The Study of Racialism

From: Lynne Guitar [mailto:lynneguitar@yahoo.com] I wish I knew, Jaime, but it would take a lot of time and research to find out. I would guess that the number would be very few, for there is no social, political, or economic advantage to claiming to be "indio," in fact, quite the opposite, for to be "indio" is synonymous with being "stupid" and "gullible." Also, the Dominican teachers and school books hit hard on extinction for the Taino--most Dominicans accept the word of the "authorities" without question, even when their parents and grandparents use terms and concepts that have come down to them via the Taino.

Jorge Estevez Taino Testimony Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink
Jorge Estevez from Laguna Salada, Cibao, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

My name is Jorge Estevez, my family comes from a town in the Dominican Republic known today as "Laguna Salada" (salted Lagoon) but part of it is still called "Jaibon". At the turn of the century, the whole town was known as "Guabay". Jaibon is in the "Cibao" region of the Island.

All my family came from the campo (country side). Some family members have never left the campo and are still there today. We immigrated to the U.S. in 1961. I was left behind with my father and did not make it back to New York until I was 5 years old. We settled in the Inwood section of Upper Manhattan.

From early on, being one of the few Dominican families in the area, I became aware of how distinct we were from the other people in the neighborhood. We had different words for many things that other Latinos had, for example, we would say "un chin" as apposed to un poquito, or Auyama for calabasa, himagua instead of twins, ciguato instead of podrido, etc., and this among other things became a source of pride, in who we are and where we came from, for me.

On Saturday mornings my mother and grandmother told stories of our campo that fascinated me. There were stories of "Ciguapas," creatures that lived in the woods and had long hair and inverted feet. There were the stories of brave Indians who would rather die than succumb to the Spanish. Women whom my family believed were beautiful were always compared to Anacaona, a Taino Cacika (chief) who was murdered by the Spanish. My mother always maintained that bravery and jealousy were the two things that ruled an Indian’s life. My mother would put us to sleep with songs with Indian themes, one in particular she created from an old Cuban poem dedicated to the Taino.

My grandmother always told us that we were Indio. Even when I pointed out to her that we had family members who were black, she would in turn point out the ones that looked Indian or Spanish. To her it did not matter how mixed we were, because we had a history in Jaibon and that history was ultimately Indian. My mother on the other hand always told us that we were Indian and Black, and although she never used the word Taino to describe us, she did use Indio often. When I wanted to know about our African heritage she would just raise her shoulders and tell me she did not know what that was, but if it was anything like the Haitians, then we were different. She never spoke in racist terms when it came To Afro- Haitian/Dominicans because she recognized them as being a part of who we are as well. Her knowledge of the campo however was incredible as was her assertion of our connection to these things.

Some tales involved family members who had strange powers, and could shape-shift. My grandmother’s uncle, Don Choro was said to be able to change into any animal or plant. Other stories included "Botijas" (dreams) in which Indians would bring you messages or point out where buried treasure was hidden.

Of all the things we learned, nothing compared to "Casabe" and the planting of food crops and medicines. They spoke of "tua-tua" and how it could only be picked at certain times of the day, but that it was a great cure for diarrhea. Guanabana leaves were great for headaches, and so on. Yagua and Cana were the best for making Bohios (thatched roof houses), and guano was good for weaving Hamacas, arganas, and macuotos. "Cayucos" were a type of cactus that produced a fruit called "yaso" and it was made into a drink, as was the "behuco de Indio" that was used for "mabi".

The Casabe is made from the bitter yucca, which is poisonous. When we made casabe my mother would tell us that the best utensil to spread the yuca flour on the griddle was the bottom shell of a Hicotea (fresh water turtle). This always bothered me because I always liked keeping turtles in the house, but my mother would only allow land turtles, not the water kind, because she insisted they brought bad luck. When I questioned her as to why it brought bad luck, she just didn’t know. All she knew was that her grandparents in the campo always maintained that these animals should not be kept in the home.

