Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that while bad things happen, people do kind of amazing things in the middle of bad things. I'm your host, Margat Kiljoy and my guest today it's propw.
Are you hey excited to hear about somebody group of people that did cool things in this Black History Month.
Yeah, they're gonna do some really fucking cool things, some really cool stuff. Yeah. And our producer is Sophie Just kidding, I mean well, Sophie star producer.
Actually he's not on mic right now.
She's still a producer.
But yeah, our audio engineers Rory. Everyone's sills to say hi to Rory.
Hi, Rory sor Ry.
Our theme musical was written for Spy on Woman and this is the three parter. I am really impressed by any listener who's starting with part three. Your brain works differently than mine, you are.
Yeah, that is a wild, a wild choice. Yeah, I feel like you know what that is. I feels like first born energy of like I am not going back to No, this is where we are, and like what you I'm telling you, if you just go back to part one and two, it may make no, I already started it. That's what we're doing.
I think that's a very accurate I could say this as the youngest, like yeah, yeah, no, I'm the youngest too, that's why I yeah.
Yeah, totally yeah, just like watching my sister and I'm just like, I really think there's a better way for us to do this.
And then well, the youngest we get to be the most adventurouses we feel the least responsible.
Totally.
But in parts one and two, for anyone who didn't listen, or for people who want the catching up, we talked about the history of Sandomong as the French colony was called the western half of the island now Haiti, and we talked about the religion Vodom, and we talked a lot about how that led to a bunch of uprisings.
We talked about a guy named Macndahl who history and legend has as a mass poisoner, but it was probably still really interesting living outside the system, doing his own thing with his followers and then got burned at the stake. And then and this part actually feels at least as true as anything else, he cheated death, turned into a mosquito, and later basically wiped out all the invading armies.
So bit a bunch of booties.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's how you get things done, you know. So the thing is setting one guy on fire for a witchcraft doesn't actually end the hysteria. Even though the colonial authorities were like, we have caught all the ring leaders, for decades after enslave people kept getting caught up in basically an inquisition. Slavers kept torturing enslaved people into false confessions. So this is why there's like evidence about all this
poisons that we have all these confessions. They were like, hey, I'm gonna drown this guy in front of you, So what are.
You going to do about that? You know?
Yeah, And so people were getting like burned alive and drowned and all the stuff. You go from alive to dead in the worst possible ways, and they were being called Mackandall's in the seventeen seventies, so like fifteen years.
After that guy died.
Wow, the fear of poison and the persecution. I didn't realize how deep this went. The persecution of supposed poisoners was a huge part of colonial life, just like everyday life for decades people were just like, oh, the voodoo in the woods, and also they're all going to poison us, and you're like, well, the vodoo in the woods is real.
Yeah, that's just a religion. People are doing it.
Yeah, yeah, very much. The Dei of its time. It's just gonna come kill us.
There are so many weird overlaps with today.
Yeah.
I've always been really fascinated by the Haitian Revolution because of how it ties into us abolitionism and stuff. I didn't realize just how much as a hopeful version of what we're looking at right now, like because usually you look at like, oh some well, we'll get to it. I'll tell you about it as but one of the first weird overlaps of the modern times. You know what the colonists were doing. They were vaccine denying. They are the first anti vax people in the history of the world.
I mean other people are probably doing it at the same time, but this is before vaccines. Because one of the histories of vaccines is you have smallpox right just going around killing everyone, and people figured out, all right, well, if we take the tiniest bit of smallpox, we can inoculate ourselves and survive and smart people were like, all right, we're gonna do that. But most of the colonists were like, no,
people aren't dying of smallpox. People are dying of poison because the black people are poisoning everyone.
That's what these bumps are. It's the bumps they working the roots on you. Oh man yo QAnon COVID head ass. It's like, yeah, COVID is fake and China gave it to us word.
Yeah yeah, got hi one all right, yes, yeah both yeah, yeah.
I think this is so so special and like for a number of reasons, because it's like, all right, first of all, to your point, for someone to say, to cure this horrible disease, I just need to take a little bit of that disease and put it on me. It sounds absurd, like you know, it's true. It sounds upshurd off the top where I would be like, yeah, I don't know, fam, that's sound the wait, but I don't have it, so you're gonna give it to me?
Like yes, so stay away from me.
I thought I should stay away from you. But to go from that to well, obviously it's they gotta they got dolls with nail in it, and the nails, like, that's what's happening.
Yeah, that's so much more realistic.
That's so much more realistic.
Yeah, And so doctors and scientists and all the people were actually like paying attention to what was going on, kept telling everyone it wasn't even just like like you kind of have this thing where the colonial authorities are a little bit like, hey, could y'all stop being a bunch of idiots, and everyone's like, no, we will not.
You're not here, you don't see what's happening.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, So small boxes running rampant. Some people are starting to inoculate themselves and then also inoculate the people.
That they own.
