Death and Deceit: Black Political Authority and the Forging of US Moral Logic Abroad

This chapter analyzes the events surrounding the Dominican government’s accidental killing of the American citizen John J. Platt in 1885. It uses the case to argue that racial moral discourse drove the dialectic between US empire and Black political authority. Whereas the US government in Washington preferred to ignore the killing, Astwood declared it a case of murder and insisted that both the Dominican Republic and the United States engage in diplomatic negotiations under his watch in order to avert international scandal. Through an analysis of the racist and gendered language in the case, this chapter grapples with Astwood’s Blackness and the persistent racist stereotype of Black misrule that white Americans and Europeans applied to the island and its leaders. Ultimately, the chapter probes Dominican elites’ reproductions of this stereotype through moral discourse, particularly as fear grew over Ulises Heureaux’s rising authoritarian rule.