President Trump ignited an uproar when he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” in a meeting last week. But as shocking as the remarks were, they shouldn’t have been surprising. Trump simply exposed the racist premise that has driven American policy toward Haiti for the entirety of our history.
In July 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette. More than a decade after meeting the French aristocrat during the American Revolution, Jefferson congratulated Lafayette for his leadership of the French Revolution, which was “exterminating the monster aristocracy & . . . its associate monarchy.”
The author of the Declaration of Independence was proud of his old ally, but he had advice for him, too. From the United States, Jefferson had taken notice of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue. He wondered whether France would “ever be able to reduce the blacks” in its most profitable colony. He warned Lafayette that Saint-Domingue would “be lost if not more effectually succoured.”
Jefferson’s letter does not just confirm the hypocrisies of a Founding Father who battled British colonialism and advanced ideas of universal freedom before condemning the Haitian Revolution. It also reveals the pro-slavery and racist foundations of U.S. policy toward Haiti. U.S. politicians and policymakers, then and now, have equated Haiti with slave rebellion and blackness, disaster and poverty. They have advanced imperialism and stifled immigration based on the mischaracterization of Haiti as a “shithole,” simultaneously dangerous and diseased.
In the same moment that Jefferson assured Lafayette that “we as sincerely wish [the] restoration” of Saint-Domingue to France, slaveholder George Washington showed that he also was unsympathetic to the struggle for black freedom in the Caribbean. His administration shipped arms and munitions to French planters struggling to retain power and assured them that the United States would “render every aid in their power . . . to quell ‘the alarming insurrection of Negros.’ ”
In 1804, the Haitian revolution succeeded despite Washington’s efforts. But the United States then dismissed Haiti’s existence. For almost six decades after Saint-Domingue’s rebirth as the independent nation of Haiti, the United States refused to grant it diplomatic recognition and enforced a trade embargo.
Slavery and racism drove those policies. As both expanded in size and scope, a senator from Missouri argued that welcoming a Haitian diplomat would be seen as “a reward for the murder of masters and mistresses by black slaves.” A colleague from South Carolina agreed that “We never can acknowledge [Haitian] independence . . . the peace and safety of a large portion of our Union forbids us to even discuss it.”