Yeah, but a lot of people are ignoring all that and blaming black people. And then the other thing that was running rampant was anthrax. And I don't know a ton about anthrax. From my point of view. Anthrax is like a thing that gets mailed to people in the late nineties or early aughts or whatever.
Yeah, some sort of some sort of band, Yeah that the racist white kids liked.
Yeah, totally totally. And but anthrax is this, you know, disease, and that ye killing a lot of people specifically, is killing livestock populations, and it shouldn't have then killed any people because it would have just killed the animals. But instead the white people decided to starve all the black people to death, and so people were left with no food to.
Eat besides infected meat.
Smart.
Yeah, exactly, it worked out really well for everyone, so quote that author John D.
Garrigus.
Although cases of human anthrax were rare in France, they were common in sant Dumong because the colony was designed to produce famine among the enslaved to save labor and land, planters and their agents routinely decided to buy food rather than produce their own. This maximized sugar profits and made their workers food supply vulnerable. Plantation life exposed enslaved people to anthrax in many ways. And again physicians were like,
it's an epidemic of anthrax. We can dissect these animals and see, and slavers are like, nope, it's them, dastardly enslave people.
They're putting the hecks on the beef.
Yeah.
Really, we're cursing the beef, got it, Yeah, the one that we're eating, like you, we cursed our own food.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so Basically, you have all these slavers being like, well, I want to kill one guy that I own in order to frighten everyone else to confessing into poison. Which works. You can get people to confess to poison if you kill their friend in front of them.
Yeah.
Other people in town were like, no, this is small pox and anthrox. We have we have the we have studies on this.
It's happening everywhere else too, It's not just here.
Yeah.
So I don't think their voodoo's that powerful. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah.
As the century winds down, slavers are getting worse and worse. You have these poison inquisitions and slave people are being buried alive. Saw Island continues to be Saw Island. To continue to not watch the Saw movies, but I continue this metaphor.
You're not missing anything, Margaret.
Yeah, that's that's really the best I can tell.
Yeah, you're not missing anything.
As repression ramped up, there was two different groups that started trying to address that repression of enslaved people, and both of these actually ended up kind of paving the way for the revolution. And one of them is the courts. Okay, because we were talking earlier about how like the courts were like, hey, you can't treat enslaved people really bad. But then the yea, or rather France told the local courts, hey you can't do this, and the local courts are like, we don't care.
We're gonna do whatever we want.
And this led to this almost counter revolution. Like Okay, I've said a million times on the show, I consider the American Revolution of counter revolution. You have the white supremacist aristocracy against a like politically moderate monarchy. The white nationalists like George Washington spun a whole fairy tale about liberty in order to get poor whites to go die for the rich people, so American coluinists could invade the indigenous lands west of the Appalachians. And before the Haitian
Revolution there was almost this same kind of thing. Colonists started getting mad at France telling them what to do because the colonists wanted to be even more racist.
Than the mainland French people.
Yeah, and so you end up with these two revolutions kind of racing, like going side by side in opposition to each other. There is the white slavers, and not even all the slavers, but specifically the white ones and then you have the enslaved people. Sandomong was hit by a bunch of really hard times in the seventies. The seventeen seventies obviously. Yeah, I guess so lost in reading history books that I'm like, I know more about the seventeen seventies this week.
Yeah than the nineteen seventies.
Yeah, although that's it. I know an awful lot about the nineteen seventies. It's the twenty twenties I'm not caught up on, like.
You still feel like do you feel like the seventies was thirty years ago? Still?
Yeah, it wasn't, And I don't understand how could it not be?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's fifty years.
Do you ever think about how you're like listening to like, like in the nineties when I was a kid, you know, as a teenager, the classic rock was like weird old shit, right, yeah, and like that shit is more recent than the shit I was listening to in the nineties.
Yes, yes, Like, man, when people go they're gonna put on old school hip hop and then they play like Wu Tang and I'm like, you mean run DMC, Like no, no, that's ancient. We mean Wu Tang and I'm like, oh dang.
Yeah yeah, and I know, oh, any album that came out after I became an adult is new.
That is the perfect way to put it. That is the perfect that's perfect. I'm just like, oh, yeah, it just happened, like remembering that two thousand was twenty five years ago. Yes, yeah, exactly.
What as the two oldest people at cool Zone the too old Yeah, yes, all right. So in the seventeen seventies, famine hit because the winter in France was so cold that the ports froze over, so food wasn't imported from there, and all of the sugar planters were like, we don't grow food, we only import food. And then seventeen seventy six, the British had that whole war with the colonies and they blockaded North America and this reduced the amount of
food coming in even further. And so this is when you start having all the enslaved people literally digging up the animals that died of anthrax because they're starving to death day and the colonial administration in Haiti had to straight up order the planters to plant food, to allow the enslaved people to plant the food that they could eat. Themselves. But the planters refused that that was there, Like, oh,
this is a step too far. They're telling us that we have to let people grow food to feed themselves.
That's it.
Yeah.
