Privilege in Haiti: Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation-State in the Americas

This ethnography, accepted for a doctorate in anthropology at the City University of New York in May 2015, asks who the elites are in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere and whether they divide along a line that opposes Blackness to Whiteness or Mulattoness. It studies the nation's middle classes educated in Western ways and analyzes social relations among privileged national subjects within and across the boundaries of color. Its central thesis is the material unity in privilege of Haiti's colorist fragments.

Noirisme, the strain of black nationalism that became hegemonic under François Duvalier in the 1960s, is in marked retreat, while mulatto nationalism lapsed into irrelevance around the middle of the 20th century. The study argues that through competencies in Western cultures the fragments recover cohesion in reproducing privilege, at the expense of the interests of the monolingual Creole-speaking majority. The work is supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.