fecundating forces in springtime.