The court started offering really limited I'm not trying to play up how great the court was here, but it plays into the revolution. The court started offering really limited
protections to enslave people, the tiniest amounts. At one point, ten enslave people showed up at court with burns all over their bodies from all the torture that they had faced, and the court was like, well, you do got to go back to your slaver, but we're gonna tell him that if any of you are killed or sold, he's in trouble.
So dread Scott head ass. That is awful and also so familiar. Yeah, just yeah, lay that on so many things. It's like, hey, listen, yeah, okay, man, I know he slapped the shit out of you, but I'm gonna tell him, Hey, next time you put your hands on that lady, we're coming. Yeah. Okay, thanks, thanks dude. Appreciated courts. Yeah, it feels so safe now.
Yeah, and this is too much for the slavers. They start rebelling against the colonial administration because of the slap on the wrists.
They because they gently said that there is a way to keep your investment alive.
Yeah. Y, this is what actually really drove me. It really interested me because I used to think of slavery in the West as like an economic arrangement, and that's the wrong way to look at it. It really is a white supremacist arrangement. Like at its core, it is about power even more than economy.
Yeah.
But all this horrible abuse that enslave people are facing, they it as it's I don't want to I can't really say as things got worse because it's already like the place where the life expectancies like two years, but it somehow gets worse. Yeah, and so they start responding even more. You have all these maroon communities, like we've talked about, there was probably amongst all the poison hysteria
people also poisoning. Being like, well, you gave me a good idea, and I do have accessed all this anthrax meat, so I'm sure that some people are getting poisoned, but we don't have any evidence of that. Yeah, But one tactic that got used a lot that I have not personally read about in a comparable situation. They went on.
Strike, they just stopped working.
Like labor strikes, they would just leave the plantation, but not to run away, just like, until our demands are met, we're not going to work. And this is fucking high stakes, right. If you fail, you die. Yeah, but their backs are against the wall anyway. If they don't strike and get their conditions better, they're going to die.
Yeah.
And honestly, these are some of the most inspiring labor strikes I've ever read about my life.
Amazing. I never read it in terms of labor strike. I never thought of it as that means that's exactly what it is.
Yeah, and it Yeah, And it's interesting because like we talked about on the first episodes, you were on on about how the you know see all our James talked
about how the South did a general strike during the war. Yeah, but that's still kind of a like, I mean, that's true, they did a general strike, but it wasn't quite a like, hey, we have the following demands and we're we're going to withdraw our labor until Yeah, this was a fuck labor strike and it was like, I don't know, I don't remember exactly where this maps to, like England having labor strikes, but this is fucking early.
Yeah, I like, yeah, I would have never like, but that's what it is. I would have never thought of it that way because yeah, like this, you know, in the Southern States, if you are a chattel slave at the time and y'all going to war, it's like, well, you gon't die tomorrow. So like I'm not I'm not working, yeah, you know, yeah yeah.
So at the first one I read about, at an a state called the Breta Estate, twenty five out of the one hundred enslaved workers fucked off on a strike in response to these poison inquisitions. And so, in a weird way, the poison hysteria did was like a domino that helped bring down the slave empire because these inquisitions were too much for people, so they walked off the job and they short term marooned with a quarter of
the workforce gone. The owner listened to his nephew use the foreman was like, it's poison, and the nephews were like, hey, we read science and it's not poison.
Actually I can read you know, yeah, yeah, you'll oversee your can't read. I can read.
Yeah, And so the workers returned after the foreman was fired, and they got you know.
The inquisition stopped.
Mm hmm.
And at this place there's a guy who I'm not actually gonna talk about nearly as much as I expected to. They had a coachman working for him named Toussaint Luvitour, who ends up being one of the heroes of the revolution.
The man dude.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And an unlikely class of heroes arose during the strikes. This part, okay, this part really surprised me. The people who left these strikes were the most privileged enslaved people. Yeah, the skilled laborers, the field laborers did shit too. I'm not trying to dismiss this, Yeah, but the so you have, like, for example, the people who make the sugar instead of tending the crops, they have more like they're harder to replace. You have to get
trained into the job more. The coachmen were doing a lot of the revolutionary stuff and the strikes. But the thing that surprised me is that there were the drivers, basically the slave drivers, right. And the slave drivers were also enslaved people, but they were like giving whips and better food and hit people and stuff. They were often the people who led the strikes.
This is one of the big start contrasts between America and Haiti. Yeah, was this point between like, you know, house workers and field workers that you know, in a lot of ways to this day still is a sort of a thing. But like that, you know, obviously I'm making a gross generalization, but that's one thing that specifically was was very different to where they were, like, oh, you you treating me nicely. Don't change the fact that I'm a slate. Like, nah, I'm with them, yeah, uh huh.
Yeah.
