Dominican Republic Makes Racism the Law

TruthDig 
Mark Kurlansky
January 6, 2014.

The ogre is loose on the island again. The highest court in the Dominican Republic, the Constitutional Tribunal, has taken a huge step backward with Ruling 0168-13. The Sept. 23 decision proclaimed that any Dominicans who descend from undocumented Haitians going back as far as 1929 are to be stripped of their citizenship. This affects an estimated 250,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent but mostly without any connection to Haiti—Spanish speaking Dominicans with no other country. What does it mean that 2.5 percent of the Dominican population (the same percentage in the U.S. would be more people than live in Arizona or Indiana) has just lost most of its legal rights because of race? Why have the old Dominican specters of racism and political instability, disturbing prospects in a country with a history of civil war, risen up at what had seemed a quiet moment for the troubled country?

Juliana and her daughter Maria are two of many who were born in the 

Dominican Republic but may now lose their citizenship, and the 

rights that go along with it, because of a 

recent Constitutional Court decision.

Race has been the great political divide in the Dominican Republic since its founding. In 1822, the Haitian army that had defeated Napoleon in the world’s first successful slave rebellion and declared the first independent modern black state marched across the island to the Spanish colony on the other side, took it over and immediately abolished slavery. The Haitians believed that only a nation with a large black population could be depended on to never bring back the hated practice of slavery. They began gathering free blacks, often liberated slaves, from the U.S. to make the population “blacker.”

Feb. 27, Dominican independence day, does not celebrate independence from Spain but rather from Haiti in 1844. On Feb. 27, 1844, a nation named the Dominican Republic that banned slavery and welcomed a diverse population was founded, but the people have been arguing about the diverse population ever since.

According to official tallies, the Dominican population is 73 percent mixed, 16 percent white and 11 percent black. So for those who want to worry about such things, population shifts could make Dominicans whiter or blacker. It has become part of not only the politics but the folklore of the country. Uneducated peasants sometimes believe that a pregnant woman can assure a whiter baby by eating white colored food. Milk of magnesia or milk itself is sometimes recommended.

A racist sector of the Dominican political class has clung not only to Western attitudes of black inferiority but to white Western countries themselves. At various times in Dominican history there have been attempts to annex the country back to Spain, to France, to the United States and to Símón Bolívar’s Gran Colombia—almost anything to assure that it would not join up with the black people on the other side of their island.

Most of the Haitians who came to the Dominican Republic, including the parents of most of the Dominicans who now find themselves declared stateless, were brought in by unscrupulous elite Dominicans who defied the country’s laws to procure cheap labor for the often American owned sugar companies. If slavery was not to be allowed this was the closest thing to it. They were kept in barracks lacking basic amenities and deprived of all civil rights.

In 1912, in an effort to prevent what it saw as a “blackening of the population,” the government decreed highly restrictive measures to limit the number of black people allowed to enter the country. The sugar companies just ignored the restrictions and brought in Haitian workers; the government did not try to stop them because Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were in the midst of a sugar boom popularly known as “the dance of the millions.”

Under the American trained and supported tyrant Rafael Trujillo, who ruled for 31 years, an estimated 20,000 Haitians were massacred in five days in October 1937. Trujillo said that he was “cleansing” the border region.

The racism has continued. In 1983 the then-president of the Dominican Republic, Joaquin Balaguer, published a book “La Isla al Revés” (The Island in Reverse) claiming that the Haitians were still trying to invade but now their secret weapon was “biological.” According to Balaguer, Haitians “multiply with a rapidity that is almost comparable to that of a vegetable species.”

In 1996 when José Francisco Peña Gómez—a popular Dominican politician with black skin and African features—ran for president, Balaguer insisted that he was an undercover Haitian with a secret plan to turn the Dominican Republic back over to Haiti. Peña Gómez, a Dominican with Dominican born parents and one Haitian grandparent, was frequently said to be Haitian. Under the new ruling in which this bigotry has the sanction of law, were he still alive he could lose his Dominican citizenship.

Read the rest here.

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Comment: My head hurts just reading about this racist mess.  Be sure to check out the commentary section under the post at TruthDig for an idea of the trolling bigotry that supports this heinous ruling.

Onward!