Abstract
In this roundtable intervention delivered at the Third CARICOM Regional Conference on Reparations in Bridgetown, Barbados, Dr. Judite Blanc of Haiti's National Committee on Restitution and Reparation (CNHRR) argues that Haitian independence, though a genuine world-historical rupture, was never a finished project. Tracing the extreme violence of the French slave system in colonial Saint-Domingue through to Haiti's present-day health disparities, state collapse, and enforced diplomatic isolation, Blanc contends that the “business of freedom” remains unfinished in material, psychic, relational, and constitutional terms all at once. She names the persistence of anti-Haitian discrimination and visa restrictions within a Caribbean community that claims Haiti's revolutionary legacy, calls for a genuinely multilingual reparations movement that includes Kreyòl and French speakers, denounces the 2026 stripping of legal status from roughly 350,000 Haitian migrants in the United States, and asks the regional reparations movement for concrete diplomatic and institutional support, not solidarity in words alone, for Haiti's fight for restitution from France and for reparations for the system of chattel slavery it imposed across the Caribbean.
I. Framing: Why Haiti, Why Now
I want to begin by thanking the organizers for the invitation extended to the Haitian National Committee on Restitution and Reparation to take part in this panel. Placing Haiti at the center of this regional roundtable on reparations is not simply a gesture of historical courtesy. Everyone in this room understands, in some measure, what the island represents within the broader arc of Black liberation, anti-racist democracy in the Americas, Pan-Africanism, and the reparatory justice movement more widely. Haiti is not a footnote to that history; it is one of its founding chapters.
But I want to resist the temptation to treat 1804 as a closed story, a revolution that succeeded and then simply receded into commemoration. Read together, the body of scholarship this roundtable draws on converges on a single, recurring claim: Haitian independence was a genuine and world-historical rupture, but it was never a terminus. Freedom was achieved by a people whose social and cultural inventiveness routinely outpaced the state built in their name. It was contested from without by Atlantic powers unwilling to recognize Haitian sovereignty as legitimate. It was compromised from within by continued forced labor and by elite mimicry of colonial categories. And, in Frantz Fanon’s terms, it remained incomplete so long as colonial structures persisted within consciousness itself. Haiti’s revolution did not fail to deliver freedom; it revealed how expansive and demanding genuine freedom actually is, material, psychic, relational, and constitutional all at once. That is the frame for everything I want to say today: the business of freedom, in Haiti and in the decolonial project more broadly, remains unfinished.
II. A Brief Look at Haiti’s History
The CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: A Manifesto For The Coming Enlightenment, released in June 2026, captures the singularity of Haiti’s history well, particularly in its discussion of the island on pages 15–19. It is worth restating why that singularity matters here.
Known as the “Pearl of the Antilles” for its economic profitability, Haiti, then Saint-Domingue, experienced one of the most ferocious forms of the colonial slave system. The French slave and colonial system established there trafficked nearly a million African children, women, and men into bondage, after the Spanish decimated more than eighty percent of the Taíno population who preceded them. Girls as early as eleven-year-olds were routinely raped and impregnated. The life expectancy of an enslaved person brought to the colony typically ran between two and five years, a mortality rate so extreme that the French colonial economy depended on a continuous, renewed supply of trafficked Africans simply to keep the plantation system running.
This violence was not only physical. The Code Noir (Black Code) institutionalized mutilation, torture, and execution to suppress any resistance, while colonial science, embodied by the “Cercle des Philadelphes,” placed medical and agricultural knowledge in the service of plantation profitability and the intellectual legitimation of slavery. Spiritual, epistemic, psychological, and physical all at once, this violence was what maintained the slaveholding order.
This is not incidental background. It is the material foundation against which we have to measure what independence in 1804 actually accomplished, and what it left unresolved.
III. Haiti in 2026: Disparity, Collapse, and Enforced Isolation
My own research has focused on the disparities between France, the former colonial power, and the Haiti we know today, particularly in the domain of health. Amid the dismantling of state structures in Haiti, the first Black republic faces significant health disparities compared to its former colonial power, France. These disparities include lower life expectancy (64.8 vs. 82.3 years) and higher infant and maternal mortality rates. The situation is further exacerbated by widespread mental health issues, severe food insecurity (50% acute vs. 37% moderate), gender-based violence, and elevated homicide rates (13.35 vs. 1.35 per 100,000 inhabitants) (Blanc et al., 2025).
Haiti is currently living through a state collapse that is not a crisis of misfortune but one that bears the marks of orchestration. And the isolation in which the country finds itself is nothing new. Since the revolution of 1791, nation after nation has kept Haiti at arm’s length diplomatically, economically, and symbolically.
This is where I want to make a direct appeal to this community. Perhaps it is not enough for the CARICOM reparations and Pan-Africanist movements to speak in the register of solidarity toward Haiti while leaving the relationship there. Solidarity could translate into stronger cooperation and concrete diplomatic and institutional support to Haitian communities at large.