The fact that white people made this a race war is the reason that the whole thing fell apart, which gives is the thing that gives me hope with the modern era of like kicking out like banning dei or whatever the fuck you know. Yeah, and so yeah, the quote unquote privileged enslave people are a huge part of the revolution leading up to it and during it. And this is a paragraph where I wrote what you just said,
so I'll just skip that. In May of seventeen eighty two, people working at the Noah Estate went on strike and they shut the place down for a week. And these are like two separate strikes, as the field strike and the sugar factory strike. Yeah, and the two drivers are the people who at least get the credit for leading this Hipolte was the field driver and a man named Jean Jacques, who's not Jean Jacques de Salinaeus, who's more important later?
Yeah's your hero later?
Yeah, Yeah, but Jean ends up actually one of the heroes of the early parts of the revolution. One hundred and forty field workers left the estate, then came back twenty four hours later, and then the skilled laborers left for nine days. And I believe this strike was successful and they got their immediate demands met. Jean Jacques is an interesting fellow. He's later going to become one of the early leaders of the revolution. I am not aware of him having a last name, which is of course common.
Yeah.
He was a crafts person. He was basically the person who made the sugar production happen, and he was higher in authority than a lot of the white employees on the estate. And the owner had kept promising like, oh, I'm totally gonna let you go. Like the yeah, the old owner like in his will was like you should totally let this guy go one day, you know, and it didn't happen.
Well, Thomas Jefferson Stez.
Yeah, yeah, he does get free, but by a little bit more of a direct route later exactly, and after these successful strikes, these two drivers, they're punished by putting them into internal exile. They are fired without being freed, so they are unemployed slaves.
Syop dude.
They I know, they get paid for ending the strike, Like I think there's all like thanks for ending the strike, here some money, like I think it's like part of the negotiations. But then they're left with nothing to do, but like hang out on the plantation. They can't leave. Yeah, so they became revolutionaries.
I mean you idle hands, yeah, idle hands. Yeah, y'all gave me the time. Yeah, I didn't have time. Now I got time. Yeah, y'all's fault.
This plantation, the Noah Plantation, less than a decade later, is going to be one of the first places to revolt. But you know who, we would never revolt against.
Oh, we better not.
I don't know if that's a comparison. I feel a good making but.
I mean we have many times, but yeah, but now we won't.
But we we love our goods and services being employed.
So listen, man, you notion you gotta swim.
Yeah, and here's what we're swimming in. It adds.
And we're back.
So the strikers would say things like we're not going to do night work anymore, or we want a right to choose our managers among I think amongst themselves, or they would be protesting like one of the skilled laborers would you know, be seen as unruly and get demoted to field work or something. And so it's very similar types of demands as what wage laborers will end up going on strike for, you know, one hundred years from now. And sometimes the strikes make conditions better. Sometimes they make
the conditions worse, but dangerously to the slave empire. The strikers are often appealing to the court systems for to be intervene into into the labor demands. Meanwhile, I want to tell a story about another diviner like Mackandal. In fact, the Attorney General at the time called this woman Macndal's second Coming. And her name is King Gay. She was born in Congo. Then she was stolen, trafficked and sold
across the ocean. Her owner was as best as anyone can tell a free black woman who let Kingay kind of do her own thing as long as she paid a monthly fee to her, which is again the like that also happened sometimes in the States. You had people being like, oh, yeah, you can go out and get a job. I just get a cut, you know.
Yeah, totally.
The education I got around slavery was very for good reason, focused on the plantation system and like specifically the most I don't know whatever, it's like, I feel like it's useful to see the breadth of this really nasty harble system.
You know. No, for real, I think the point you made earlier about how this was really about white supremacy, because there was a moment where this was not financially viable, Like there was a moment where it stopped being actually a good and like you said in the in the first episode, to where it was like the chattel slavery in North America was very much an upper crust like
sort of experience. But were you a northern freed educated black person in the same way you've existed in the rest of the world, and over time you have somebody that works for you, you know that you would call a slave, you know, and but like you said, there's a stipend, you go just give me a cut, Like this is our world. I have to own you, Okay, I own you whatever that means. You know what I mean totally.
And it's interesting because the treatment of how even black slavers started getting cut out of the system is going to be a huge part of the revolution in a way that I that was like the part that I was like, oh, holy shit, but so so Kingaey For two years seventeen eighty four to seventeen eighty five, she worked as what I defined last time as a service magician, similar to makendal, where you go around you help people with shit and you you know, give evil charms and
help heal and do whatever needs doing. She and her probably husband traveled around from plantation of plantation selling talismans. She was probably a vodu practitioner, but the book that I read that talked about her never used the word vodu at anywhere. Is I kept running across this Everyone who writes the history of the Haitian Revolution is completely different politics from each other and completely different ideas about which parts they need to include in like xcise. But
she would probably channel spirits. She would so she was or she was channeled spirits. This is probably that she let a la mount her and she spoke in a channeled man's voice. And she is not really honestly a hero here, and she's but it's more interesting and I think ties.
Into some of this stuff.
Okay, she had a strong following among enslaved people. I believe she was revered. The it was phrased this she was worshiped. I'm skeptical of that framing because.