Years later I read a Taino creation story from a book and realized why she had this taboo. According to the story the spirit being Deminan Caracarcol had children with a fresh water turtle, and these children became the first people, so in essence the turtle was a symbol of our mother and our ancestors never ate her flesh for that reason. It was then that I understood why my mother perpetuated a taboo with out even knowing why. After 500 years of Christianity, it is truly amazing how certain taboos and traditions have remained. Owls for example are considered messengers of death in the Dominican Republic. Many Native people in this Hemisphere also have this same perception of owls. In Europe the owl is seen as a symbol of wisdom.

I remember how once, while my mother was making casabe and telling me stories, my mind drifted back in time, and I wondered if maybe 500 years ago there was some other little boy watching his mother make casabe while listening to stories of our homeland, of heroic warriors and great shamans. At that moment I knew that our connection to these things are strong and it is the root of who we are and defines us as a people.

For me it boils down to where I come from. I identify with the roots of our culture in the Caribbean. I am extremely proud of our heritage. So when I am asked where I come from, I always answer: I am Taino from the Dominican Republic, from the town of Jaibon.

Baracutay12@aol.com wrote:
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 9:51 PM
Hello, Max Forte forwarded your email to me.
As for your inquiry, yes there have been two, although very limited, DNA studies done in the Dominican Republic.
The first were conducted by an Italian company along with the Late Dr. Luna Calderon. These studies were focused in the Barahona region. Of the 29 samples taken (all from people displaying mostly African heritage) 10 had Native American Mitochondrial DNA.

In the second, Professor Juan Martinez Cruzado of Puerto Rico took 196 samples and of these 33 percent had Native American MTDNA. What should be noted is that in previous studies in Puerto Rico where the population is 4 million people, 800 samples were taken and 61 percent of these were Indian. The DR has over 9 million people so a much higher representative number of samples must be obtained before any conclusion can be made.
That said there are a few things that are clear though:
(1) the question as to whether or not there is Native descent in the DR has been answered and the answer is yes.
(2) The samples in the DR are Haplo groups A and C. The C haplo groups and types match the Puerto Rican C group. But the Haplo group A does not match the Puerto Rican A. This implies that the Haplo group A in the DR is from an older population that mixed with the Arawakan speaking peoples that entered the region some 3 thousand years ago.

I took a Bio-geographical DNA test, one that gives percentages of mixture. I tested positive for all three, except that my Native American Markers were so high that it implied that my ancestors were "pure" up to 5 generations ago. Not bad for a supposedly extinct people!

I actually took the test three times because at first I was not at all convinced that such a thing was possible.

On my first test which was called the 2.0 DNA print test My percentages were 29% Native American, 39% African and 32% Caucasian. It was this first test that confirmed for me what my grandmother always said about our families’ descent. She claimed that her grandmother and all the people of the place I come from in the DR were pure Indians. So since I had 29% Indian that means my mother would have perhaps twice as much and so on.
But then I took an updated version of the test, 2.5 , which goes deeper into the genome and this one revealed that I was 42 percent Indian.
One thing though. I think that as important as the tests are, they are also a bit misleading. I think that Identity is more about culture than genes. The reason why I have always identified with Native is because of the campesino culture which is very Native in the DR.
At the end of these tests I am still as Indian as I was at birth. The thing is does confirm however is that our history in the Caribbean must be re-written. That the Taino became extinct 30 years after contact with the Spanish is just about the biggest myth ever created and we in the Caribbean bought that side of the story, hook line and sinker!

If you have any further questions please contact me at this email address.
Thank you
Jorge

The reason the language struggles so hard for precision is that it seeks to describe that which does not exist. As a scientific matter, there is no such thing as race. We are all of the human race, something we probably will not fully understand until it is explained to us by green people with eyes waving on stalks.

Racism takes many hues
Visiting Brazil, where race has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange, the experience is like looking into a fun-house mirror.
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- An old adage comes to mind: ‘‘If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back."

