Jeffrey Buchanan and I shot each other a glance. We could barely conceal the amazed looks on our faces.
We were listening to Sonia Pierre, a tall, slender black woman who was born in the Dominican Republic. But Pierre’s parents came from Haiti, which is on the western part of the island of Hispaniola shared by both countries. Pierre was talking about the racial classifications in the Dominican Republic.
“There is white, light Indian, dark Indian, trigeno — the color of cinnamon,” Pierre said. “There’s no recognition of Afro descent. What is black is Haitian.”
Pierre’s brief description of the bizarre racial situation in the Dominican Republic -- and “bizarre” might be too kind a word -- is what stunned me and Buchanan. I’m a 55-year-old black columnist. Buchanan is a young, white graduate of Johns Hopkins University. But we were both shocked to learn that there is at least one country with an even more wacky racial problem than our own.
Buchanan is the information officer for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. Every year, the organization gives out the RFK Human Rights Award. Pierre was the 2006 winner for her work in advocating for the rights of Haitian immigrants and Haitians born in the Dominican Republic. Pierre’s winning of the RFK Human Rights Award gets my vote for the most-ignored news story of 2006.
A Lexis Nexis search revealed only four stories about Pierre in 2006, Two ran after she won the award, two before. Compare that to the hundreds of stories that ran about the plight of illegal immigrants in the United States.
Americans have had their humps busted lately about the supposedly disgraceful way we treat illegal immigrants, especially Latinos. But would any of those Latino illegal immigrants in the United States want to trade places with Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic? I think not. Those Latinos wouldn’t even want to swap places with native Dominicans who have Haitian ancestry.
Pierre, who was 43 when she received the RFK Human Rights Award in late November, was born on a batee in the Dominican Republic (A batee is a sugar plantation.). It was Haitian immigrants — documented and undocumented — who mainly worked those plantations. As she was growing up, Pierre saw how the Dominican plantation owners would treat the migrant Haitian workers “like their property.” She saw how those same owners and plantation supervisors would select the prettier Haitian women as sex slaves.
She remembers the Dominican field guards -- a veritable police force -- who “were very repressive and very anti-Haitian.” Seeing these abuses led Pierre to her first foray into political activism -- encouraging, at the age of 13, her fellow workers to strike.
These days Pierre uses her activism to fight for immigrant and citizenship rights for Haitian-Dominicans. Her mother, who’s lived on the same batee since 1951, can’t get legal documentation and still has to hide when Dominican government officials conduct deportation sweeps. In 1997, Pierre took up the case of two girls of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic who couldn’t get birth certificates and other documents showing that they were Dominican citizens, even though the law of the land says they are.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in 2005 that the Dominican Republic systematically denies Dominicans of Haitian descent citizenship based on race. Pierre received threats after the decision. The wording of the threats is most revealing.
“You that are trying to make our country blacker,” one caller said, “your children are going to pay for it.” The threat was made against Pierre’s four children.
“It’s evident that this situation happens because of racism,” Pierre said.
That “r” word is something most black Americans refuse to use unless we’re talking about white folks in America. We rarely, if ever, use it about other “people of color.” We assume that other “people of color” are cool with us, just because they’re “people of color.”
Pierre, growing up in the Dominican Republic, can’t afford such delusions. She knows the grief mixed-race black folks have given full-blooded black folks. And, being a descendant of Haitian parents, she probably knows the reverse is true.
There’s a story about how Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian slave who successfully led black armies to defeat Spanish, French and British expeditionary forces, asked his general Jean Jacques Dessalines why he had massacred both whites and mulattoes.
“I couldn’t tell the difference,” Dessalines is said to have answered.
It’s that kind of bad blood that feeds the racism in the Dominican Republic today. I tip my hat to Pierre for daring to speak out about it.
zsana,
People of all hues are ignorant to a degree but in the case of mulatos vs negros, I would never label it racist. It is definately ignorance, abuse or lack of power like crab fighting in a barrel to get to the top!
My posiiton is that racism requires a type of de jure authority to implement, as in a legal code.
The tete a tete between Haitians and Dominicanos is a classic struggle rooted in 'who gets the best scraps from the masters' table'!
zsana,
People of all hues are ignorant to a degree but in the case of mulatos vs negros, I would never label it racist. It is definately ignorance, abuse or lack of power like crab fighting in a barrel to get to the top!