Yeah, that's that's laying on top of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, but she worked for a lot of slavers. The commander of a local militia is one of her main benefactors. She showed up and told him he'd been poisoned, and so she saved him by pulling toads out of him, one out of his head and one out of his side.
Love it.
Yeah, And then she told him which of his enslaved people had poisoned him, and so then he went and killed a bunch of them.
Yeah, don't love that.
Oh yeah, no, this is yeah, she's not a hero and yeah, and so then he killed a bunch of them and sold the rest. And then she was allowed to live on his plantation, and he provided carriages and servants, and the servants were enslaved people to help her travel around and do her work, which by this point meant that she would show up and accuse enslave people of being poisonous. So she's part of this inquisition system and
then like watch those people get killed. She's probably taking bribes from other enslaved people to be like, hey, I've I got beef with this guy, can you go kill him?
Yeah, I'm really tired of I'm really tired as Jean Pierre. Yeah yeah.
But even she wasn't acceptable to the white supremacist institution. She pissed off the wrong people. She got too big for a breeches. In seventeen eighty five, the Attorney General had her and Or probably has been arrested, and they disappeared from the historical record. This was partly because they were trying to keep revolt down. They were like, all of these inquisitions are going badly, But it's just it's like a, I don't know, I found the story really fascinating.
It is, and it's also like you know, in parallels for now, you know, it's not as simple. I can speak for almost for all the cools on medias being like, it's not so much that we're like partisan democrats, because we're like, well, you guys, are you know, khaki beige? You know, cream a mushroom soup anyway, Like so that's not even like our lane. But dad being said, you know, when it was time to push the line, we knew
where to stand. And when you're watching, you know, for example, at least as a person of color, when you're watching other people of color actually stand up and defend, you know, the moves conservative movements to Donald Trump's movement, you know,
for whatever reasons they say they're doing. And a lot of times among among I'm about to get into a diatribe here, but a lot of times, like black capitalists, they're like, you just got to get yours, Like this is the world we're in, and it's like at the end of the day, man, like you got to get yours.
You know. You we like Trump because you get to the money, you know, and at some point, you know, I don't care you could, you know, you teach you you keep your kids from listening to hip hop, you put them in private schools and make them never wear hoodies.
And wear suits and ties. But at the same but at the end of the day, yeah, listen, you not want of them, you know, and the day will come, and when that day comes, you will look out at the fact that you sold out your own community been trying to take care of you this whole time, you know.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's it's real, man, And that's.
The story of the Haitian Revolution in a like as we'll keep getting to it, like even the free people of color, like not even that there's a distinction people color being the mixed race people in this in this context, uh huh, Like eventually they're gonna get kicked out of the white supremacy too.
You know, you can't and you can't stay. Yeah, especially out here, especially with all these like immigration things you know happening, like who's shutting down the freeway. It's actually been kind of beautiful. Yeah, but like all of them are looking at the whole Latinos for Trump movement, and they're just like you see, you see what you've done to your own people, and you say you're doing the right thing, you.
Know, But eventually they're coming for them too.
They coming for you too, Like, don't you like what don't you see about this, Like they they'll pat you on the back and they'll put you all you know, like good Kanye when he when he was still cool, like yeah, put him all in the front of us stow like yeah they yeah, He'll put you in front of the He'll put you on the stage you're talking to rally. Yeah, okay, just.
Wait and then one day they won't and one day they won't yup.
Yeah. Fuck.
And so in seventeen eighty five, France passed a law that gave more authority to the state to check in on plantations and the treatment of people. They were like, we're going to actually start punishing slavers. You could now get murder charges if you killed an enslaved person, And so white people started saying shit like and this is a literal quote from a plantation manager, and it just sounds like it's said today quotes.
Cannot wait for this.
If the ordinance is upheld, it would be better to be a good slave than to be a manager, a plantation attorney, or even a proprietor. I would say, the more I see, the more I understand that they want to free the slaves and put whites under the yoke.
That fucking amazing, markret.
Like you can a on the Twitter right now and find the richest man in the world, be like straight white men or the real oppressed minority.
Listen, it's that's what's really was happening. Yeah, yes, is the truth is they hate us, That's what it is.
Yeah.
I'm just saying, don't kill a bit. I'm just saying it's a crime. You committing a crime, That's all I'm saying.
Yeah.
And it's like we're not even saying freedom. Yeah, we're not even we're not Yeah, I'm just saying yeah.
And so local governments start refusing to enforce this new French law they can't kill people.
You're fine, don't worry about it.
Racial tensions start getting worse and worse. There's this whole middle class of free black people and or rather more accurate to say free people of color, the race hierarchy and send themong went white mixed race people usually call people of color in this context, and black people at the bottom, and then of course the slave people below all of that. Yeah, any of those people can be free,
any of them can own enslaved people. White people aren't allowed to be enslaved, but people of color and black people are.
Yeah.
