Racism in the Dominican Republic exists due to the after-effects of African slavery and the subjugation of black people throughout history. In the Dominican Republic, "blackness" is often associated with Haitian migrants and a lower class status. Those who possess more African-like phenotypic features are often victims of discrimination, and are seen as foreigners. [1]
The Dominican Republic has a right of blood law, which bases nationality on ancestral lineage rather than land of birth. The country has a large population of Haitian migrant descendants who are not seen as citizens, and are considered "stateless" by some human-rights organizations. A 2013 study concluded that Dominican Republic was the second most xenophobic country in the Americas. [2] When individuals in the country were asked who they wouldn't want as neighbors, 15-20% responded those of "another race". [2]
The Dominican Republic, like most countries in Latin America that were colonized by Europeans, shows a strong correlation between race and wealth. The upper and upper-middle classes of the Dominican Republic are overwhelmingly of European origin. [3] [4] The middle class is the class with the broadest colour spectrum [5] and is composed mostly of mixed race individuals of varying skintones, [4] while the lower working-class is darker. The underclass is predominantly black, with many being of Haitian background. [4]
People of predominant European ancestry in Dominican Republic have an economic and social privilege, and have strong representation in politics, business and the media, while those of African ancestry are in the lowest strata of society. Thus in the country whiteness is often associated with wealth, intelligence, beauty, and cleanliness, while blackness is associated with poverty, lower education, and unattractive features. [5]
Due to the influence of European colonization and the propagation of Africans or "darker people" as inferior, being of African ancestry is often not desired or acknowledged in the Dominican Republic. The mixed-race population identify as "Mestizo" or "Indio" rather than Mulatto, preferring to acknowledge only their European and Indigenous heritage, while those with darker skin and other traits associated with 'Blackness' face rejection and social exclusion. [6] In Latin America, there is more flexibility in how people racially categorize themselves: they identify themselves mostly based on skin color and facial features and not so much their ancestry, allowing for more "racial fluidity." [7] For example, a person who has some degree of Black ancestry can identify as non-Black if they can 'pass' as such.
Socioeconomic status also heavily influence race classification in Latin America and tends to be correlated with whiteness. In the Dominican Republic, those of higher social status tend to be predominately of a lighter color tone as are often labeled as 'blanco/a', 'trigueño/a', or 'indio/a', while poorer people tend to be 'moreno/a', 'negro/a, or 'prieto/a', the latter category being heavily associated with Haitian migrants. [7]
An example of racism in the Dominican Republic and the prejudice against darker-skinned people is the relations between Haitian and Dominicans. The term “anti-Haitianism” has been coined to describe the discrimination against Haitians by Dominicans. The development of anti-Haitianism ideology can be attributed to the years of the Spanish racist mentality, racial stereotypes, and the historical propagation of dark-skinned people as the "inferior". [8] Many Haitians have lost their lives as a result of this discrimination. The most notorious event that occurred was the massacres of Haitians in the Dominican Republic border region in 1937 under the order of former president, Rafael Trujillo. However, the discrimination may also be attributed to the Haitian military occupation of the now Dominican Republic from the years 1822 to 1844. barely a month after the colony of Santo Domingo became independent from Spain. During this occupation, the Haitian government forced the French language into the documentation of the dominated Spanish-speaking colony, closure of the only university of the island and first university of the Americas, restrictions on the use of Spanish by the natives (despite that being their only language), [9] and stories are also told about restriction of hours of religious festivities, brutality of the military regime, among other forms of domination. During that time most of the inhabitants of the East side of the island were white descendants of Spanish people. The Haitian Constitution banned whites from having property: "12. No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein." [10] The majority of the population of the East of the island thus finding itself therefore immediately legally destitute from what had been their homes, farms, and lands, due to the white color of their skin. This favored the migration of the whites back to Europe or other places, and favored an anti-Haitian resentment in the ones who remained .
