Enslaved people coined the colonial racial vocabulary that structured Saint-Domingue’s hierarchy

Evidence

The creoles of Saint-Domingue, after all, were a tiny minority surrounded by a vast population with their own interests and interpretations of the world. The enslaved were “omnipresent and attentive observers” who had an astute sense of the divisions among their oppressors and developed a rich vocabulary to describe it. They referred to the newly arrived whites who often served as their overseers as moutons France—French sheep. (The term would be used later to refer to the French troops that arrived, and were decimated, in 1802.) They coined the term petit blancs—little whites—to refer to those who did not own land, contrasting them to the grand blancs (big whites), also called Blancs blancs, or “White whites,” whose ownership of property made them true whites. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 131

Categorization

• XREF: The enslaved coining ‘petit blancs’ and ‘grand blancs’ parallels the class/status signaling in the Immodesty article’s moral panics as identity markers.
• QUESTION: The slaves’ vocabulary being ‘adopted by everyone’ — did this include the enslaved naming white subcategories only for strategic insight, or as genuine class analysis?
• DEFINE: Defines the terms moutons France, petit blancs, and grand blancs/Blancs blancs with their class content.
• CANDY: That slaves nicknamed newly-arrived French overseers ‘French sheep’ — and the label later migrated to the decimated 1802 troops — is a memorable tidbit.