And for a long ass time, the free people of color very much saw themselves as not black, and they generally identified with their white ancestry. Early colonists in San Demong were mostly men, and they were encouraged early on, for like one hundred years, they were encouraged to marry black and slaved women, convert them those women to Catholicism, and then free them. And so you have a bunch of mixed race people who are literally the aristocracy and shit.
It seems to be an inversion of what I understand of like how shit works in the United States, where it was like, you know, you have a white man has black kids, and then they're immediately slaves and not acknowledged.
Yeah you're still slaves.
Yeah, And in this case, it was like no, no, no, me and my free wife have these kids. They're French, you know. But by the secondcity of this whole huge group, it's about as big as the white people, and which are both tiny compared to the enslaved black population, of course, by an order of magnitude. By the second half of the seventeen hundreds, they start putting all these race restrictions into place, and we tend to see things in history foolishly as like linear, like oh, the world used to
be more racist and now it's less racist. But it's actually an ebb and a flow. I think everyone who lives in America right now knows this.
We get it. Yeah, it's not a straight line. Yeah.
The sixteen eighty five Black Codes said that free people at all the same rights as freeborn people. But suddenly these rights start getting taken away. In seventeen sixty nine, free men of color could no longer be officers in the military. By seventeen seventy three, it became illegal for free men of color to practice medicine or become teachers. Then they're not allowed to dress like white people. Then they're not allowed to take the names of their white fathers,
and they soon non white people can't be midwives. By seventeen eighty you have forced conscription for men of color. So within a generation their rights are just stripped away completely, like they would pass laws like oh, as of today, people of color can't use wheeled carriages or no more jewelry, sorry, people of color. For it was a little while where people of color couldn't wear shoes in public.
What Yeah, I missed that one. That was a new one, Like yeah, yeah there were shoes. Like if you imagine that, you imagine the police being like, hey hey Margaret, yeah, uh, mission just totally misgender you and then are like, now you gotta take off your shoes.
Yeah, sorry, what the Yeah, it's just like why are you why? Yeah, And they're saying this to some of the people who were like the aristocracy, you know.
That's the bonker's part to where it's like I I was in tennis class with you. Yeah, we played croquet together. What are you talking about?
Yeah?
Your mom baby sat us? Yeah what yeah?
We all agree.
I'm not black like that person.
Yeah all black.
Yeah.
And then the white men who were married to black women started to have their nobility denied and stripped from them. So now it was like miscegenation laws also on top of it all.
Yeah you did all that race mixing. Yeah, you dirtied yourself, all right.
And then you get into this weird thing where so people of color weren't allowed to take their white family name anymore. They had to take on quote African names. And it's fascinating because overall, right, Like rejecting some name like Jean Jacques and taking a name like an African name is like a yeah, a positive reclamation in most.
Of Yeah, I'm like, you say, you're making them reclaim their African side. Yep, y'all don't hear y'allself?
Yep.
Yeah, They're like they could have just basically been white people and fought for you. You know, they would have fought against the Slaver vault if you had let them.
Yeah. So now und Miso und Miso Mafu right who used to be to loose La Trek I don't know? Yeah, yeah, right, So now it's like, okay, well I guess I'm ind Miso now.
Yeah, and I guess I fight on the side of the Africans.
Fuck it, yeah, you know, you know totally.
And so all of these rich white dudes who have black wives and children of color, they start fleeing for France with their wife and kids, and it's this whole other level of white fragility, not like white fragility is like white people being fragile, but white fragility, like whiteness itself,
is fragile. Yes, yes, and uh, all of the suppression of even free people starts coming to a head because in seventeen eighty nine we got the French Revolution, which came out of nowhere, much like these ads.
You did it again, you did it again.
So it gets me up on Thursday mornings the day I record.
Yes, amazing, here they are and we're back.
So one of these days I'll probably do the French Revolution. But I kind of don't care that much about the French Revolution because it's like mostly rich people and it's like, I don't know whatever.
Yeah, kind of didn't Yeah, it kind of didn't go deep enough. But yeah too. Yeah, yeah, but they're why we called it right and left. So like there, that's true. That's a thing.
Yeah, and the French Revolution is a big deal and it affected a lot of stuff. They also there's this thing where people basically say, oh, the French Revolution kicked off the Haitian Revolution because it exported the ideas of liberty to the people who had never heard of it before in Haiti, and that's obviously like paternalistic and wrong. It's all right, but it did fundamentally disrupt the empire that was in charge.
Yeah, there's a reality of again, like connecting the now when you when when you see a kink in the armor, when the reality of like this person that they can get touched like you, oh you could get touched, like you're not invincible, and what and what that germ does of like, oh this, we could win this. You know that to me. So it's not that it kicked it off. It was just like you said, in the paternalistic way, but in the idea of saying, oh.
Actually things can change around here.
Yeah no, big hoby. Yeah, it's like, oh, you don't have backup.
Yeah wait a minute, yeah you.
Don't have backup now. Okay, oh we're good now.