It was a folk saying -- property of no one, property of everyone -- that we African Americans used to encompass defining realities of our lives. Meaning not just the fact that some white men would think themselves better than you because they were white, but the fact that some black men would, too, because they were light. This was a legacy of slavery, when light skin often meant less brutal treatment.

So to be here in Brazil, to wander through this culture where a man the color of Bishop T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle might, with a straight face, deny the Africa in him and people earnestly debate "who is black," well . . . it feels like you've stumbled into a fun-house mirror of race in which everything is exactly the same as it is back home, except where it is completely different.

As this month's Miami Herald reports on black life in Latin America vividly attest, that sense of falling through the fun-house mirror fits much of the black experience in this hemisphere. That black woman in Guatemala who made history by winning a beauty title could be Vanessa Williams. That Argentine kid who got called Kunta because he went to a white school could be a kid bused to school in Boston 30 years ago. That black man in Cuba getting harassed by police could be my son or, indeed, any young black man in America.

In much the same way, race in Brazil has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange. Some here will tell you that this nation's triumph is that it never encoded race into its laws as did the United States. While that sounds like, and in some ways is, a laudable thing, the punchline is that those same people will also tell you this did not save Brazil from the sin of racism.

Indeed, they will haul out anecdotes and statistics illustrating the fact that Brazilians the color of T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle tend to find it harder to get work, education or healthcare, but damnably easy to get followed around the department store by security guards who equate darkness with dishonesty.

This country is engaged in a debate over how to best address those issues. They are fighting over an affirmative-action program that would offer educational and healthcare advantages to Brazilians who are black.

Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?

A COMPLEX MATTER

The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but "afrodescendente'' (Africa-descended) or negro (black).

In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be ‘‘high yellow'' (i.e., of very light skin); one can be "red'' (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was "Detroit Red''); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, "Smokey." In fact, the famous (and "high yellow'') Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends -- sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny.

THERE IS NO DOUBT

But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question. Detroit Red was black. Smokey Robinson is black. T.D. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.

The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes ‘‘pass," i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country "passing is a national institution." So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on "passing," she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be."

But Simon Schwartzman, a white social scientist, thinks that allowing Brazilians to self-identify beats the alternative. "I think it's very wrong for the government to start labeling people and saying, ‘You are officially black or you are officially white, or you are officially something.' You have all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I don't think it's the business of government to classify and label people."

So the question of "Who is black?" is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D. Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face?

BLACK IN THE U.S. OF A.

Maybe your instinct is the latter. In the U.S. of A., after all, we know what black is.

Of course, the U.S. of A. is also the country where, in 1896, an ‘‘octoroon'' (i.e., one-eighth black) man named Homer Plessy, white to all physical intents and purposes, lost a Supreme Court case that started when he was ordered to move to a "colored'' train car. And it's also the country where educator Gregory Howard Williams, a man who would disappear in a room of middle-age white men, saw his life change in 1954 from middle-class comfort to ostracism and racial slurs when it was revealed that his father was half-black.

As Williams, the author of the 1995 memoir Life On The Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black once told me in an interview, "The issue in America has never been color. It's always been race."

So in deriding the silliness of another nation's racial mores, an American finds himself in the unenviable position of the pot calling the kettle, well . . . black.

THE ROLE OF LAW

Indeed, it is America's history of encoding its racial biases in law -- everything from the Constitution designating blacks as three-fifths of a human being in 1787 to the restrictive housing covenants and segregation statutes that persisted into the 1960s -- that Yvonne Maggie points to in explaining why she objects to Brazil's flirtation with affirmative action.

"We don't need to say that race exists," says Maggie, an anthropologist and university professor. "We have to say that race is not important to define people in social terms, that black and white are the same kind of people."

It is worth noting that Maggie is white, her ex-husband is black, and they lived for a while in the United States. In 1971. In Texas.

"It was a rough time," she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color."

Which brings you to the heart of the matter, the reason any discussion of race and racial terminology that goes on long enough eventually comes to seem silly and overly complicated. African American? Afro-Brazilian? Negro? Colored? Moreno? Afro-descendente? Red? Pardo? Smokey?

