gatzbygordon
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im talking about the latinos who have this resentment towards their very obvious african heritage..its not hard to see they're trying to run away from their roots.
Arkansas Congressman: "Slavery a blessing in disguise" for Black People
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Lol religious folk gonna have a field day on that site with u lad.
longstroke
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fixeddudes really in here fighting with each other when we just had a public official basically say integration is whats destroying america
NT race & religion threads are ******g entertaining
and just read the first 7 pages....
CLIFF NOTES:
It got REAL at post #80
Future, Ninja and a few others debating Ninja's ethnicity
Tr1ll linked Slavery to Black dominance of sports.
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futuremd
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Black denial
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
By Frances Robles
frobles@miamiherald.com
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big *****!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html#storylink=cpy
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
By Frances Robles
frobles@miamiherald.com
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big *****!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html#storylink=cpy
cj863
Banned
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- Jun 4, 2008
And the plot continues 
Ninja just may be da biggest clown I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Dude got bold and came completely out of pocket in here
Ninja just may be da biggest clown I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Dude got bold and came completely out of pocket in here
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Please tell me theres more of these.
Ninja is PISSED
da aggression is real.
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futuremd
Banned
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Don't worry ninjahood. Touching a kneegrow in haiti isn't going to keep you out of the pearly gates.
Its ok.
We don't bite.
It doesn't rub off.
Its ok.
We don't bite.
It doesn't rub off.
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- Aug 1, 2004
im talking about the latinos who have this resentment towards their very obvious african heritage..its not hard to see they're trying to run away from their roots.
All ol' sammy is doing is his best Michael Jackson impression.
BTW, sammy is back to his color, da king of pop died faking da funk.
futuremd
Banned
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Let me guess. But Vybz Kartel isn't...right?
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elpablo21
Supporter
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- Feb 11, 2008
Back to his color
futuremd
Banned
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BRAZIL
In Brazil's northeastern coastal city of Slavador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black, condominium residents sunbathe and swim behind high walls, with a backdrop of slums. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A great divide
Brazil's public self-image of a 'racial democracy' is being challenged as black Brazilians struggle to overturn centuries of racism
By Jack Chang
jchang@mcclatchydc.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Aleixo Joaquim da Silva was working in this city's famed seaside Copacabana neighborhood, far from the slum where he lives, when he was reminded that racism is alive and well.
While refurbishing the service elevator of a high-rise apartment building, da Silva had to ride the elevator reserved for residents to fetch supplies. A white woman entered and, taken aback, ordered him out.
" 'I'm not riding with a black!' she told me. 'The place of blacks is in the service elevator!'" da Silva recalled.
Although black Brazilians have long endured such insults, many are deciding that they have had enough. The 50-year-old reported the woman to state authorities and had her convicted for breaking laws prohibiting discrimination.
It was a small victory for da Silva, but he's part of a growing movement in this country of 190 million people -- it has the world's second-largest black population, behind Nigeria's -- to turn back centuries of pervasive and largely unchallenged racism.
A multiracial crowd of commuters leaves the subway in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the central train station. Brazil claims more than 90 million people of African descent out of a population of 190 million. It has more blacks than any country except Nigeria. In Rio's slums, blacks make up the majority of residents. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
From university classrooms to television airwaves, black Brazilians are fighting for what they say is long-denied space in a society that has kept them on the margins.
They are pushing for two affirmative-action bills in Brazil's Congress that would open up college enrollment and government payrolls to more Brazilians of African descent. Already, many state universities have implemented their own affirmative-action programs.
In 2005, black entertainer José de Paula Neto launched the country's first television station aimed at black audiences, TV da Gente. Meanwhile, hundreds of communities founded more than a century ago by escaped slaves and known as quilombos are winning recognition and federal protections.
And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.
"The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you'll see exclusion is endemic," he said. "We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve."
Da Silva said outrage over his treatment in the elevator pushed him to fight back.
"I couldn't let it go, especially since it was done in such a flagrant manner," he said. "It just hurt too much. It hurt my soul. We can't go backward. We can't stay quiet anymore."
