A Building Bridges Special,  7 - 9 pm
The Haitian Revolution's Contribution to Humanity: A Society Without Slavery, One of Universal and Unqualified Human Rights to Freedom

On January 1, 1804, Haiti's chief general Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus indicating the birth of the first Black independent state in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, led also by Haiti's foremost general, Toussaint L'Ouverture, was the only triumphant slave revolution in world history, and stands as a symbol of anticolonial revolt and universal emancipation.
 
The slaves at Saint-Domingue who revolted against their masters in 1791 "invented decolonization", thus making Haiti "the first postcolonial state” in 1804. The major thesis of our extraordinary documentary is that the construction of a society without slavery, one of a universal and unqualified human right to freedom, properly stands as Haiti's unique contribution to humanity. It was Haiti that fulfilled the failed promises of both French and American Revolutions concerning the unqualified and universal human right to freedom and equality. Consequently, the Haitian Revolution has the utmost relevance for contemporary debates on human rights, ethics, and universalism.
 
We must finally learn the glorious history of this noble people and the way their struggle for freedom would be the single most important factor in shaping the geopolitical trajectory of the Western Hemisphere since Columbus. 

"But the prejudice of race alone blinded the American people [to] the 
debt they owed to the desperate courage of 500,000 Haitian Negroes 
who would not be enslaved.” — Henry Adams, direct descendent of 
John Adams and America’s foremost Historian of the 19th century.
 
Western historiography has silenced the Haitian revolution because it was necessary for the development of a hegemonic concept of Western modernity rooted in an ethics of differential and otherness.  The Western world disengaged the question of race, racial inequality, and the culture of slavery which it had created and which was necessary upon which to rest its developing economic system and its survival.  It is the revolutionary Haiti, the construction of a society without slavery, one of a universal and unqualified human right to freedom, that stands as Haiti’s unique contribution to humanity.  Consequently, the Haitian revolution has immeasurable importance and immediate relevance for contemporary debates on human rights, ethics and universalism.  The idea of 1804 goes beyond the politics of French Jacobinism and that Toussaint L’Ouverture transcends the conditions and confinements of Western political autonomy.