Early Haitian citizenship was a creedal identity rather than a racial one.

Evidence

In the wake of the massacres, Dessalines explained that a “handful of whites” who had “professed” the right “religion”—the rejection of slavery—were under his personal protection. He granted them naturalization papers that welcomed them “among the children of Haiti.” In order to receive the papers the whites had to take an oath renouncing France and accepting the laws of their new land. Many of those who were naturalized were white women, presumably widows, who were allowed to retain their property. Their special status was solidified in the constitution proclaimed in 1805. In it Dessalines declared that “no white, no matter what his nation,” could come to Haiti as “master or property owner,” but he exempted those who had been naturalized. He also singled out two special groups who were not included in the ban: the Poles who had deserted or remained in the colony after the evacuation, and a group of Germans who had been settled in the colony before the revolution. The constitution went on to declare that, in the interest of eliminating all distinctions of “color” in the nation, all Haitians would henceforth be known as “black.” Haiti was a black nation, but those who embraced its creed of rejecting France and the slavery it had propagated were welcome to change their official identity and become a part of it, and therefore of the black race. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1058

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Haitian national identity as creed-based anti-French/anti-slavery adhesion, not phenotype — a striking inversion of racial citizenship.
• XREF: Contrasts sharply with later Haiti’s color hierarchies and 20th-century Noirisme, and with the US and French racial citizenship of the same era.
• SEED: Angle: how anti-racist nations still naturalize race as a category of belonging — Dessalines making everyone ‘black’ prefigures later color-blind-turned-racial nation-building.