A game of dominoes provides a diversion for men in a 'favela,' or slum, in Salvador, a northeastern Brazilian city where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream. Despite racial disparities in the country, debate about race is rare. But now, black Brazilians have become more assertive about their rights. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
TURNING POINT
The changes mark a dramatic shift in a country that claims more than 90 million people of African descent but looks almost completely white on its TV screens and in its halls of power.
Starting in the 16th century, Portuguese slave traders sent about 5.5 million Africans to Brazil, with more than 3.3 million surviving the journey, according to historians. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
That African legacy is clear in census numbers. About half of Brazilians identified themselves in a 2005 survey as black or pardo, meaning a mix of races but predominantly white and black. Another half identified themselves as white, and less than 1 percent were Asian or indigenous.
Offenders occupy a jail cell in Salvador. Crime among the poor has jammed the penal system. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
DISPARITY ENTRENCHED
Despite their numbers, black Brazilians have long been poorer, less educated, less healthy and less powerful than white Brazilians.
And although Brazilians regularly eat foods and use words that originated in Africa, their history books talk almost exclusively about the deeds of white heroes, said Emanoel Araujo, a renowned black sculptor and the curator of the Afro Brasil Museum in Sao Paulo.
"We need to redo the history of this country," Araujo said, "and work around the premise and the perspective of the African not only as a slave but as the one who changed Brazilian society, the one who constructed Brazilian society, who constructed the wealth of Brazil."
That day of acknowledgment is still far off, and Brazil, a country with one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor in the world, is sharply divided between its whites and non-whites.
Census figures show that pardos and blacks earned about half of what white Brazilians made last year, with the gap actually widening among more educated Brazilians. In comparison, African-Americans (U.S. blacks) earned 62 percent of white American wages in 2004., and more schooling helped blacks approach white incomes.
A man begs for change outside the Salvador church Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos.(Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
The U.N. Human Development Index, which measures countries based on health, income and other factors, paints an even worse picture. If measured separately, Brazilian whites would be ranked 44th in the world, on par with oil-rich Kuwait, while its blacks and pardos would be ranked 105th, about the same level as El Salvador.
"I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there's widespread racism in Brazil," said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil. "Racial and social inequality are strongly linked."
Jailson de Souza e Silva, who runs a Rio de Janeiro anti-violence advocacy group, said the split is stark in his city's violence-torn slums, where blacks make up the majority of residents. Two-thirds of the country's homicide victims in 2004 were black.
"The objective here is not to preserve life, and hundreds of black men are dying every year," de Souza e Silva said. "Meanwhile, in the rich, white parts of the city, every single death is big news. Our lives clearly don't have equal value."
Da Silva's slum has been paralyzed in recent years by gang-related violence, and its middle-class neighbors have erected gated checkpoints around the slum to stop the killing from spilling into their streets.
"It's another sign of the inequality here," da Silva said while gesturing to the rutted dirt road running by his house. "The government doesn't bother to pave the streets here. We're just totally forgotten."
A squatter named Beatriz, hanging laundry under the glare of a bare bulb, is one of many who occupy abandoned buildings in Salvador. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
GAP IN NORTHEAST
The divisions are felt even in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black and where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream.
Ivete Sacramento, who became the country's first black president of a major university in 1998, said she is saddened every day when she looks out the balcony of her upper-middle-class apartment at the sprawling slum that sits just a few dozen yards away.
Except for her family and two other households, every resident in her 64-unit apartment tower is white. In the nearby slum, the racial equation is inverted, and white faces are rare. ‘‘No one has any idea that blacks can be anything more than maids," said Sacramento, 54.
‘‘The place of blacks in Brazil is still the place of slaves."
Alberto Borges, a 31-yearold aspiring boxer from the slum, said that just being from his neighborhood is a strike against him.
"If you live in one of these houses, the people outside will call you preto," Borges said, using a word for black Brazilians that many consider derogatory. "If you try to find a job and tell them where you come from, they won't call back."
Despite the disparities, debate about race is rare in Brazil., and problems are more felt than spoken about.
Black Brazilians have never launched a civil-rights movement like that in the United States nor developed national black leaders in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. or South Africa's Nelson Mandela.
