Haiti was the only American nation born of a successful slave revolution

Evidence

In establishing their own nation, Black rebels had accomplished what the scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot has described as the “unthinkable.” After all, Haiti became the first and only country in the Americas where enslaved Africans threw off their shackles, fought for their freedom, defeated European powers, established their own nation, and pledged to defend their freedom and independence until their “last breath.” The Haitian act of independence radically upended the basic premise of white supremacy upon which slavery rested, and asserted Black people’s fundamental human rights to liberty and self-governance. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 373

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Trouillot’s ‘Silencing the Past’ argument about the unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution and to the reader’s case-study interest in how historical controversy shapes what counts as thinkable.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘unthinkable’ — a historical event that cannot be absorbed because it violates the premises of the dominant frame.