Postures, Impostures

Hoax and white supremacist pseudo-antiracism:

Democracy Now: Shirley Sherrod said that when she had to pull over on the side of the road in Georgia, when she was being told to resign, that the main reason, she was told, was that she would be on Glenn Beck that night.

Hoax and genuine anti-racist public pedagogy:

New York Times: Haitians who suspected that an announcement that France would pay Haiti $22 billion, to make up for forcing the former French colony to pay an equivalent sum in exchange for its independence in the nineteenth century, was too good to be true were proved right on Thursday, as an elaborate hoax was revealed....


Ezili Danto comments:First let me say there are two mistakes in this New York Times blog, one the writer or his editor make themselves, the other is in the statement made by the hoaxers. The title of this piece is France Will Not Repay Haiti Reparations. It's wrong because the debt is not about reparations but restitution. When we get around to asking for the 300-years of free labor and slavery that will be asking for reparations (1503 to 1803) when Haiti won in combat with France, Britain, Spain and over a US embargo. What Haitians are asking for is RESTITUTION of the Independence debt Ayisyen then had to pay to France and other nationalities (including US families in what is now Louisiana/Philadelphia) who owned our grangrans as "their property" even after our grangrans had beat these three nations in combat.

This hoax affords us Ayisyen the opportunity to tell Haiti's history and not the mainstream's colonial narrative. It's a rare chance and a good way to educate the world on France's hypocrisy and heinous avarice.

Hoax and white supremacist revisionism:

Zizek, The London Review of Books:For Kant, even more important than the – often bloody – reality of what went on on the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm that the events in France gave rise to in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe and in places as far away as Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event: the first revolt by black slaves. Arguably the most sublime moment of the French Revolution occurred when the delegation from Haiti, led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, visited Paris and were enthusiastically received at the Popular Assembly as equals among equals.