Also non-existent are black civic groups with the power of U.S. institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or financial networks that could spur black entrepreneurship.
A couple embrace in a Salvador doorway, in a neighborhood popular with squatters. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A BACKLASH
Those who do speak out about racial disparities, such as TV da Gente, are accused -- even by some prominent blacks -- of fomenting racial divisions or of outright racism.
‘‘Every time we try to put together a project like this, we're criticized by the government and everyone else who says there is no racism in Brazil," said Hasani Damazio, TV da Gente'sdirector of international programs. "It's clear that race is treated very differently here than in the U.S."
A key difference is that Brazil never imposed legal racial segregation like the United States and South Africa, which meant that black Brazilians didn't have an institutional injustice to rally around.
Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the "racial democracy'' vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.
Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races.
Roberte Santana, 14, works out in a boxing gym, where Salvador slum youths find an outlet. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Opponents of the pending affirmative-action bills have echoed key points of Freyre's argument, especially those about miscegenation. Census statistics show that about 30 percent of Brazilian households in 2000 were headed by couples from different racial backgrounds -- six times the U.S. ratio.
Ali Kamel, executive director of news for the country's biggest television network, Globo, said Brazilians don't think in terms of white and black, and argued that poverty affects all Brazilians. He blamed a collapse in public education and not racism for social disparities.
"Our big problem in Brazil is poverty, not racial discrimination," Kamel said. "The racism here is at a degree infinitesimally less than in other countries."
Opposition to the affirmative-action bills also has come from some black leaders such as José Carlos Miranda, coordinator of Brazil's Black Socialist Movement, who fear that racebased policies could aggravate racism.
"The worst thing we could do is pass laws that deepen divisions that already exist," Miranda said. "What wounds us the most is class, and the only way to fight racism is to promote more equality."
Other black activists, however, argue that race is the dividing factor and that racial mixing didn't eliminate discrimination against nonwhites.
A man in a wheelchair gets a ride from a caregiver in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
'PREJUDICE ISSUE'
"The problem of Brazil always was this issue of thinking the mulatto and the pardo are outside of the prejudice issue," Araujo said. ‘‘Yet, when you want to hit the soul of someone, you call him black."
More Brazilians are coming around to Araujo's view, polls show, and the timeworn idea of a multi-hued racial democracy is losing its sway, even as the race debate heats up.
In its place has risen the begrudging admittance of a racially segregated country. A 2003 poll showed that more than 90 percent of Brazilians said racism existed here.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist activist and union leader, is credited with helping to spur the changes in attitudes.
Soon after taking office in 2003, he made race a key issue and appointed Brazil's first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa. Lula da Silva also created a special secretariat for racial equality and launched initiatives such as requiring that Afro-Brazilian history be taught in all primary schools.
Many black leaders are skeptical that the latest changes will have any lasting impact. They point out that although the country's 1988 constitution criminalized racism, few people have served jail time for breaking the law. The woman who insulted da Silva in the elevator was sentenced to community service but has appealed the ruling.
"Things have gotten worse," said Antônio Carlos dos Santos, president of Ilê Aiyê, a community group in Salvador known for both its African-influenced Carnaval parades and its consciousness-raising social projects.
"Sure, we have people who are more conscious about the situation, but this is a land that's stepping backward," he said. "We are almost 80 percent of this state, but we're still controlled by the white minority."
It's a cynicism shared by ordinary Brazilians such as da Silva, who live every day with the country's crushing inequalities. But in his case, and for many black Brazilians, cynicism is giving way to action.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/index.html#storylink=cpy
In Brazil's northeastern coastal city of Slavador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black, condominium residents sunbathe and swim behind high walls, with a backdrop of slums. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A great divide
Brazil's public self-image of a 'racial democracy' is being challenged as black Brazilians struggle to overturn centuries of racism
By Jack Chang
jchang@mcclatchydc.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Aleixo Joaquim da Silva was working in this city's famed seaside Copacabana neighborhood, far from the slum where he lives, when he was reminded that racism is alive and well.
