Live
Audio Only
“Black lives matter” is a resounding cry heard around the world. The UN Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent said as much in a recent news release regarding the deportation of Haitian residents and migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. Mirelle Fanon Mendes-France, head of the U.N. group stated, “The Dominican Republic does not recognize the existence of a structural problem of racism and xenophobia, but it must address these issues as a matter of priority so the country can live free from tension and fear.”
Since June 21 some 19,000 Haitians have fled the Dominican Republic for Haiti fearing the unfair deportation policies that make it difficult for legal residents to comply with demands, which not only disregard the Dominican Constitution but also violate international norms.
In 2013, the constitutional court of the Dominican Republic ruled that offspring of undocumented immigrants would become illegal retroactive to 1929. This immediately invalidated the legal status of an estimated 200,000 Dominican citizens. Of the 450,000 Haitian migrant workers in the country, 290,000 met a filing deadline for legal status. Of those who filed, the government ruled that only 2 percent were legal.
The clash between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola has a strained history beyond the obvious racial differences. Haitians are the dark progeny of the French African slave trade while Dominican Republicans are mulattoes of Spanish descent. The enmity between the two countries is not only racial, but also cultural and historical. However, just as the world witnesses how little Black lives matter in American extrajudicial killings, the mistreatment of dark Haitians could well inspire a #Haitian Lives Matter twitter campaign.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and 28th poorest in the world. That is how most people think of Haiti today. But under French colonialism, in the late 18th century Haiti was considered “The Paris of the Antilles.” Its imports and exports exceeded those of the United States at the time of George Washington. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Haiti has been looted and exploited since Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Taino natives on the island of Hispaniola (which was later split into Saint Domingue (Haiti) in the West and the Dominican Republic in the East.) On his way to China, a shipwrecked Columbus created his first colony, La Navidad, on the north shore of present day Haiti.
The Taino Indians, who are believed to have migrated to the island from Central and South America 5,000 years before Columbus’s arrival, unfortunately were unable to survive Columbus. In spite of Taino resistance, through enslavement, torture, disease and outright genocide, several million natives were reduced to 50,000 after 25 years of Spanish occupation. During that time the natives were forced to work in gold mines for the foreigners. When the French came in 1600 and occupied the Western end of Hispaniola they brought hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work the sugar plantations. This made Haiti a jewel of the Caribbean for the French.
Finally the French were thrown out by a slave revolt led by a French Black man, Toussaint L'ouverture in 1791. In four years the Spanish ceded its part of Hispaniola to the French and the revolution succeeded in freeing the entire island. The new nation became Haiti, the Indigenous Taino name for “Land of the Mountains.”
Hispaniola is mixed-race island of French, Spanish and Africans now known as Dominicans. However, just as in the United States, fair skin carries privilege and dark skin persecution. Color matters.
The miscegenation of Haiti by the European enslavers created almost a caste system where mulattoes became the inheritors of land and wealth while their darker relatives became their slaves.
The French colonizers divided the natives by creating a three-tiered social structure in which Whites “grands blancs” were on top and black slaves (noirs) mostly of African descent, were on the bottom. Mulattoes were granted privileges below Whites, but had rights superior to the “noirs.” The mulatto Freedmen were called “afranchis” and they owned their own plantations, enslaving 25 percent of African slaves. As slaves died from overwork or brutality on plantations, they were constantly replaced so that most Africans were born on the island, never to know their homeland.
After the Haitian revolution broke the French colonial plantation system, land was distributed among the slaves who later became agrarian peasants while mulattoes moved into positions of power in urban centers where they became professionals and took over the government and military.
Mulattoes became Francophiles and many were educated and wealthy. Wikipedia states, “Thus, French language and manners, orthodox Roman Catholicism, and light skin were important criteria of high social position. The elite disdained manual labor, industry, and commerce in favor of the more genteel professions, such as law and medicine.” Upward mobility in the class structure was rare, but the 20th century brought small changes.
The color line in America is subtler, but when these Haitian ex-slaves tried to find freedom from persecution in this country, Lady Liberty was not so gracious to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The brutal regime of Haiti’s President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957 and the subsequent reign of his son “Baby Doc” Duvalier brought thousands of Haitians to American shores. Initially they entered with the 1965 Immigration Act that allowed American Haitian family members to bring over their relatives. Nearly 7,000 Haitian permanent residents and 20,000 temporary immigrants came to the Land of the Free. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the issue of Haitian “boat people” became a political windstorm. Desperate Haitians were fleeing oppression in scanty boats, hoping to make it to the shores of South Florida to beg for asylum. America, like the Dominican Republic, turned them away.
The argument was that the Haitians were seeking asylum for economic reasons, not because of political persecution and oppression. Indeed, both things were true. Certainly, when the refugees were returned to Haiti, they suffered brutal reprisals.
Policies under President John F. Kennedy who denounced the Duvalier regime and its reign of terror, eased the acceptance of Haitian immigrants. The government welcomed many Haitian elite into this country because the upper class threatened Duvalier’s regime so they became political targets. Unfortunately, President Lyndon Johnson, succeeding Kennedy, returned to discriminatory practices. Communism had become America’s greatest enemy and overshadowed concerns about this small Black dictatorship. This meant that people fleeing Communism were accepted. According to statistics from 1975 and 1976, 95 percent of immigrants from Communist countries could receive asylum, while only 5 percent others could enter.
When Cubans showed up in Miami there was a place for them. But the authorities returned the beleaguered dark Haitians to their impoverished homeland or held them in Guantanamo Bay.
Does color matter? Many social activists in the 1990s thought that it did.
Rev. Thomas Wenski, director of Miami's Haitian Catholic Center and pastor of its Notre Dame d'Haiti Church complained, "What we've seen is predominantly black people being sent back to their country but Cubans - mostly White people - being treated differently."
As persistent as the issue of race is across the globe, there are many other political and historical factors that create rancor between people. However, it is a shame that in the 21st century the term “Blacks lives matter” has resonance. Haitians are being racially profiled for deportation in the Dominican Republic just as Freddie Gray and Michael Brown were the unfortunate targets of police brutality in America.
Although Mirielle Fanon Mendes-France of the U.N. did not exactly say, “Black lives matter” in the Dominican affair, she did say that the Dominican Republic must address the “structural problem of racism” “as a matter of priority.” And I think that says enough.
Newsletter
