White planters rejected free-colored allies because prejudice sustained slavery

Evidence

Raimond was educated, wealthy, and passionate in his struggle against racial discrimination. Starting in the 1780s, he mounted a political struggle on behalf of the free-coloreds of Saint-Domingue by petitioning the head of the Colonial Ministry in Paris. He remained a major political figure through the turbulent years of the Revolution. He was also, in his own way, a despot. Like many of those whose rights he was defending, he owned slaves. His struggle for rights and the stubborn rejection of his proposals by the white planters of Saint-Domingue show both the absurdity and the power of racial prejudice in the colony. Raimond and many other planters had some African ancestry. Economically, culturally, and socially, they and the white planters were in many ways natural allies. Yet white colonists, convinced that slavery could be maintained only through discrimination against free people of color, rejected their requests for political equality. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 214

Categorization

• XREF: This reflexive logic whereby a ruling group treats discrimination as indispensable to its own survival parallels the caste logic described in Things Fall Apart and white-settler dynamics generally — connects to: Slaveholders deliberately sought alliance with Northern white labor on color caste — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 354