While refurbishing the service elevator of a high-rise apartment building, da Silva had to ride the elevator reserved for residents to fetch supplies. A white woman entered and, taken aback, ordered him out.
" 'I'm not riding with a black!' she told me. 'The place of blacks is in the service elevator!'" da Silva recalled.
Although black Brazilians have long endured such insults, many are deciding that they have had enough. The 50-year-old reported the woman to state authorities and had her convicted for breaking laws prohibiting discrimination.
It was a small victory for da Silva, but he's part of a growing movement in this country of 190 million people -- it has the world's second-largest black population, behind Nigeria's -- to turn back centuries of pervasive and largely unchallenged racism.
A multiracial crowd of commuters leaves the subway in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the central train station. Brazil claims more than 90 million people of African descent out of a population of 190 million. It has more blacks than any country except Nigeria. In Rio's slums, blacks make up the majority of residents. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
From university classrooms to television airwaves, black Brazilians are fighting for what they say is long-denied space in a society that has kept them on the margins.
They are pushing for two affirmative-action bills in Brazil's Congress that would open up college enrollment and government payrolls to more Brazilians of African descent. Already, many state universities have implemented their own affirmative-action programs.
In 2005, black entertainer José de Paula Neto launched the country's first television station aimed at black audiences, TV da Gente. Meanwhile, hundreds of communities founded more than a century ago by escaped slaves and known as quilombos are winning recognition and federal protections.
And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.
"The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you'll see exclusion is endemic," he said. "We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve."
Da Silva said outrage over his treatment in the elevator pushed him to fight back.
"I couldn't let it go, especially since it was done in such a flagrant manner," he said. "It just hurt too much. It hurt my soul. We can't go backward. We can't stay quiet anymore."
A game of dominoes provides a diversion for men in a 'favela,' or slum, in Salvador, a northeastern Brazilian city where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream. Despite racial disparities in the country, debate about race is rare. But now, black Brazilians have become more assertive about their rights. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
TURNING POINT
The changes mark a dramatic shift in a country that claims more than 90 million people of African descent but looks almost completely white on its TV screens and in its halls of power.
Starting in the 16th century, Portuguese slave traders sent about 5.5 million Africans to Brazil, with more than 3.3 million surviving the journey, according to historians. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
That African legacy is clear in census numbers. About half of Brazilians identified themselves in a 2005 survey as black or pardo, meaning a mix of races but predominantly white and black. Another half identified themselves as white, and less than 1 percent were Asian or indigenous.
Offenders occupy a jail cell in Salvador. Crime among the poor has jammed the penal system. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
DISPARITY ENTRENCHED
Despite their numbers, black Brazilians have long been poorer, less educated, less healthy and less powerful than white Brazilians.
And although Brazilians regularly eat foods and use words that originated in Africa, their history books talk almost exclusively about the deeds of white heroes, said Emanoel Araujo, a renowned black sculptor and the curator of the Afro Brasil Museum in Sao Paulo.
"We need to redo the history of this country," Araujo said, "and work around the premise and the perspective of the African not only as a slave but as the one who changed Brazilian society, the one who constructed Brazilian society, who constructed the wealth of Brazil."
That day of acknowledgment is still far off, and Brazil, a country with one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor in the world, is sharply divided between its whites and non-whites.
Census figures show that pardos and blacks earned about half of what white Brazilians made last year, with the gap actually widening among more educated Brazilians. In comparison, African-Americans (U.S. blacks) earned 62 percent of white American wages in 2004., and more schooling helped blacks approach white incomes.
A man begs for change outside the Salvador church Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos.(Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
The U.N. Human Development Index, which measures countries based on health, income and other factors, paints an even worse picture. If measured separately, Brazilian whites would be ranked 44th in the world, on par with oil-rich Kuwait, while its blacks and pardos would be ranked 105th, about the same level as El Salvador.
"I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there's widespread racism in Brazil," said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil. "Racial and social inequality are strongly linked."
Jailson de Souza e Silva, who runs a Rio de Janeiro anti-violence advocacy group, said the split is stark in his city's violence-torn slums, where blacks make up the majority of residents. Two-thirds of the country's homicide victims in 2004 were black.