Yeah.
It's like the first time if you've ever seen the cops retreat from you, yes, you will never forget what it is like to watch them get in their squad cars and drive away.
Yeah you know.
Yeah.
It changes the understanding of power completely.
It just it's it's it's mind blowing. When I realized, man, these these big burly men are more scared of me. Yeah, you scared of me? And I was like oh yeah, yo hoh. Posture change is like yeah, yeah, actually you know what, No, you may not see my ID.
And that's even why they're dangerous, so they're afraid to you, you know.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, you know, yeah yeah.
So the French Revolution seventeen eighty nine, a group calling itself the French National Assembly was set up. People stormed the Bastille in Paris. We talked about this on our prison Break episode a while ago. It was a pretty good prison break. And then the King Louis the sixteenth was like, all right, fine, you can be a real group.
You've scared me enough.
They wrote up a declaration of the rights of Man and citizen. And there are all kinds of folks from Sandemong living in France at the time, and they want to be part of the revolution. And you have two different factions. You have a bunch of white people who are desperately trying to make sure that the revolution doesn't expand to include black people people of color. They're like that's their thing. They're like, we're part of this as long as we make sure it doesn't disrupt white supremacy
in Haiti, yeah, or in sand Demong. But there's also free black people and people of color and invest as I can tell, they're like white family and friends who are fighting that for the new constitution. Of France to include. Some people are arguing for abolition, but that's not the big thing. They're arguing that free black people and the colonies and shit should have like the right to.
Vote and stuff.
Yeah.
In March seventeen ninety, the Colonial Committee of the French Revolution was like, the new constitution doesn't apply to the colonies because we can't risk upsetting our rich white supremacist planters. So they just like chicken out. They come around. The revolution is still underway in France. Things are in turmoil. A man named Vincent Ouje, he's a mixed race guy from Sandomong. He had been he was a free man.
He had been in France and then he went home to sand Humong and he was like, it's time to stand up to the colonial authorities. We should bring the French Revolution to the colonies. Not free the enslaved people, but us people of color, slavers. We should get our rights. So they threw an armed rally called the Oja Rebellion. And these are not leftists, like, these are property owning
people of color who the majority of them are slavers. Yeah, and the colonial authority is like, oh fuck no, because they don't owe their allegiance to the rich. They don't owe their allegiance to slavery, they owe their allegiance to white supremacy.
Yeah.
And so the military breaks up this demonstration and arrests two hundred and twenty six of them. Oja and another guy were tortured and beheaded and their heads were put on pikes, which is a specific symbol. This is what happens to slave rebellions. Yeah, so this is saying you are all the same to us.
Yeah. Yeah, And twenty.
Three people were executed. Fifteen of them were branded and then given life imprisonment on a chain gang. Forty four people were tried in absentia. Two of them were executed in effigy like they made dummies of the people and then like tortured and killed the dummies as like a public spectacle. Weird, which is such a good way to show we are terrified of you. Yes, yes, you have
so much power over us. And this protest it failed in the short term, but on May fifteenth, seventeen ninety one, a couple months after the leaders of the demonstration had been killed, the French Revolution was like, all right, political rights for free people of color in the colonies. If you're born free to free parents and you own shit and you're a man, you can vote, got it?
Yeah? Perfect.
There's only a couple hundred people in Sandumong who.
Mactually like, I was like, that's like five people. Yeah, okay, but yeah.
And this was too much for the white supremacist slavers.
They couldn't handle it.
Now it's like right now that's ned and Yahoo's cabinet. Yeah, they're like ceasefire never. Yeah. I'm like, you're out of bullets.
You've killed them. They're dead.
They're dead. There's no one left it. What do you You leveled the city?
Yeah? I know it's not enough.
It's not enough. Or do you want and like and you're about to sail land you don't own? Yeah, to America. That's not enough. Yeah, fuck goddamn it.
I mean everything's gonna be fine. And so, in response to a couple hundred people of color suddenly being their equals legally, they they start planning their own revolution. They're gonna they're planning to break free from France to defend their right to be white supremacists.
This is their revolution call.
But they're they're not the only people plotting a revolution. This is not an ad transition. I almost wish it was, uh, because suddenly a bunch of different groups of people who did not see themselves as part of the same group now have all their interests aligned. You have the unskilled enslaved people, you have the skilled enslaved people. You have the free black people, and the free people of color, including the slavers among them, who are suddenly forced onto the same side.
Yeah.
So they had a revolution.
Yeah. Man, the the stubbornness of your racism just working against you. Yeah, I mean, is this not history rhyming?
Yeah.
This was one of the things, the biggest things I got wrong in like twenty fifteen. I was I plotted out this science fiction novel about like set in like twenty forty, and in it, I was assuming that like right wing nationalism was going to take over the US, but it was going to do it by being like woke right wing nationalism. Okay, it was going to be like trans inclusive, all women army units like the fascists and stuff, you know. Yeah, and like they were gonna
be like as long as you're American, you're American. We don't care what color you are. If you're gay or whatever, as long as you're willing to enforce a terrible empire that conquers the entire world. Yeah, yeah, because I thought that was the direction things were going, and then nope, they went back to their old strongest card, just raw racism.
