French language practices legitimize exclusion of Haiti’s Creole-speaking lower class from government

Evidence

Haiti exists in contradistinction to the Spanish Creole reality. There, Creole identity is firmly embodied in the representations and practices of the black lower class. This is reflected in the close association between nationalist “noiriste” ideology and the black Creole-speaking population. The latter comprises the overwhelming majority in the country. The black lower class has become distinguished, both linguistically and culturally, from the Francophile middle and upper classes. These latter contain both mulattos (in the vast majority) and blacks (Trouillot, 1990:109-36). The distinction between Creole and Francophile forms in representation and practice is somewhat inchoate. Middleand upper-class Haitians traverse the boundaries between the two. The members of the Francophile elite do employ the popular cultural forms of the Creolespeaking black lower class in their everyday associations with the latter. At the same time, they reserve the more European forms, including the use of the French language, in their formal relationships and for government administration. French practices are employed to legitimize and justify the exclusion of lower-class participation in government in an identical manner that European forms were employed under colonialism. The institutionalization of French practices has become the basis of middle class-symbolic power (Trouillot, 1990:109-36). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3212

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Creole/Francophile social binary in Haiti and how class distinction maps onto it.
• XREF: Parallels postcolonial language-politics in places like Northern Ireland or Belgium — a house argument about how an ex-colonial language becomes a class gatekeeping mechanism.