Wealth and education made race the only defensible basis for denying free-coloreds citizenship

Evidence

Although there were many limits placed on citizenship during the early years of the Revolution (women, servants, and many poorer men could not vote), the justification for such exclusions—that only those who were financially independent could be politically independent as voters and representatives—could not be applied to the educated and wealthy free men of color petitioning in Paris. The only justification for excluding them was race. For many thinkers influenced by Enlightenment universalism and revolutionary egalitarianism, the “aristocracy of the skin” that the planters were defending was a clear violation of everything the Revolution stood for. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 284

Categorization

• XREF: The phrase ‘aristocracy of the skin’ is a striking inversion of the revolution’s anti-aristocratic rhetoric—worth connecting to later arguments about race and citizenship in other contexts.