"The objective here is not to preserve life, and hundreds of black men are dying every year," de Souza e Silva said. "Meanwhile, in the rich, white parts of the city, every single death is big news. Our lives clearly don't have equal value."
Da Silva's slum has been paralyzed in recent years by gang-related violence, and its middle-class neighbors have erected gated checkpoints around the slum to stop the killing from spilling into their streets.
"It's another sign of the inequality here," da Silva said while gesturing to the rutted dirt road running by his house. "The government doesn't bother to pave the streets here. We're just totally forgotten."
A squatter named Beatriz, hanging laundry under the glare of a bare bulb, is one of many who occupy abandoned buildings in Salvador. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
GAP IN NORTHEAST
The divisions are felt even in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black and where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream.
Ivete Sacramento, who became the country's first black president of a major university in 1998, said she is saddened every day when she looks out the balcony of her upper-middle-class apartment at the sprawling slum that sits just a few dozen yards away.
Except for her family and two other households, every resident in her 64-unit apartment tower is white. In the nearby slum, the racial equation is inverted, and white faces are rare. ‘‘No one has any idea that blacks can be anything more than maids," said Sacramento, 54.
‘‘The place of blacks in Brazil is still the place of slaves."
Alberto Borges, a 31-yearold aspiring boxer from the slum, said that just being from his neighborhood is a strike against him.
"If you live in one of these houses, the people outside will call you preto," Borges said, using a word for black Brazilians that many consider derogatory. "If you try to find a job and tell them where you come from, they won't call back."
Despite the disparities, debate about race is rare in Brazil., and problems are more felt than spoken about.
Black Brazilians have never launched a civil-rights movement like that in the United States nor developed national black leaders in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. or South Africa's Nelson Mandela.
Also non-existent are black civic groups with the power of U.S. institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or financial networks that could spur black entrepreneurship.
A couple embrace in a Salvador doorway, in a neighborhood popular with squatters. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A BACKLASH
Those who do speak out about racial disparities, such as TV da Gente, are accused -- even by some prominent blacks -- of fomenting racial divisions or of outright racism.
‘‘Every time we try to put together a project like this, we're criticized by the government and everyone else who says there is no racism in Brazil," said Hasani Damazio, TV da Gente'sdirector of international programs. "It's clear that race is treated very differently here than in the U.S."
A key difference is that Brazil never imposed legal racial segregation like the United States and South Africa, which meant that black Brazilians didn't have an institutional injustice to rally around.
Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the "racial democracy'' vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.
Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races.
Roberte Santana, 14, works out in a boxing gym, where Salvador slum youths find an outlet. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Opponents of the pending affirmative-action bills have echoed key points of Freyre's argument, especially those about miscegenation. Census statistics show that about 30 percent of Brazilian households in 2000 were headed by couples from different racial backgrounds -- six times the U.S. ratio.
Ali Kamel, executive director of news for the country's biggest television network, Globo, said Brazilians don't think in terms of white and black, and argued that poverty affects all Brazilians. He blamed a collapse in public education and not racism for social disparities.
"Our big problem in Brazil is poverty, not racial discrimination," Kamel said. "The racism here is at a degree infinitesimally less than in other countries."
Opposition to the affirmative-action bills also has come from some black leaders such as José Carlos Miranda, coordinator of Brazil's Black Socialist Movement, who fear that racebased policies could aggravate racism.
"The worst thing we could do is pass laws that deepen divisions that already exist," Miranda said. "What wounds us the most is class, and the only way to fight racism is to promote more equality."
Other black activists, however, argue that race is the dividing factor and that racial mixing didn't eliminate discrimination against nonwhites.
A man in a wheelchair gets a ride from a caregiver in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
'PREJUDICE ISSUE'
"The problem of Brazil always was this issue of thinking the mulatto and the pardo are outside of the prejudice issue," Araujo said. ‘‘Yet, when you want to hit the soul of someone, you call him black."
More Brazilians are coming around to Araujo's view, polls show, and the timeworn idea of a multi-hued racial democracy is losing its sway, even as the race debate heats up.