Just yeah, like you are you you keep lowering your own like pool of resources. Yeah, you you just keep telling the most skilled and most qualified people in our country that they need not even apply. Yeah, like, oh, okay, well, I guess I'm a diversity higher. I only have four more degrees than this food. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm a diversity higher. So mean, y'all go ahead, Dan, Do you know it's.
Like just I get lost thinking about that ship becau I'm thinking aboutw It's just like some of the best programmers in the world are trans women, because there's so many obviously not all I'm not a programmer, right, yeah, and awful disproportionate number of the best programmers in this world are trans women. And to be like, oh no, they're all diversity higres, they gotta go, and you're like.
You just so you wait, wait, wait, let me get this straight. Like even if yeah, I'm just like even if I'm racist. Yeah, I'm like, wait, hold hold on now, like she's really good, Like she's really good at this.
Yeah, all I got does color a girl and she's down to the program.
Like yeah it's fine. Yeah, yeah, she doesn't even care what we're making. Yeah, exactly.
And so just the because again, there's like this whole thing where in eighteen oh four when Haiti starts to spoiler alert, there's gonna be a thing that's called the mass courgenocide depends on who's writing it, where yeah, a couple thousand white people are killed, and like it's presented as like all the white people are killed. And first of all, this because there weren't that many white people left on the island at that point, but also they
weren't all killed, and we're gonna talk about that. But like if you just say that totally out of nowhere, you're like, oh, this sounds kind of bad, right, And you're like, who made it a race war?
Yes? Yeah, like yeah, you did you ask what is yeah? Yeah, yeah absurd.
But what I'm asking for is your plugs. Because that's the end of part three, because we're gonna talk about the revolution itself in part four.
Finally, man, we're gonna talk about the pew pews. Uh yeah, dude, the politics pod. I've been trying to like get better at ways to be in contact with people that are interested in what I do. So yeah, like so prop hip hop dot Com that has like you could sign up for, like the newsletter, you could sign up for the for the text messaging service. So the text message and stuff is like, if I'm in town, I'll text you, Oh that's cool, I'm doing a show.
Yeah, and just like works by zip code or something like that.
Yeah, that's awesome.
It just I'll be like, hey, where do you live? Yeah? Uh, Toadsuck, Arkansas? All right, Hey, I'm gonna be doing a show somewhere close to there.
Yeah.
People in Arkansas are gonna drive a little further for shows than people on the mid Atlantic.
You know.
Yeah, I have.
I have performed in Toadsuck, Arkansas.
Oh okay cool.
That's why I always pull that stadia out because I'm like, I know that one anyway. But yeah, prophitpop dot Com. There's the hood politics thing, there's a newsletter, there's a music We're gonna start rolling out a ton of music this year. I'm super excited about So yeah, man prop hip hop dot Com.
Hell yeah, if you want to follow me. My next book comes out this summer and it's called The Immortal Holds Every Voice and it is a third book in the Daniel Kaine series. And if you look it up on Kickstarter you can get information about that. It's going to kickstart in March. And you're like, what if I've never heard it before, Well, you're in luck because I read Robert Evans the first of these books on cools
on Media book clubs. So if you look up The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, you will find me reading it to Robert. And also one of the rewards for the Kickstarter is going to be audiobooks of me reading all three books, so if people have never heard it before, you can hear all of it.
So dope. I wish I would have done more on the Dinah Wars.
Oh, Dinah Wars is still going on. You still have a chance to do Dinahars.
I saw have a chance. Like I've been trying to come up with an angle. You guys are so good at this. I'm like, what's the angle? What's the angle? Yeah?
People want every Sunday, I think on this feed and on the it could happen here feed. I've been doing Dinah Wars twenty fifty five how to Survive, and it's been fun and eventually Propa is going to do part of an episode.
I'm going to figure it out, man, I'm going to figure it out. Yeah, some sort of, I would, because I was trying to come down a music angle of like something where it's just like for like two decades artists just gave up, like they were just like forget it, dude.
Like we tried there's no money in it more at all, Like yeah, there's.
Like there's no money, like yeah, all your favorite artists are AI, you know. And we tried to tell y'all like all the way back to like the gunp the dude. You know what I'm saying, Like we've been trying to forget it. That's what y'all want. But like maybe there's one guy that's like, come on, guys, let's try, you know. So that's kind of what I was kind of coming with.
Nah it's good, But.
Anyway, Okay, dear listener, you should bug Prop to write a song as if Prop has written it in the year twenty fifty five.
Okay, that you just get You just gave me the idea. Now, now that's what I'm doing.
Cool all right, all right, Well, I'll see everyone on Wednesday when we tell you more about the Haitian Revolution. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.