"There is no feeling of humanity, nor political reason, nor any circumstantial convenience that can force us to look indifferently at the Haitian migration. That type is frankly undesirable. Of pure African race, they cannot represent for us any ethnic incentive. Not well nourished and worse dressed, they are weak, though very prolific due to their low living conditions. For that same reason, the Haitian that enters lives afflicted by numerous and capital vices and is necessarily affected by diseases and physiological deficiencies which are endemic at the lowest levels of that society."
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Approximately 10–20,000 men, women, children, babies and elderly, who were selected by their skin color, were massacred using machetes, guns or were thrown to sharks. [12] While many of the people who lost their lives were Haitians who immigrated to the Dominican Republic, some were Haitians born in the Dominican Republic and those of Haitian-Dominican descent. [13]
Date | 2 October 1937 - 8 October 1937 |
---|---|
Also known as | Parsley Massacre |
Type | Massacre/Genocide |
Motive | Anti-Haitianism/Anti-Black |
Participants | Dominican Army |
Deaths | approximately 12,000-35,000 |
Trujillo's authoritarianism culminated in the 1937 massacre of Haitian peasants on the border with the Dominican Republic. Before the Haitian Massacre led by Trujillo, also known as the Parsley Massacre, President Lescot's had claimed Trujillo's motives behind his acts of violence towards Haitians in the Dominican border. Lescot's accusations of "material acts of violence and the continual violence of writings, practiced in the Dominican Republic against the Haitian People," challenge the idea of an economic, political, and military Pan-American solidarity that the US government had promoted since the inauguration of the "Good Neighbor" policy in the early 1930s. [14] The Good Neighbor policy was enacted by President Roosevelt in hopes of ensuring a mutual friendly relationship between the U.S. and the nations of Latin America. [15]
With Dominican civilians and local authorities participating in the massacre, many of them assisted the army by identifying and locating Haitians, while others helped Haitians hide and flee. Generally civilians who were recruited by Trujillo were prisoners from other areas of the country or local residents already tied to the regime. Local Dominican civilians were compelled by the army to burn and bury the bodies of the victims, which played a role in the growth of Anti-Hatianism. The rise of the sugar-plantation economy in the early twentieth century, as US sugar firms in the Dominican Republic imported Haitian laborers, led to opposition by the Black sub-proletariat. Anti-Haitianism has continued to grow and diffuse during the last 60 years, as Haitian migrants to Dominican sugar zones and other areas—mostly far from the frontier regions—actually increased in number after the massacre. According to Richard Lee Turits, author of the Haitian Massacre review, these migrants have been subjected to extraordinary exploitation and continual human rights abuses. [16]
Contemporary incidences of Dominican discrimination against individuals of Haitian descent included the mass deportation of Haitians under the premise of purifying the racial state of the Dominican Republic. Following the earthquake that impacted Haiti in 2010, two weeks after the earthquake, the Dominican Government revoked citizenship by birth from the Constitution, thereby affecting the more than 800,000 Haitians who resided in Dominican Republic at the time. [17] As a result of the withdrawal, Dominicans of Haitian descent are denied the issuance of birth certificates at birth which is need to acquire the national ID card. Without a national ID card, these individuals are not allowed to get government documents such as passports and drivers licenses, and they are not allowed to vote or hold political presence in the country. [18] This is a systematic way to prevent Dominicans of Haitian descent from naturalizing or integrating into the society, especially politically. Despite this lack of representation, Haitians represent a large section of labor in the Dominican Republic and are subjected to slavery-like work conditions on sugar plantation. [8]
In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina commanded his army to kill all "Haitians" living in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier, which borders on Haiti certain parts of the Cibao region. Many targeted Haitians were mostly small farmers, many of whom had been born in the Dominican Republic (and thus were Dominican citizens according to the Dominican constitution) and some whose families resided in the Dominican Republic for generations. The racial dimension to Dominican anti-Haitianism is shown as Haitians have been identified in the Dominican Republic as "black" in contrast to Dominicans. In the pre-massacre period, the colonization period served and gave voice to the anti-Haitian nationalism that had originally molded the concept of anti-hatianism. In September 2013, the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic stripped Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship. As a result, 210,000 people were stripped of their citizenship and were deported to Haiti. [19] In 2015, a young Haitian man was lynched in Santiago. The beaten body of the man was found hanging from a tree in a Santiago park with his hands and feet tied with rope. The lynching sparked protests in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States over anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. [20]
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
Miscegenation is marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms miscere and genus. The word first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, an anti-abolitionist pamphlet David Goodman Croly and others published anonymously in advance of the 1864 presidential election in the United States. The term came to be associated with laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, which were known as anti-miscegenation laws. These laws were overruled federally in 1967, and by the year 2000, all states had removed them from their laws, with Alabama being the last to do so on November 7, 2000. In the 21st century, newer scientific data shows that human populations are actually genetically quite similar. Studies show that races are more of an arbitrary social construct, and do not actually have a major genetic delineation.
