Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 12: The Accurate Name

In episode one of this series, I gave you the Oxford English Dictionary's, uh, earliest documented English use in 1824 in the writing of T.S. Wien.

The formulation is older than that, though.

It arrives in French, and the circumstances of its arrival tells you exactly what the word is for.

In 1802, a former colonist of Saint-Domingue named Jean Félix Cathole published a book in Bordeaux about the events that had ruined the French portion of the island.

Writing about the revolution of the enslaved that was in the process of defeating France and that would produce Haiti two years later.

Cathole set down as an axiom what he called the unalterable supremacy of the white species, a preeminence he described as the safeguard of his own kind.

The Abbe Henry Gregoire, quoting him a few years later, noted that Cathole blamed the ruin of Saint-Domingue on the pride and premature pretensions of people of color rather than the pride and immoderate pretensions of white people.

So let's get back to the timing.

The phrase was not coined by a scholar describing a system from the outside.

It was coined by a defeated slaveholder at the exact moment the enslaved were beating him as an explanation for why the beating should not be happening.

He wrote it in an axiom, a thing not requiring proof, a law of nature that the facts on the ground were in the process of disproving.

And the same country supplies the sequel, which episode one of this series already put in front of you.

In 1825, twenty-three years after Cathole, France sent warships into the harbor of the nation those revolutionaries had built and demanded one hundred and fifty million gold francs in compensation to the former enslavers for the loss of their property.

Haiti paid with interest for one hundred and twenty-two years until 1947.

So the word and the bill come from the same event just two decades apart.

The word was invented to explain why the enslaved would not have won.

The bill was imposed to make certain that winning cost them everything anyway.

That is the lineage of the term this series is retiring.