Jeannette Mejia,
TCCS Student (MS Candidate ’19)
In 2013, the Dominican Republic ruled to revoke the citizenships of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The attempt and actions of the Dominican government to expel Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent, time and time again, is one that is fueled by anti-Haitian sentiment.
These sentiments are not new and follow a long history of anti-blackness in the Dominican Republic. This anti-blackness arose from colonization of Hispaniola in 1492 by the Spanish regime, the subsequent enslavement of the African peoples forcibly brought to the island, Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804, and the Dominican Republic’s thirty years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo.
The colonization of the island by France and Spain split the island into two – the eastern hemisphere of the Dominican Republic and the western side as Haiti. This division did not cause anti-Haitian sentiment per se but it did separate people who share the island. The interests of the United States, which sought to annex the country in the late 1800s, in addition to the colonial interests of France and Spain further deepened this division of the island and its inhabitants.
Additionally, the United States’ perspective towards Dominicans not only impacted the ways that Dominicans viewed themselves, but it also had an impact on how the rest of the world viewed people of the island. For example, in 1871, several U.S senators visited the Dominican Republic and noted that most citizens of the country were “mixed” both of African and Spanish descent and that the white blood was dominant in the country. They concluded that this mixture made it a white nation. Subsequently, this complex racial identity was both internalized by Dominicans and exported as the understanding of Dominicans in countries of power.
Black Dominicans, in short, came to see themselves not just as Black but as “white Black” while Haitians became viewed as “just” black. This conception gave Dominicans, as well as other nations, a sense of superiority over Haitians. The “negrophobia” that emerged out of the internalized identities given to people of the Dominican Republic underlie the anti-Haitian sentiments that still so heavily impact the country today.
Today, the Dominican government still tries to expel Haitian citizens and Dominicans of Haitian descent. I pose that one of the reasons that this phenomenon is still occurring is due to the internalized anti-blackness initiated on purpose by countries of power, such as the United States, and the internalized identity of whiteness also imposed by these countries. The effort to remove Haitians, who are in fact Dominican, only benefits the former colonizer and invader of the country.
Silvio Torres, The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity (1998): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2634170.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6dcb212d1d8c48bce77adf7f35406ade
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