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, nicknamed El Jefe, was a Dominican military commander and dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from August 1930 until his assassination in May 1961. He served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, ruling for the rest of his life as an unelected military strongman under figurehead presidents. His rule of 31 years, known to Dominicans as the Trujillo Era, was one of the longest for a non-royal leader in the world, and centered around a personality cult of the ruling family. It was also one of the most brutal; Trujillo's security forces, including the infamous SIM, were responsible for perhaps as many as 50,000 murders. These included between 12,000 and 30,000 Haitians in the infamous Parsley massacre in 1937, which continues to affect Dominican-Haitian relations to this day.
Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their race, ancestry, ethnic or national origin, and/or skin color and hair texture. Individuals can discriminate by refusing to do business with, socialize with, or share resources with people of a certain group. Governments can discriminate explicitly in law, for example through policies of racial segregation, disparate enforcement of laws, or disproportionate allocation of resources. Some jurisdictions have anti-discrimination laws which prohibit the government or individuals from being discriminated based on race in various circumstances. Some institutions and laws use affirmative action to attempt to overcome or compensate for the effects of racial discrimination. In some cases, this is simply enhanced recruitment of members of underrepresented groups; in other cases, there are firm racial quotas. Opponents of strong remedies like quotas characterize them as reverse discrimination, where members of a dominant or majority group are discriminated against.
Mulatto is a racial classification that refers to people of mixed African and European ancestry only. When speaking or writing about a singular woman in English, the word is mulatta The use of this term began in the United States of America shortly after the Atlantic Slave Trade began and its use was widespread, derogatory and disrespectful. After the post Civil Rights Era, the term is now considered to be both outdated and offensive in America. In other Anglophone countries such as the British Isles, the Caribbean and English and Dutch-speaking West Indian countries, the word mulatto is still used. The use of this word does not have the same negative associations found among English speakers. Among Latinos in both the US and Latin America, the word is used in every day speech and it's meaning is a source of racial and ethnic pride. In four of the Latin-based languages, the default, masculine word ends with the letter "o" and is written as follows: Spanish and Portuguese – mulato; Italian – mulatto. The French equivalent is mulâtre. In English, the masculine plural is written as mulattoes while in Spanish and Portuguese it is mulatos. The masculine plural in Italian is mulatti and in French it is mulâtres. The feminine plurals are: English – mulattas; Spanish and Portuguese – mulatas; Italian – mulatte; French – mulâtresses.
Dominicans are an ethno-national people, a people of shared ancestry and culture, who have ancestral roots in the Dominican Republic.
Afro–Latin Americans or Black Latin Americans are Latin Americans of sub-Saharan African heritage. African heritage is common throughout Latin America.
Afro-Dominicans are Dominicans of predominant or total Sub-Saharan African ancestry. They are a minority in the country representing 7.5% or 642,018 of the population, according to the 2022 census.
