Anti-Dominicanism, a No Lesser Evil

In the recent crisis involving Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the world seems to be lacking stories that show Dominicans in identification with human rights or blackness. In the absence of balanced representations, assumptions turn rash and hopeless.

In the book form of the film documentary series “Black in Latin America,” African American intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. goes as far as to suggest a measure of “schizophrenia” on the part of Dominicans. This would be a reckless assertion if it were not that verdicts such as this appear regularly within an atmosphere of negative criticism in the press and social media where an audience seems to grow inured.

Yet, the air to revile so blatantly begs the question of whether the cast diagnosis is not in itself a reflection of the state of disorder reached by some intellectuals and others who inform opinions in the United States, as they seem to be losing patience and clear judgment when dealing with the DR.

Gates is hardly the instigator, for nearly fifty years before in 1967, a Dominican exiled in Venezuela, Pedro Andrés Pérez Cabral, already ground the axe and dissected the national consciousness that he himself identified as partly unsound. He unleashed vitriol against Dominican identity in some sections of a generally useful book titled La comunidad mulata (The Mulatto Community), as he deployed an analytical style seemingly influenced by the works of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, particularly the Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), which appears listed as a source in La comunidad.

At times, Pérez Cabral’s language suggests homoerotic yearnings of a confused Dominican people who hate their own skin and lust after white leaders. He attacks whitening and implies a defense of blackness, as he claims that pure races have backbone while fusion yields a degraded collective. But his assertions veer often into extremes that reverse his purpose to expose or defeat racism.

For example, Dominican diehard Joaquin Balaguer used a similar line of argument for years to do the opposite: exalt whiteness and demean blackness. In his 1983 La isla al revés (The Backward Island), Balaguer warned Dominicans against mixing with Haitians, for in his view they ruined all attempts at human progress and organized society. And so it is that the junction of parallels becomes true.

Herding Dominicans in as the sheep gone astray is as mistaken as are rants to keep Haitians out. In every case, Haiti is cast as a symbol of blackness and the DR typecast as its negation. Perceptively, African American anthropologist Kimberly Eison Simmons avoids falling in this trench.

In her book, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, Simmons steered clear of Pathology Road, dealing but moving past the racial contradictions and returning an account of Dominicans that is neither romantic nor singularizing. Her stay and findings in the DR resonated with some of her life experiences in the US, as she suggested the significance of context and the need for observers to relinquish exclusive copyrights to blackness as conditions to appreciate how Dominicans express themselves in a local or US setting.

To study Dominicans on their own terms is a bold line followed by her arranged translation of The African Presence in Santo Domingo, a work of Dominican blackness by local Dominican sociologist Carlos Andújar. Simmons answers the question of black “denial” with a not-so-obvious reply and with the matter for another question: is prejudice all that we should know of the DR?

Anti-Haitianism in the DR is an ideology with a government patent and whose practices are documented. It involves an effort to discriminate and deny recourse to victims of xenophobia and racism. Anti-Dominicanism, as it plumes its feathers on the other hand, comes as an attitude parting from a conviction, ignorance or lack of efforts to present critical information that warns against lampooning a nation and its people. It is an obstinate scheme.

No one takes the stories of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. only to highlight those blacks who betrayed them and impose the view of duplicity of African Americans. There is hardly a squabble, however, when Dominicans are portrayed widely as the epitome of self-hate and anti-blackness, who blame Haiti for their mental deformation and would sever their skin for a try at racial mutation.

The complex reality of a people is outplayed by this cruel satire which, impervious to changes and sobering facts, is dealt best by indulging in its own theatre of irony, for no light attempt at rectification could alter the tendentious portrayal.

The anticipation for the final act in this “ethno-drama” is infecting the public with rage and many Dominicans with anxiety. How is the story going to end for Hispaniola? It certainly has the sparkle of a classic thriller. When injustices in the DR, such as stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship, are denounced internationally while leaving the impression that Dominicans are not moved to indignation, the stage is set for a famous ending that channels the tragedies of old.

Sodom and Gomorrah, we are told, had a punishment befitting annihilation through scorching cataclysm because not a single soul was free from its folly. The techniques of effacing are no less spectacular today because they employ tactics of economic drought. In this newly rising script, fiery sanctions against the DR can also burn Haiti (the House of Lot). If Judgment Day starts in the form of a ban on Dominican economy—a lit fuse clearing the way to the Overture of 1812 finale—Haitians will have to run faster than Napoleon, and then swim, to avoid some of the exploding brimstone, as fate bound them to their neighbors in one island.

The truth is unsettling as is the fiction. Anti-Haitians and anti-Dominicans work alike for doom and disunion. It is true. One lives in the past prophesying of a coming avalanche of Haitian immigrants fulfilling a conspiracy, and the other lives on the moon demanding an apology of the Dominican people they call “lunatics” for living their history.

George Washington Carver once said: “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” It is good advice to change what we now see. Anti-Haitianism will live for as long as the politics and activism against it are less about forging ties and more about disqualifying Dominicans as allies for justice. We cannot ignore the mirror and the consequences no matter how big the outrage.

In the DR, Dominicans of Haitian descent can face ugly attitudes that ridicule their ancestry. How will it be different when, in the US, Americans of Dominican descent are told that they too come from a family tree diseased at the roots? This is the fusillade carried by the media, well-funded figures and other bullhorns of monotone determinism. They become that which they eliminate, and that is no less of a problem.