My posiiton is that racism requires a type of de jure authority to implement, as in a legal code.
The tete a tete between Haitians and Dominicanos is a classic struggle rooted in 'who gets the best scraps from the masters' table'!
Load of hogwash. Racism is about a beleif in innate difference between people and that one is better than the other. Period.
My posiiton is that racism requires a type of de jure authority to implement, as in a legal code.
Salsassin wrote:
Racism is about a belief in innate difference between people and that one is better than the other. Period.
In this context, we may be talking about a form of colorism (more Euro versus less Euro), rather than racism. But if the disdain or mistreatment is truly based upon presumed heredity, rather than upon mere appearance, then I would say that Jaime's definition comes closer to this site's standard (see The Rules 3.3.5 and 3.3.6). Not that Punjabtrini does not have the right to use the word any way that he choses. But he should be aware that most readers of this forum would interpret the word to mean: "Belief in someone’s inferiority, or mistreatment, based upon ancestry." (Without regard to whether such belief or mistreatment was implemented by statute.)
As stated, Punjabtrini's definition can lead to odd conclusions. For example, using Pubjabtrini's definition, the only racism that exists in the United States today is Black-on-White racism, since the only codified statutes that currently give special privileges or preferences based on "race" empower Blacks over Whites.
Racism is about a beleif in innate difference between people and that one is better than the other. Period.
By itself, that has never been the problem. To make that reality or better yet, part of an institutional process, that had to be made into law.
I know I am better than alot of people but that does not give me the right to abuse them.
Even the definition is way off because it is not truthful.
So the definiton of racism actually meant that Europeans believed they were superior and had to right to do what they wished with non Europeans. In some instances, laws were passes even stating that x people were fractions of man (how absurd but people believed it).
Joined: 02 Feb 2007 {Posts: 255 } Location: California
Posted: Sat 08 Sep 2007 18:21 Post subject:
punjabtrini wrote:
Quote:
Racism is about a beleif in innate difference between people and that one is better than the other. Period.
By itself, that has never been the problem. To make that reality or better yet, part of an institutional process, that had to be made into law.
I know I am better than alot of people but that does not give me the right to abuse them.
Even the definition is way off because it is not truthful.
So the definiton of racism actually meant that Europeans believed they were superior and had to right to do what they wished with non Europeans. In some instances, laws were passes even stating that x people were fractions of man (how absurd but people believed it).
Good point! Racialism was coined to stress the belief part of racism. Racism, as you correctly point out, is more than simple belief.
By itself, that has never been the problem. To make that reality or better yet, part of an institutional process, that had to be made into law.
I know I am better than alot of people but that does not give me the right to abuse them.
Power can come in as little as being bigger than soemone else and no one else around. law is not necessary. Acting on racism is not racialism. Racialism truly means the belief in races. Racists are racialists who believe in the superiority of one race over another.
Quote:
Even the definition is way off because it is not truthful.
So the definiton of racism actually meant that Europeans believed they were superior and had to right to do what they wished with non Europeans. In some instances, laws were passes even stating that x people were fractions of man (how absurd but people believed it).
And there are Afrodiasporic people that beleive Whites are mutants. Your point. Both are racist.
Joined: 04 Oct 2006 {Posts: 228 } Location: CT/U.S.A.
Posted: Sat 08 Sep 2007 20:44 Post subject:
punjabtrini
IMO, your definition of Racism is more on point than this site's accepted definition of Racism because it encompasses the "meat and potatoes" of why and how Euro-descended individuals have held power over non-Europeans for centuries. HST, your point about Racialism mustn't be overlooked as well.
IMO, Racism requires access to social/political power and "a ruling class social control formation" ("White" or "White-identified" people) within a society in order to be effective. Prejudice requires no access to social/political power within a society in order to be effective, but instead it only needs the personal belief system by an individual that believes one set of characteristics (whether physical or mental) makes one better than the other, usually because one is perceived as different (whether physical or mental) from the other.
Racism is a power system that was designed to keep one group of people "in check" while giving another set of people "privelages" that aren't necessarily deserved and passing laws/policies to implement/protect them.
