Saint-Domingue’s racial categories were too unstable to reliably distinguish people of African ancestry

Evidence

Moreau sought to order this world by producing a phantasmagoric racial cosmology: a “scientific” formula based on the division of individuals into 128 parts, all either European or African, with different combinations creating different racial identities. He wrote that even after several generations in families that appeared white, there might appear “indiscreet apparitions of an African character” that belied the family’s origin, and that even if certain “quadroons” were whiter than a Spaniard or Italian “no one would confuse them.” But his certainty in racial identification was mis- 70 av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d placed. Families like that of Raimond had long “passed” as white before the latter half of the eighteenth century, and there was often no way to distinguish those with African ancestry from those without. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 249

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to racial ‘passing’ literature and to James Scott’s work on how classification systems fail against messy social reality.

Related

• Saint-Domingue’s racial hierarchy was internally contradictory and internally divided. (similarity 0.87)
• Saint-Domingue’s administrators created racial categories by relabeling existing families as non-white (similarity 0.83)
• Saint-Domingue’s racial law contradicted its pervasive interracial family ties. (similarity 0.81)
• Saint-Domingue’s workforce became violently racialized within a century (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Saint-Domingue’s workforce became violently racialized within a century #expands (0.30)