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15469: This week in Haiti 21:07 04/30/2003 (fwd)
[Shortened by moderator to the Haiti-relevant material]
"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French
and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
(fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at <editor@haitiprogres.com>.
Also visit our website at <www.haitiprogres.com>.
HAITI PROGRES
"Le journal qui offre une alternative"
* THIS WEEK IN HAITI *
April 30- May 07, 2003
Vol. 21, No. 07
"EL ANTI-HAITIANISMO": AN IDEOLOGY OF RACIAL INFERIORITY
by Danyel Peña-Shaw
Like Palestinians in Israel or Muslims in Bosnia, Haitians in the Dominican
Republic are demeaned, harassed, and victimized in both extraordinary and
mundane ways. They are subjected to a wide array of demeaning stereotypes.
El Anti-Haitianismo, anti-Haitian racism, is but one symptom of the colonial
mind-set in the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican people are flooded with intense propaganda denigrating all
that is Black/African and glorifying all that is White/European. Many
Dominican parents jokingly threaten to send their kids in a sack to a
Haitian boogeyman if they misbehave. Haitians are accused of stealing
animals, or even children, and sacrificing them. In the mass media, Haitians
are identified with hunger, AIDS, political turmoil, and black magic.
Imbued with the myth of their cultural and racial superiority, many
Dominicans have turned their backs on Haitian language, history and culture.
Popular educators now have the task of reeducating the Dominican population
about the Haitian reality and raising awareness of the dangers of
anti-Haitian hysteria.
I will analyze just three dimensions of El Anti-Haitianismo to show how the
Dominican state, whose policies are reminiscent of apartheid, has a vested
interest in harassing the Haitian population.
Dominican President Hipolito Mejia's government invests substantial
financial and human resources into persecuting Haitians who come to the
Dominican Republic. Military checkpoints, one every 15 miles, line the route
towards the interior of Santo Domingo. National Guard searches of popular
transportation serve to publicly humiliate Haitian migrants and remind them
of their status as unwanted visitors to the Dominican Republic. The
Dominican military intentionally provokes Haitians by aggressively searching
through their belongings, mocking their language, dress, and skin color, and
demanding that they pay ridiculous fines. Dominican state police have
converted crossing the border and traveling into the interior into a
business fueled by bribes and corruption. The most aggressive guards carry
out illegal deportations and beatings if Haitians do not give into
extortion. Rhetoric about the need to patrol for Haitian arms and drug
traffickers serves as the eternal justification for this aggression.
Even Dominican citizens sometimes contribute to this persecution. One
Sunday afternoon on a bus returning from the border town of Jimani, I
witnessed a young Haitian man being forced from the front to the back of the
bus on the charge that he had "el grajo," or body odor. A group of
Dominicans waved their hands in front of their noses as if to say that he
could not sit close to them. The man was robbed of his right to take an
empty seat on a six-hour bus trip.
In counterpoint, the Dominican population is trained to be servile and
obedient to German, Spanish, Italian and North American tourists. White
Western "grajo" is an afterthought and not a bias permanently attached to
their ethnic identity.
The dynamics of "el grajo" is just one element of an aggressive fear of
Haitians that goes against the humble nature of the Dominican people and
secures their role as the carriers of a necessary racism. "Necessary"
because as long as Haitians are viewed as sub-humans, they can more
effectively be exploited by international high finance. Racism provides the
cloak and justification for their super-exploitation.
The Dominican state apparatus has assumed the leading role in labeling,
stereotyping, and scapegoating the Haitian community. The principle figure
behind El Anti-Haitianismo was former president Joaquin Balaguer, who
dedicated his intellectual and literary talents to defaming Haitians. In his
book La Isla al Reves, Balaguer stomps vulgarly on the dignity of Haitians,
absurdly blaming them for the spread of venereal diseases across the
Dominican Republic, among other things. He plays on Dominican society's
historical paranoia that Haitians will try once again to unify the two
countries under one government as happened from 1822 to 1844. Inaccurate
recounting of Dominican history under Haitian military rule is still used
today to whip up anti-Haitian hysteria. In truth, the Haitian occupation
brought freedom to Dominican slaves and broke up the monopolization of land
and wealth by colonizing Spain and the Catholic Church. Any mention of the
Haitian occupation today in the Dominican Republic begins with a wild tale
of vicious Haitian soldiers throwing children into the air and chopping them
up with their machetes as they fell. We must struggle against this distorted
historical memory which has been imposed on us and begin to rescue the
Dominican and Haitian people's history of solidarity.
Why would an intellectual like Balaguer attack Haiti? Political
opportunism. The Haitian people have long served as the easiest whipping boy
in the DR, easy to blame for social crisis. They are blamed for many things,
from AIDS to unemployment. If it were not for these ideological escape
valves, the manipulators of truth would have to invent another enemy or
confront the structural dynamics of gross class and national inequalities in
the Caribbean region.
Danyel Peña-Shaw recently lived and worked in the Dominican Republic and is
presently Outreach Coordinator at the Haitian Women's Project in Brooklyn,
NY.
All articles copyrighted Haïti Progrès, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haïti Progrès.
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