Anti-Black racism, also called anti-Black sentiment, anti-Blackness, colourphobia or Negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialised as Black people, especially those people from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas, as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanization of Black men; and the objectification of Black women.
The Parsley massacre was a mass killing of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier and in certain parts of the contiguous Cibao region in October 1937. Dominican Army troops from different areas of the country carried out the massacre on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Anti-Haitian sentiment is prejudice or social discrimination against Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
Black Hispanic and Latino Americans, also called Afro-Hispanics, Afro-Latinos, Black Hispanics, or Black Latinos, are classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget, and other U.S. government agencies as Black people living in the United States with ancestry in Latin America, Spain or Equatorial Guinea and/or who speak Spanish and/or Portuguese as either their first language or second language.
The continent of South America is culturally and racially diverse. This article examines by country and region the current and historical trends in race relations and racism within South America. Racism of various forms is to be found worldwide. Racism is widely condemned throughout the world, with 170 states signatories of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by August 8, 2006. In different countries, the forms that racism takes may be different for historic, cultural, religious, economic or demographic reasons.
Racism in Cuba refers to racial discrimination in Cuba. In Cuba, dark skinned Afro-Cubans are the only group on the island referred to as black while lighter skinned, mixed race, Afro-Cuban mulattos are often not characterized as fully black or fully white. Race conceptions in Cuba are unique because of its long history of racial mixing and appeals to a "raceless" society. The Cuban census reports that 65% of the population is white while foreign figures report an estimate of the number of whites at anywhere from 40 to 45 percent. This is likely due to the self-identifying mulattos who are sometimes designated officially as white. A common myth in Cuba is that every Cuban has at least some African ancestry, influenced by historical mestizaje nationalism. Given the high number of immigrants from Europe in the 20th century, this is far from true. Several pivotal events have impacted race relations on the island. Using the historic race-blind nationalism first established around the time of independence, Cuba has navigated the abolition of slavery, the suppression of black clubs and political parties, the revolution and its aftermath, and the special period.
Racism has been present in Brazil since its colonial period and is pointed as one of the major and most widespread types of discrimination, if not the most, in the country by several anthropologists, sociologists, jurists, historians and others. The myth of a racial democracy, a term originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande & Senzala, is used by many people in the country to deny or downplay the existence and the broad extension of racism in Brazil.
Dominican Republic–Haiti relations are the diplomatic relations between the nations of Dominican Republic and Haiti. Relations have long been hostile due to substantial ethnic and cultural differences, historic conflicts, territorial disputes, and sharing the island of Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The living standards in the Dominican Republic are considerably higher than those in Haiti. The economy of the Dominican Republic is ten times larger than that of Haiti. The migration of impoverished Haitians and historical differences have contributed to long-standing conflicts.
The Haitian minority of the Dominican Republic is the largest ethnic minority in the Dominican Republic since the early 20th century.
Colorism in the Caribbean describes discrimination based on skin tone, or colorism, in the Caribbean.
Human rights in the Dominican Republic constitute the civil and political rights and freedoms legally protected under the Constitution of the Dominican Republic and enforced by the government through common and statutory law. The majority of human rights disputes are presided over by the highest court of constitutional appeal, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal. These rights and freedoms have developed over time in accordance with the Dominican Republic's expansion from the former Spanish colony of the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo to its modern state formation. The history of human rights in the state have also been marked by the oscillation between democratic administrations, such as the current presidency of Danilo Medina, and authoritarian administrations, most significantly the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo between 16 August 1930 and 16 August 1938. As a member of the Organization of American States and the United Nations, the Dominican Republic is party to myriad legal treaties and covenants which propagate the human rights standards of the international community and have integrated the majority of these human rights directives into their domestic legislation.
reconoci.do is an activist group in the Dominican Republic, fighting discrimination against Dominicans who have ancestors from Haiti.
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