In its place has risen the begrudging admittance of a racially segregated country. A 2003 poll showed that more than 90 percent of Brazilians said racism existed here.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist activist and union leader, is credited with helping to spur the changes in attitudes.
Soon after taking office in 2003, he made race a key issue and appointed Brazil's first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa. Lula da Silva also created a special secretariat for racial equality and launched initiatives such as requiring that Afro-Brazilian history be taught in all primary schools.
Many black leaders are skeptical that the latest changes will have any lasting impact. They point out that although the country's 1988 constitution criminalized racism, few people have served jail time for breaking the law. The woman who insulted da Silva in the elevator was sentenced to community service but has appealed the ruling.
"Things have gotten worse," said Antônio Carlos dos Santos, president of Ilê Aiyê, a community group in Salvador known for both its African-influenced Carnaval parades and its consciousness-raising social projects.
"Sure, we have people who are more conscious about the situation, but this is a land that's stepping backward," he said. "We are almost 80 percent of this state, but we're still controlled by the white minority."
It's a cynicism shared by ordinary Brazilians such as da Silva, who live every day with the country's crushing inequalities. But in his case, and for many black Brazilians, cynicism is giving way to action.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/index.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
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CUBA
A group of Rastafarians gathers at a park in Old Havana. The movement has gained a foothold, especially among younger Afro-Cubans. (Miami Herald staff)
A barrier for Cuba's blacks
New attitudes on once-taboo race questions emerge with a fledgling black movement
Miami Herald Staff Report
HAVANA -- Six-foot-two, brown skinned and with semi-curly hair, Denny walked confidently into a government warehouse for a recent job interview. Sitting across from the white manager, he rattled off his qualifications: high school diploma, courses in tourism, hard worker.
They weren't good enough: He needed his white brother-in-law to vouch for him, Denny recalled.
"Black people tend to do everything bad here," the manager said.
After Fidel Castro's revolution triumphed in 1959, he declared that Cuba would be a raceless society, banned separate facilities for blacks and whites and launched a string of free education and health programs for the poor -- most of them blacks.
Many blacks people still support Castro, saying that without him they would still be peons in the sugar cane fields. One black Cuban diplomat said he had no hope of an education, and his grandmother no medical care for her glaucoma, until the revolution came along.
A young girl peeks as Cuban schoolchildren practice marching in the Prado, a historic plaza in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
But listen to some blacks, particularly those born after 1959, and the failures of the revolution also become clear.
"Everyone is not equal here," said Ernesto, 37, as he dodged traffic on a Havana street. Tall and athletically built, he once hoped to be a star soccer player. He now gets by selling used clothing, and said he's continually hassled by police just because he's black.
In recent years, a new attitude has been emerging quietly, almost secretly, among Afro-Cubans on what it means to be black in a communist system that maintains ‘‘No hay racismo aquí'' -- there's no racism here -- and tends to brand those who raise the issue of race as enemies of the revolution.
"The absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens . . . the revolution's social project," wrote Esteban Morales Domínguez, a University of Havana professor who is black, in one of his several little-known papers on race since 2005.
In another paper, he noted that "much of the research that has been done on the subject in general has been put away in drawers, endlessly waiting to be published." Black filmmaker Rigoberto López also broached the sensitive topic in a TV appearance in December, saying that while the revolution had brought about structural changes toward racial equality, "its results do not allow us to affirm that its goals have been achieved in all their dimensions."
A mural declares 'Somos Uno' -- We Are One.(Miami Herald staff)
'A NEW MOMENTUM'
Afro-Cubans familiar with the situation say black and white Cubans also have been establishing a small but growing number of civil rights-type groups. The government has not cracked down on such usually illegal activities, but neither has it officially recognized them.
"There is a new momentum, which the government is surely frightened by," said Carlos Moore, a Cuban-born expert on race issues now living in Brazil.
In recent years, the Castro government has been on the defensive on the race question. In last year's book 100 Hours With Fidel by French-Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Castro admitted that while the revolution had brought progress for women and blacks, discrimination endures.
"Blacks do not live in the best homes; they're still . . . performing hard jobs, sometimes less-remunerated jobs, and fewer blacks receive family remittances in foreign currency than their white compatriots," he said.