NO SUCH THING

The reason the language struggles so hard for precision is that it seeks to describe that which does not exist. As a scientific matter, there is no such thing as race. We are all of the human race, something we probably will not fully understand until it is explained to us by green people with eyes waving on stalks.

Whereas U.S. history flies in the face of that fact with its centuries of pretense to hard and fast racial boundaries, it's a point of pride for Maggie that her country never -- officially -- bought into that lie.

I respect the principle she argues -- race does not exist and therefore should not be acknowledged in law. But that raises a question: How can you have racism without race?

Maggie insists that you can. She says that what Brazil has is a kind of "social racism'' supported not by law, but by custom. One suspects that those who suffer under it would be hard-pressed to tell the difference -- or find reason to care. Which is why, given the choice, many dark-skinned Brazilians choose to be other than "black." It is a means of escape, if only linguistically.

One morning, my translator and I ride out to the favela made infamous in City of God, the Oscar-nominated 2002 film about the drug wars that suck in children and spit out bones. We wait outside a community center for the Brazilian hip-hop star I have come to interview. Inside, a funeral has just come to an end. A casket is borne out to a van, followed by a handful of young people. Some have light skin, some have dark. All have sad eyes.

After a while, the man I'm waiting for appears. His given name is Alex Pereira Barbosa, known professionally as MV Bill. The MV stands for Mensageiro da Verdade, Messenger of Truth, and he is famous for rapping about conditions in the favelas.

CHOOSING ONE'S RACE

When I mention the funeral, he explains that the dead boy worked for one of the drug lords and met a violent end. When I mention that the boy was mourned by young people both black and white, MV Bill gives me a look. He considers all of them black.

"One of the characteristics of Brazilian racism," he says, "is that the person can choose to be what she wants. ‘Oh, I'm white, I'm not black.' Here, the darker you are, the more discrimination you suffer. And that makes it difficult for the blacks, from light to dark, to understand each other. The lighter-skinned blacks avoid the darker-skinned blacks because they don't want to suffer the same discrimination. It's hard for them to work together because of the degree of discrimination according to your color."

The cruelest racism, says MV Bill, is actually intraracial, perpetuated by light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned blacks. Fair skin, he says, represents power, even in the favela.

SELF-IDENTITY

After being in this country a while, I find myself doing something I'd never feel the need to do at home. I ask people I'm interviewing "what'' they are. When dark-skinned people identify themselves as "black," there is an unmistakable little thrill of victory, a notch for "our'' side, as in someone who was brave enough and tough enough to accept the designation this society despises. Someone who understands that the problem isn't color and never was; rather, it is what some people have arbitrarily decided color means.

Lucia Maria Xavier de Castro, coordinator of Criola, an activist group representing black women, says she has known many people who were unable to accept their own blackness. "The person does everything to get rid of black traces. Straightens her hair, dresses like white people -- not colorful. People do everything to eliminate traces. It's as if this person had a birth defect and was trying to correct it by taking those attitudes."

Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that's a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation's most controversial journalists in the process.

When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she's crazy. "I don't know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious," she says.

And there it is again, that sense of race as a glimpse in a fun-house mirror. Indeed, as Leitao relates the responses she receives, I find myself laughing in recognition. One reader, for example, accused her of "creating a problem because I talk about it."

"Because of you," the reader wrote, "one day, we will be racist."

I've gotten that exact same e-mail. Many times. And it's funny, Lord knows it is, but it's also maddening. You wonder how intelligent people can turn logic so thoroughly inside out. How smart people can say such stupid things.

Over the years, I have come to understand that it's not about the strength of the argument. Leitao has a computer full of statistics documenting "a very strong and permanent gap between black and white in Brazil." Over the years, I must have quoted a hundred government and university studies illustrating a similar gap between black and white in the United States. Yet at the end of the day, sometimes, it's like you wrote it in sand.

