Rigaud rejected the accusation of racism by citing his own black kin and teachers

Evidence

Rigaud denied that his resistance to Louverture was motivated by racism. It was, he insisted, simply a response to the vicious treatment he had suffered at Louverture’s hands. “I have chiefs, but I have no master,” Rigaud wrote, “and never did an irritated and foul-mouthed master treat his slave in a manner as atrocious as I have been treated.” Rigaud noted that he had been born, like “General Toussaint,” to a mother who was a “négresse.” He had a brother who was black whom he had always “obeyed and respected.” He had been educated by a black schoolteacher. All these individuals had always given him orders, and he had always followed them. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 817