IV. Anti-Haitianism and the Limits of Regional Solidarity
Any reckoning with Haiti’s symbolic place in Caribbean history has to confront the paradox that sits alongside it: Haitian citizens and migrants, among the Caribbean nations with the most Black African phenotype, continue to face mistreatment and discrimination throughout the region, particularly in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and the French overseas departments (Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Saint-Martin and Martinique). As reported by the Jamaica Observer in July 2025, only two CARICOM member states — Grenada and Montserrat — allow Haitian citizens to travel there without a visa, even as every other CARICOM nation moves visa-free among one another. A movement that celebrates Haiti’s revolutionary legacy cannot, at the same time, treat Haitian people as the exception to regional freedom of movement. To illustrate my point, to travel to this conference on reparatory justice, Haitian delegates traveling with their Haitian passport needed a visa to enter Barbados.
V. Linguistic Exclusion, Cognitive Injustice and Multilingualism
As we gather today in September 2026 in Bridgetown, Barbados, twenty-five years after the 2001 World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, to discuss the unfinished project of freedom and decolonization, to celebrate the progress of the global reparations movement, and to plan for the implementation of reparatory justice, I want to issue a call in the same spirit of unity and solidarity that Pan-Africanism has always claimed for people of African descent, for a reparatory justice movement that is genuinely multilingual and inclusive.
The colonial project did not travel in a single language; it came in every language spoken by the European powers that carried it out. As we all know very well, colonialism did not only traffic Africans and seize land and resources. Colonialism violently shaped how we speak, whose knowledge is valued, and who gets pushed to the margins of society. Colonial administrations forced their own languages and racist school systems onto conquered peoples, producing what we can call linguistic insecurity: the induced shame or fear that one’s native language or dialect is somehow not “good enough.” France is among the principal architects of that dispossession in Haiti and across the francophone Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Haiti and most of French overseas departments and territories alike are Kreyòl- and French-speaking societies. If the reparations movement wants to be more than symbolically inclusive, CARICOM and the Reparations Commission could be strengthened with representation and translation services for all the languages spoken across the Caribbean, particularly French and Kreyòl, spoken by an estimated ten to fourteen million people in the region.
VI. The Right to Freedom of Movement
As discussed in The CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: A Manifesto For The Coming Enlightenment, land dispossession and forced migration are among the enduring effects of historical injustice in the region, and this is a central thread in my own research. At present, roughly 350,000 Haitian migrants have had their legal status in the United States stripped from them by a racist, right-wing administration decision made in 2026. I want to name that directly here and appeal to your pan-Africanist solidarity. Because when one community of African descent is targeted by racist migration policies, anyone of African descent becomes a target. Therefore, we should all stand in solidarity with vulnerable Haitian migrants.
VII. From Solidarity to Action: Effectively Supporting Restitution and Reparation from France
Finally, I want to ask this community for something concrete: stronger support for the work the CNHRR that I am a part of is undertaking to scientifically support the Haitian state in its complicated fight for restitution of the independence indemnity extracted by France for more than a century, and for reparations for the system of chattel slavery that France established in Haiti and across the rest of the Caribbean. This is where reparatory justice moves from a shared vocabulary to a shared campaign, and Haiti’s case, precisely because of its historical specificity and current multidimensional vulnerability, can anchor that campaign for the whole region.
Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Freedom
As one contemporary observer has put it, decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future precisely because it was never fully realized the first time. Haiti’s revolution did not fail to deliver freedom. It revealed, with unmatched clarity, how expansive and demanding genuine freedom actually is: material, psychic, relational, and constitutional, all at once. Freedom achieved by a people whose inventiveness outpaced the state built in their name; contested from without by powers unwilling to recognize it as legitimate; compromised from within by forced labor and elite mimicry of colonial categories; and, in the register Frantz Fanon gave us, incomplete for as long as colonial structures persist within consciousness itself.
It is in that sense, and only in that sense, that the business of freedom, in Haiti and in the decolonial project more broadly, remains unfinished. Our task in this room is not to mourn that fact but to organize around it.
References
- Beckett, G. (2019).
- Blanc, J., Sternberg, C. A., Briggs, A. Q., & Barthélemy, E. J. (2025). “A public health framework for reparations and generational healing in Haiti.” PLOS Global Public Health, 5(11), e0004133. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004133
- Borowetz, J. (2023).
- Casimir, J. (2020). The Haitians: A Decolonial History (L. Dubois, Trans.).
- Costa, R. (2006).
- Daut, M. L. (2023).
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- Getachew, A. (2016).
- Hodgson, K. (2014).
- Kaisary, P., & Past, M. F. (2020).
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- Wilder, G. (2015).
PhilAyiti Media — 09.21.2026