Trouillot argues that Haiti's color question can neither be detached from a worldwide hierarchy of races and cultures nor reduced to one. Nothing there resembles the apparatus familiar from segregated America - no color riots, no lynchings, no slurs on school walls - and yet color remains decisive, working through family alliance and serving as a favored idiom of politics.

His demonstration is demographic. Given how few light-skinned people survived the war of independence, genetics cannot explain the persistence of a category called clairs; only the social management of marriage can, and the boundary keeps sliding darker to keep it populated. He describes the resulting bargain: the ascending darker partner brings education and prospects, the lighter one what he calls epidermic capital, and the return arrives a generation or two later, in the children.

Because the color line and the income line move separately, prejudice cannot be read off class - the point Marxist accounts of noirisme and mulatrisme refuse.