(NAME-MCE) "Black Denial" in the Dominican Republic

[Aukram Burton]

Black denial (from: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html)



Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is  
a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black



By Frances Robles

frobles at miamiherald.com



SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from  
China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair. Not that Matos  
has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call  
that pelo malo -- bad hair.



But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she  
said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking  
hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not  
that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."



And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less  
black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair- 
straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin  
whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.



Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much  
by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose  
and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And,  
experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.



"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have  
nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican- 
American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing,  
I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.



"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not  
about skin color. It's culture."



The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule  
-- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of  
racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically  
encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than  
African ancestry.



Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in  
reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people  
to be considered white.



Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as  
they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo  
Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)



LACK OF INTEREST



As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the  
nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly  
fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's  
Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in  
the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a  
community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of  
humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving  
this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta,  
curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has  
pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect  
many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I  
don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"



A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned  
people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent  
of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only  
11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.



To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned  
Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so  
racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned  
Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or  
mulatto, but rarely negro.



The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to  
describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their  
own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms,  
including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and  
"toasted."

"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told  
he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black.  
"I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me,  
'You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no  
blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."



Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)



THE HISTORY

Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to  
distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts  
said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The  
country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s,  
shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.

Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic  
dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and  
many slaves were freed and rose up in society.



Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of  
Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted  
against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822,  
Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly  
Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.



To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not  
from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.



"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism  
and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel  
Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the  
Haitian."

Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly  
promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many  
racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."



The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often  
complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s,  
he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading  
black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he  
was actually Haitian.



Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste  
Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance  
troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about  
the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in  
his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)



"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said  
Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we  
are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."



Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled  
him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.



"I remember the man saying, 'If he wants to be black, let him be  
black!' '' Jiménez said.



Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one  
million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the  
sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly  
include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched  
in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship  
and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian  
migrants.

When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert  
F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by  
trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.



"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something  
bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ''Black is associated with  
dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of  
beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where  
braids and natural hair are prohibited."



Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European  
canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty  
pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker- 
skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.



Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo  
Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)



CULTURE PULL

Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is  
so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.

"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in  
it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me  
if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be  
seen."

The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening  
treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta  
Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty  
at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax  
their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the  
Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.



"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love  
yourself a lot. That's someone saying, 'I am going to take care of  
me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."

Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make  
dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many  
black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until  
they visited the United States.



"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were  
rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said  
Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City  
College in New York. "When you ask, 'What are you?' they don't give  
you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our  
blackness is simply what you want to hear."



Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows  
out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a  
university meeting with her natural curls.



Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf  
displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo  
Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)



"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.

Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her  
country, Hernández leapt to her feet.

"You should see how they come in here with their big asses!'' she  
said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her  
back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking  
they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really  
pretty?' "

Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She  
said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman  
being beautiful were something strange.

She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a  
Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of  
hair straightening products.

"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she  
said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that  
nest! Someone light a match!' ''



Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as  
Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios  
neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the  
streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/ 
Miami Herald)



'IT WAS HURTFUL'

Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American,  
said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in  
literature, people insulted her in the street.

Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her  
research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to  
Haiti.

"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun  
because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . .  
I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial  
comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the  
Dominican Republic.

"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful  
things. But when it's people who look just like me?"



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