ABSTRACT
The case of Haiti is also instructive, both for the racist notions generated and strengthened during the nineteenth-century and for its continuing “uses” in late twentieth-century racist discourses and foreign policy decisions in the United States and other Western countries. But the real point at issue is that the racist attitudes displayed towards Haiti and Haitians by the white, Western, capitalist world from the beginning of the nineteenth century remain in force today, albeit in modified form. This “symbolic function” of Haiti as a despised Black Republic in the Western world, challenging the latter’s global supremacy, took on greater and greater importance and continues to justify cruel and racist treatment of Haitians. In a monolithically racist world, Haiti was “the nightmare republic.”.
