Darwinian Performance
Chandler Armstrong
Soc 560
waned, the race phenotype remained and persists into current times where it remains
evident in racial relations and identities. The racial phenotype shaped the environment
making it prime for conflict by allowing large, but fractured, classes of free blacks and
mulattos to emerge. Tension and a complete lack of solid alliance between any of the
races embroiled the antagonism in the colonies ever further. Affranchise were coopted by
both slaves and planters. They were also the sole members of the marechaussee; a militia
tasked with tracking marronage, or runaway slaves. With drafting only blacks into the
marechaussee, race relations between mulattos, affranchise, and slaves were further
fractured and tension elevated. The mulattos typically despised both their European and
African ancestry. The slaves had nothing to lose from revolt and were feared by
Affranchise, mulatto, and European alike. The Europeans were generally united by racial
prejudice. However even whites were differentiated as grand blancs and petit blancs
(Fick, 1990; Hienl et al, 1978). From two superfluous biological races and a simple rule
had evolved a kaleidoscope of identity and meaning in Haiti. This is the cultural
phenotype for race in that nation.
A different phenotype for race relations may have led to a completely different
outcome on Haiti. The American phenotype of hypodescent allowed for no flexibility in
racial identity or relations; this was no less a trumping of biology by ideology than in
Haiti though. But it is this flexibility in Haiti which allowed tension to grow and explode
into open conflict. A different racial phenotpe, such as the American one, may have led
to a very different Haitian history.
Conclusion
Convention