Quote:
Summary of the Argument of
The Invention of the White Race by its author, Theodore W. Allen
(Part One)
1. The two-volume work presents a historical treatment of a few precisely defined concepts: of the essential nature of the social control structure of class societies; of racial oppression without reference to "phenotype" factors; of racial slavery in continental Anglo-America as a particular form of racial oppression; of the "white race"--an all-class association of European-Americans held together by "racial" privileges conferred on laboring-class European-Americans relative to African-Americans--as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life.
On the misleading concept of "race"
2. The concept of "race," in the scientific sense of particular group-identifying characteristics resulting from aeons of inbreeding in isolation, has nothing to do with "race relations," whatever that term may be taken to mean, in the four thousand years of recorded human history; certainly not in the nano-second of evolutionary time represented by the four hundred years since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. We have the assurance of eminent authorities in the fields of physical anthropology, genetics and biology, such as Stanley M. Garn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, that the study of evolution has nothing but disclaimers to contribute to the understanding of "racism" as a historical phenomenon; as Dobzhansky puts it: "The mighty vision of human equality belongs to the realm of ethics and politics, not to that of biology."Source: Thodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven and London, 1962), p. 13. With greater particularity, Garn writes that Race "has nothing to do with racism, which is simply the attempt to deny some people deserved opportunities simply because of their origin, or to accord other people certain undeserved opportunities only because of their origin."Source: Stanley M. Garn, Human Races, rev. 2nd printing (Springfield, Illinois, 1962), pp. v-vi.
The assertion that opens Chapter I of Volume One of The Invention of the White Race is altogether consistent with those disclaimers: "However one may choose to define the term 'racial'-- it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one group of human beings by another."Source: Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols., (New York, 1994-1997), 1:27.
When, therefore, a group of human beings from "multiracial" (the anthropologists' term) Europe goes to North America or South Africa, and there, by constitutional fiat, incorporates itself as the "white race," that is no part of genetic evolution. It is, rather, a political act: the invention of "the white race." Thus it lies within the proper sphere of social scientists, and is an appropriate objective for alteration by social activists.
EXAMPLE:
An Andaman Islander (who lives in India) who happens to not like an Indian (who also lives in India) is not the same as an Indian (who lives in India) who doesn't like an Andaman Islander (who also lives in India). In India, the Indian has the power and privelages that will socially and politically protect him while discriminating against the Andaman Islander by virtue of the Indian being a member of the "majority" population that holds the power structure of the Indian society as a whole.
The Andaman Islander's dislike or prejudiced feelings towards the Indian in India hold no realpower, thus making his feelings null and void. But on the other hand, the Indian's dislike or prejudiced feelings towards the Andaman Islander are socially and politically supported by a national power structure that unfairly benefits/supports the Indian making that Racism, IMO.
There is a big difference that seems to be missed by this site's accepted definition of what Racism is and how it is implemented in a society, both historically and in it's contemporay applications.
Yes, there are plenty of "Black" Americans who don't like "White" Americans but does that translate into Racism or prejudiced feelings? Will those ill-feelings by "Black" Americans towards "White" Americans result in the denial of any of the social luxuries that are usually afforded to most "White-identified" people? Hell no!
On the other hand...
There are plenty of "White" Americans who don't like "Black" Americans but does that translate into Racism or prejudiced feelings? Do those ill-feelings by "White" Americans towards "Black" Americans result in the denial of any of the social luxuries that could be be afforded to "Black-identified" people? Hell yes!
Of course, "oppressed" people can make it in an "oppressed" society in spite of the Racism and discrimination they receive in societies dominated/colonized by Europeans/Euro-descendants, but one cannot/must not forget the color-based intolerance/indifference of "true" Racism in attempts to "euphamize" the negative effects of Racism/"White" Supremacy against African/Afro-descendants the world over. It is what it is...
This thread is now over in accordance with rule 3.7
Quote:
Once a Dispute is Revealed to be a Semantic Difference, End It. — Many disputes turn out to be mere differences in word usage between the parties. Once this is apparent, you must end the dispute immediately.
I still think that Punjabtrini's definition is useless because it says that only Blacks are capable of racism because current laws that distinguish by "race" give preference to Blacks. But it is his choice and he may continue to use the definition that "racism" means solely codified law. In any event, this thread in particular has clearly met the cloture of paragraph 3.7.
'
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