Genomics confirms that race is not a genomic classifier

A 2017 study by Baker, Rotimi and Shriner in Scientific Reports demonstrated that human ancestry correlates with language rather than with race, and that race is not an objective genomic classifier. Linguists and anthropologists had been saying this for most of a century. What the genomics did was close the last exit, because the racial categories inherited from the nineteenth century had been kept alive on the argument that biology might eventually vindicate them. It did not. I put this at the far end of a Haitian timeline for a specific reason. Haiti's 1805 constitution declared all citizens black regardless of complexion, which was a political act with no biological claim behind it and it was correct. The country made race a legal category it defined for itself, two hundred and twelve years before a genome paper confirmed there was nothing underneath the category to argue with.

Cholera had never been recorded in Haiti before United Nations troops introduced it in the autumn of 2010 through defective sanitation at one of their bases. Conservative counts put the dead at ten thousand and the sick at close to a million, about a tenth of the population, and researchers who have followed the epidemic believe the real numbers are several times that. In August 2016, after more than five years of denials, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that the organisation had a role in the outbreak and promised a new response within two months. In December he said that the United Nations apologised to the Haitian people, and set out a plan to eliminate the disease and compensate victims. Alongside the apology the organisation restated its legal immunity from claims by anyone the epidemic had harmed. What forced the shift was an internal report by the special rapporteur Philip Alston, who condemned the cholera policy in terms the institution could not absorb quietly.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.

Juliana Deguis Pierre was born in the Dominican Republic in 1984. Her parents lived and worked on a sugar plantation and neither had legal residence, and under the law of the time she was issued a birth certificate. In 2008, aged twenty four, she went to an office to request her cedula, the national identity card. The staff refused it and cancelled her birth certificate on the ground that both her parents carried Haitian surnames. In 2013 the new Constitutional Court took her appeal as one of its first cases and ruled that she had never been entitled to citizenship at all, that everyone in the same position should lose theirs, and that the records of people registered as Dominican between 1929 and 2007 should be audited and moved into the register for foreigners. The court also ordered the government to produce a plan within ninety days for migrants without papers.