Still, Castro added: "I am satisfied by what we're doing to discover causes that, if we don't fight them vigorously, tend to prolong alienation in successive generations."
But Castro's own Communist Party and government fall short on the race front. Only four recognizably black faces sit on the party's 21- member Political Bureau, and only two sit on the government's top body, the 39- member Council of Minis- ters.
The highest-ranking black in Cuba is Esteban Lazo, a former party chief in the provinces of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Lazo was tapped by Castro when he took ill last summer, along with brother Raúl Castro and four others, to help rule Cuba in his absence.
And yet, black faces populate Cuba's political prisons. Some of the nation's best known dissidents are black. They include independent librarian Omar Pernét Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physician Oscar Elias Biscét. The latter was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King's non--violent forms of protest.
"Race is the biggest social issue facing Cuba," said Enrique Patterson, a Cuban-born Miami author who writes extensively about race, and calls this nation's race problem a "social bomb."
"If this problem isn't addressed, Cuba will not be governable in the future."
The work of a German graffiti artist in the Muralendo area depicts two Afro-Cubans dancing. (Miami Herald staff)
RACE STILL DIVIDES
Patterson said he believes that while Castro has kept the lid on the race issue by squashing past attempts by blacks to organize or speak out, a post-Castro Cuba won't be able to contain the frustrations.
"If the Cuban government were to permit black Cubans to organize and raise their problems before [authorities] . . . totalitarianism would fall," he said.
Look beyond the white, brown and black faces in government propaganda murals plastered throughout this island under the slogan Somos Uno -- We Are One -- and race still divides. Today's Cuba is more racially and socially integrated than the United States, but it is far from color-blind.
Whites are clearly preferred in the government controlled and highly profitable tourism industry, from taxi drivers to waitresses and hotel maids. Meanwhile, blacks in Old Havana are continually stopped by police for I.D. checks on suspicion of black market activities.
Television programs overwhelmingly show most blacks in menial jobs, and Cubans, like other Latin Americans, still use a cutting expression for a black they admire: El es negro, pero . . . '' -- He is black, but . . .
"Just look at the cab drivers lined up in Old Havana," Cito, 52, an Afro-Cuban doctor whispered so his neighbors would not overhear his complaint. "You rarely see someone who looks like me."
A tourist poses with a woman dressed in a costume in Havana. Whites are preferred for jobs in the government-controlled tourism industry. (Miami Herald staff)
Nearly three years ago, Cito, fed up with his paltry government salary and what he described as the racist attitude of his white supervisor, left his post. He now makes his living on the black market, buying meat from farmers in the countryside and selling it in Havana.
"This country has taken away all of my will to live in it," said Cito, 52, whose tiny and sparsely furnished apartment seems like a luxury compared with the rest of his crumbling building. Cito, 52, who is dark-skinned and has the body of a linebacker, recalled his early days in medical school when he dated his now ex-wife, who is white.
He recalled a running conversation his future mother-in-law would have with her daughter: "He's not a bad guy. I know his family. But there are a lot of other young men in the school you can date. Why him?"
He knew exactly what she meant; she did not want a black son-in-law.
A woman sways to the sounds of DJ 'El Fruta' as others enjoy the reggae music at a small park in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
DISPARITY IN NUMBERS
Cuba's official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island's 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.
And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.
The disparity between the census' 11 percent and UM's 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.
"You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba," said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso.
For Denny, one of six children, the color quagmire astonishes even him sometimes. One sister is married to a light-skinned Cuban who considers himself white, and another is married to a Spaniard. And even though his complexion would allow him to claim something other than black, he says, adamantly and without any reservation, "Me, I am black. I choose to be black."
Rapper Mario Delgado Sotomayor, aka Soto, idolizes American rappers such as Tupac and 50 Cent. Cuban hip-hop sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism. (Miami Herald staff)
This identification, he says, was reinforced by his experiences in schools where teachers often favored his lighter-skinned classmates.
"Even though he knew they didn't have the answer," he recalled of one teacher, ‘‘he would rather call on them than ask me."