You begin to realize that denial is stronger than logic. And that while it is, your country -- whatever country it is -- will always fall short of its self-image.

America, the land of the free? Not always, not quite.

Brazil, the land where race matters not?

"We have a carnaval song," says Leitao. "For 40 years, the people, every year, sang this song. And this song is terrible. [Whites] never think about what they are singing. The song is: ‘‘Because your color won't contaminate me, I would like your love."

"It's offensive," says Leitao. ‘‘And the people never realize. Why we don't never realize that we have a problem here?"

Her frustration makes me chuckle in recognition.

She is a newspaper columnist who writes about race in a nation 4,100 miles away.

But she is also a reflection in a fun-house mirror.

But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question. Detroit Red was black. Smokey Robinson is black. T.D. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.

So the question of "Who is black?" is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D. Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face?

Leonard Pitts:

Is Pitts totally unaware of the fact that Latinos, Arabs, South Asians and many other groups whose claim to "non-blackness" he respects, are often just as dark or darker than those he claims as "black"? Both institutions and individual Americans often have to make decisions trying to figure out someone's racial identification/ethnicity. "Race" is FREQUENTLY in question.

It isn't always denial of African ancestry per se, as a negative attitude that many have is because of the historical relationship with Haiti. In fact, many do not deny African Ancestry as much as they refuse to be called Black.

Based on the article I dont think they like to be reminded of it. To them Haiti is Africa and they wish no part of either.

Hardly. More like Black is Haiti and they wish they could part with that Neighbor.

Salsassin Haiti is the most African country in the Americas and the article spends lots of time focussing on the rejection of Africa. In any case how can one accept Africa and not accept its culture or its peoples. If some one is told that some one should drop a match into a woman's hair because she didnt straighten how then can that be an acceptance of Africa? If one cannot braid one's hair without ridicule how is that acceptance of Africa? According to the article a visiting professor wanted to study African aspects of Dominican culture (of whic much exists) and was told to go to haiti to study that. The term "Indio" is definitely aimed at minimizing any identifiaction with Africa.

To them Haiti is Africa and they wish no part of it.

And again, not because they deny Africa, but they despise Haiti which embraced Blackness so they equate it with that.

They do not deny Africa! They just deny what Africa looks like (kinky hair, dark skin, full nose and lips), or how African culture has impacted the DR, as indicated by teh hostility to any one who wants to study this. Dont know but that looks like rejection to me.

While Haitians are poorly thought of "African looking" Dominicans do not fare well either regardless as to their immediate ancestry. Note the extreme hostily to Afrocentric hairstyles which are as much charateristic of Africa and of the rest of the Caribbean (Cuba and the non hispanic Caribbean) as it is of Haiti.

And yet other countries like Jamaica have much worse record with skin lightening creams. That they me Eurocentric in some of their style tastes does not mean they do not accept their African ancestry or that they do not like the looks that occured because of that admixture. They just like the more mixed look more than the one that is less mixed and closer to that of Haitians over all. Since the days of the War of Knives.

ANd they are not Afrocentric. They are more Creolite. Doesn't mean denying their African ancestry. Feel free to show how straightening hair is a nationalistic thing.

It was stated in the MH article on the DR that several women were quoted as saying this and in fact to not straighten hair seems disgraceful. To quote one person who was asked if she had just come out of jail, or another who was told on the bus that some one should throw a match on her head. Now in other parts of the Cbn (including Cuba) only if some one has uncombed hair would they risk that. Not a neat natural hairstyle. surely not with the popularity of locks even amongst middle class women.

Dont know but given that a high % of Dominicans have kinky hair such rejections of natural or Afrocentric hairstyles (and no ridicule of such attitudes except by Dominicans who have lived abroad) is significant. It surely does appear that Cubans and Dominicans have very different attitudes to this.

Creolite means embracing all aspects of the culture. Not rejection those who are at the African end of the spectrum.

[Sorry, but a hairstyle doesn't make a culture. They also have plenty of traditions that descend from African experience.