How can my movement confront the lingering racial prejudices that the Haitian Revolution inadvertently reinforced, while still honoring its revolutionary challenge to racial hierarchy and slavery?
The slaveholders’ nightmare still stalks the global imagination: Black liberation deemed synonymous with chaos. Your task is to reverse that psychic scar. Begin by seizing narrative space. Host “Night of Fire” gatherings where musicians, historians and descendants recite eyewitness accounts alongside abolitionist poetry, explicitly naming how colonists magnified violence to excuse white supremacy. Livestream, subtitle, translate; let the world hear the revolution in its own cadence, not through colonial testimony.
From stories, move to structures. Launch a reparations demand that links the ransom France extorted from Haiti to present racial wealth gaps. Each teach-in should funnel signatures toward a transnational petition aimed at Paris, while local chapters lobby school boards to insert the Haitian Constitution of 1805 into curricula. When institutions stall, stage symbolic embargo disruptions: one-day boycotts of French luxury goods, turning consumer abstention into historical reckoning.
Finally, reclaim fear itself. Choreograph a torchlit procession ending in a sunrise planting of breadfruit saplings—life where slaveholders saw only death. The ritual declares that emancipation births nourishment, not terror, and invites observers to step into the circle.
Which myth that still haunts your community are you ready to set ablaze next?
What unspoken stories or collective memories in our movement's history might we need to set ablaze—challenging lingering myths that sustain racial hierarchies, so we can forge a deeper, more honest foundation for our revolutionary work?
Every movement inherits ghosts. Some wear the mask of respectability, whispering that liberation must appear polite to merit legitimacy. Others retell abolition as a gift bestowed by enlightened whites, scrubbing out maroon revolts and women like Sanité Bélair whose machete work birthed the phrase “liberty or death.” We still tiptoe around colorism, the plantation’s internal caste, pretending melanin gradations no longer decide who speaks for the struggle. The myth of non-violent purity also lingers, erasing the truth that Haiti’s freedom arrived by sword and flame, not petitions. Each silence props up the old hierarchy because what goes unnamed cannot be targeted.
Set these stories ablaze through living archives. Ask elders and frontline organizers for the memories they hesitate to share, audio-record in safe circles, then publish as zines stapled by youth crews. Screen Boots Riley’s films beside colonial propaganda to deconstruct racial optics in real time. Convene “truth bonfires” where participants write a cherished but false tale on paper, burn it, and speak the missing facts aloud. The spectacle turns confession into communal reprogramming, attacking myth at the root of collective imagination.
Which silenced ancestor or suppressed tactic, once voiced, could detonate a fresh surge of emancipatory power where you stand?