After intending to do so about ten years ago, I finally started the Revolutions podcast. It’s, as I expected, really good.
I’m listening to the season about the Haitian revolution. In the
second episode, Mike Duncan describes the various factions in Haiti at the time. There’s the slaves, and what historians called the Freed Coloreds, the Small Whites, and the Big Whites.
It’s something of a model of what’s happening in the US now. The Small Whites resented the Freed Coloreds, who were prosperous (and often slave owners). They also resented the Big Whites. The Big Whites were concerned about the growing power of the Freed Coloreds, too, so they liked the resentment between the Small Whites and Freed Coloreds.
The French were concerned about all of these groups unifying and breaking out of their empire. So, they introduced official racism in the law to throw a bone to the Small Whites without actually making their lives better and to stir up resentment between the Freed Coloreds and everyone else.
I guess this maybe could be different from the current Trump situation in that a revolution did actually happen eventually.