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While the world tells Rachel Dolezal that she is justified in make-believe Blackness, and while many in the Black community continue to go extra hard in the paint, defending their white Nubian Afro-centric goddess, thousands of Haitians are having their right to be considered Dominicans stripped away from them and none of us have a got-damn thing to say about it.
What I’m talking about is the mass deportations, which officially begin today in the Dominican Republic.
According to the New York Times:
“Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are facing deportation from the Dominican Republic, the latest in a series of actions by the government that have cast a light on the country’s long-troubled relationship with its Haitian neighbors.
Undocumented workers in the Dominican Republic had until Wednesday to register their presence in the country, in the hope of being allowed to stay.
The government says nearly 240,000 migrant workers born outside the Dominican Republic have started the registration process. But there are an estimated 524,000 foreign-born migrant workers in the country — about 90 percent of whom are Haitian, according to a 2012 survey — leaving a huge population of migrants at risk of deportation.”
Many of those migrant workers slave away in poor conditions at privately-owned sugar cane plantations throughout the country. They are also often the subject brutal discrimination in a country which favors lighter-skin and other features that are more akin to people of European descent. According to the Times, this latest act of aggression against the Haitians peaked back in 2013 when the government attempted to strip citizenship of children born to Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic as far back as 1929. The Times also reports: “Some advocates worry that the mechanism to identify potential deportees will be to target any dark-skinned people suspected of being of Haitian descent, whether they have papers or not.
“There are no adequate screening mechanisms,” said Angelita K. Baeyens, the programs director at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.”
As to why this is happening, many human rights experts have suggested that the DR’s many attempts at mass deportations of Haitians has more to do with the split island nation’s long-standing racial hatred of darker skinned people than actual concerns about immigration. As the Washington Post has reported:
“There was a time when that split between the two countries was drawn with blood; the 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations. The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian — or whose inability to roll the “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away.
The Dajabón River, which serves as the northernmost part of the international border between the two countries, had “risen to new heights on blood alone,” wrote Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat.
The massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans,” according to Border of Lights, an organization that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre in 2012.”
And as one legal expert tells the Post:
“”We’ve called it as such because there are definitely linkages,” she told The Washington Post this week. “You don’t want to look a few years back and say, ‘This is what was happening and I didn’t call it.’ ”
If you get nothing else from this piece, I hope that it makes you think about the imbalance in who does and who does not get to transcend race in this world. White people can lay claim to just about anything. Hell, there are likely a bunch of White Europeans laying up on the sandy beaches for years as “expats” in the Dominican Republic and I highly doubt that they are looked at with suspicion or told that they are not welcome there.
However and throughout history, it is the darker skinned amongst us who are alway told that they are not welcomed – into countries, into culture and into Whiteness (or anything close to it). That includes in America, in the Dominican Republic and in South Africa, where other Africans are being assaulted and deported by their own brethren while the descendents of those who robbed them of their land and forced them into apartheid, get to keep their citizenship. Signing petitions and boycotting tourism in the Dominican Republic, along with products made from the Dominican Republic, are great short-term solutions. But until we as a global community stop valuing Whiteness and using it as a currency to institute boundaries and borders, daker skin people will always suffer.
