Anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic

Antihaitianismo (Spanish for "anti-Haitianism") is a bias against Haitians and descendants of Haitians by Dominicans.

Description

Antihaitianismo is an ideology unique to Dominicans. Its origin can be traced back to a policy of racial segregation instituted by the Spaniards in the colony of Santo Domingo (present day Dominican Republic). Human Rights Watch has stated in their reports that the perceived difference between Haitians and Dominican's can be based from colonial times from linguistic, cultural, and racial differences, where Creoles or Haitians were thought to be descendants of Blacks or Africans while Dominicans were taught to believe they were descendants of Spanish ancestors. [1] It remains an issue in present-day Dominican Republic.

Antihaitianismo was strongly institutionalized during the regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. This policy became part of the Dominican school curriculum, which Trujillo relied "on the schools and the media to disseminate these ideas" Native Dominicans were taught that they were "white," and were to be proud to be descendants of the Spanish conquistadores. On the other hand Haitians, who share the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, were to be viewed under this racial policy as "merely" descendants of African slaves.

This educational policy became conjoined under Trujillo with a "Dominicanization" of the Dominican-Haitian border region, which culminated with the massacre of 17,000-35,000 Haitians in October of 1937, an ethnic cleansing event subsequently named the Parsley Massacre.

The government of Trujillo then initiated a policy of developing the border region by encouraging light-skinned Dominicans to settle there (as a matter of fact, Trujillo actively sought to raise the number of Caucasians by sponsoring immigration from Spaniards escaping from the war-torn Spain and Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, during the 1930s and '40s). These policies only served to perpetuate antihaitianismo within the Dominican Republic. Consequently a number of Dominicans still share this view of racial policy and history. However, this ideology can be viewed as contradictory, as the vast majority of Dominicans are of both African, Spanish European and Amerindian heritage. Groups outside the Dominican Republic thus see biased Dominicans as having a self-identity crisis.

Another factor also contributing to the mistrust of Haitians by Dominicans is the fear the latter have regarding to the voodoo that is widely practiced in the Western half of the island. Many Dominicans still believe in both santería and witchcraft, reason for which they believe that Haitians, which "are more experienced and deeper immersed into the black arts", will be easily capable of putting curses on the unwary.

Today antihaitianismo remains as a prejudice against those being dark-skinned by those that are light-skinned. Because of Haiti's much higher black-to-other ratio of ancestry as compared to the Dominican Republic, many of the biased Dominicans perceive all dark-skinned individuals on the island as Haitian or all Haitians as dark-skinned, a racist and nationalist misconception..

Most tourists, especially those coming from the U.S. and Europe, have the following recollection of race relations in the Dominican Republic:

• Haitians not only are destined to occupy the lowest echelons of society, but are actually not even considered a part thereof. They are used as slave labor (especially in cane cutting, which is seldom performed through the use of specialized machinery) and frequently humiliated, and their subservient character is continuously enforced and assumed as an axiom, even by Dominicans less educated and affluent than them.

• Blacker-than-average citizens are routinely called "Haitian", and in the best of cases this is meant as a form of verbal teasing.

• people whose phenotype immediately signals a very profuse, if not dominant, African heritage consider and classify themselves white and engage in a caste system designed to maintain, in some or other way, such self-definition.

• racist comments such as haitiano/negro/prieto de mierda (the approximate equivalents of nigger) are used very often in intimate circles by many Dominicans, some of them of above average education and purported leftist leanings. Hence, racism is arguably the only transversal trait in Dominican society: every citizen, regardless of ideology or social level, is prone to engage in it sometime -- a trait somehow comparable to the contempt and derision of Roma people in Spain and Albanians in Italy.

• The historical leader of the populist Right (and former right-hand of dictator Trujillo) and the historical leader of the Left united in a "National Patriotic Front" in order to prevent a Dominican of Haitian ancestry from becoming President

.

All of these attitudes come, in most cases, from people who would be immediately classified as black in any immigration bureau of North America or Europe.

Antihaitianismo continues to manifest itself in the form of apparent hate crimes perpetrated by Dominican citizens, mainly in the border provinces of the Dominican Republic. Haitians are also frequently used as scapegoats globally, for instance, blaming them for the propagation of illnesses, proliferation of crime, destruction of natural resources, etc. As such, the prejudice is being challenged by many human rights organizations.

See also

• Racial segregation#Dominican_Republic
• Sonia Pierre

External links

• Sonia Pierre’s struggle for justice — article in The Socialist Worker
• The Double-Edged Sword of Racism and Sexism — article about black women in the Dominican Republic
• Human Rights Watch report