And while Cubans of his mother's and grandmother's generations readily accept endearing uses of negro or negrito, his peers are treating it as their "N'' word.
"It's unacceptable," said Denny, whose access to the outside world via illegal Internet and satellite TV hook-ups have given him a perspective on race that Cubans in general lack.
He pays for those with U.S. dollars he earns, a relative rarity for blacks. Since whites make up the overwhelming majority of the Cuban exile (population), whites get the bulk of the cash remittances sent to relatives on the island. A study in 2000 by UM's Cuba studies institute found that the average white Cuban received $81 a year in remittances, compared to $31 for non-white Cubans.
Denny, the would-be hip hop performer, said he also sees racial changes coming through his kind of music, which sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism.
He remembers one man in particular who landed in jail. ‘‘He was rapping, ‘If you are black, and feel that you are treated equal,' raise your hand. . . . He was arrested by the police."
A man reads the newspaper as two boys practice drumming in Havana. Racial categories can be complicated in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.(Miami Herald staff)
MOVEMENT
On a recent Sunday at a Havana park, a group of mostly black Cubans in their 20s and 30s, including some dreadlocked Rastafarians, carried on an intense discussion on reggae icon Bob Marley, whose songs depicted the black struggle.
"He understands what we are going through," said Omar, 31, proudly showing off a life-size portrait of Marley tattooed on his back.
Such talk can be scary to Cubans who know their history. While blacks made up a good portion of the mambises who fought against Spanish colonial rule, they remained poor and ill-treated after Cuba won its independence. A black revolt in 1912 was brutally crushed, leaving behind hundreds of dead and a deeply ingrained fear.
"Their rights and protection from potential genocide and violence depended on them never trying to organize politically as blacks," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA professor who spent 11 months in Cuba researching his recently published book, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.
That kind of talk also likely scares the Castro government.
A young couple watches a play about Cuban unity by children at a Havana artists colony. (Miami Herald staff)
"There is an unstated threat," Moore said. "Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead."
Yet something of a black movement is indeed growing, he added.
"It's subterranean, and taking place among intellectuals and people in general," said Moore. "The government is frightened to the extent to which it does not understand black Cubans today. You have a new generation of black Cubans who are looking at politics in another way."
But the government still has a hold over black Cubans -- the fear that the collapse of the communist system would make their lives even worse.
"Black Cubans are afraid of a return of the people in Miami," Moore said. "They are afraid of a restoration of the U.S. influence. The last link Castro has to the black population is based on those two fears. The third is: They are afraid that the social advantages the revolution brought in terms of health, education and even political participation will be abolished if American influence and white influence are reestablished."
Denny says he shares those concerns, but is willing to take the risk.
"We are never going to be slaves again," he said. "We are not stupid. We know the development of the world . . . We intend to have a better life."
More information about the Cuba:
› AfroCubaWeb.com
› Quarterly journal of Afro-Cuban issues
› TheRealCuba.com
› Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies
› Center for the Understanding of Cubans of African Descent
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this dispatch, and the last name of most of the people interviewed, because the reporter lacked the Cuban journalist's visa required to work on the island. Miami Herald Translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part4/index.html#storylink=cpy
A group of Rastafarians gathers at a park in Old Havana. The movement has gained a foothold, especially among younger Afro-Cubans. (Miami Herald staff)
A barrier for Cuba's blacks
New attitudes on once-taboo race questions emerge with a fledgling black movement
Miami Herald Staff Report
HAVANA -- Six-foot-two, brown skinned and with semi-curly hair, Denny walked confidently into a government warehouse for a recent job interview. Sitting across from the white manager, he rattled off his qualifications: high school diploma, courses in tourism, hard worker.
They weren't good enough: He needed his white brother-in-law to vouch for him, Denny recalled.
"Black people tend to do everything bad here," the manager said.
After Fidel Castro's revolution triumphed in 1959, he declared that Cuba would be a raceless society, banned separate facilities for blacks and whites and launched a string of free education and health programs for the poor -- most of them blacks.
Many blacks people still support Castro, saying that without him they would still be peons in the sugar cane fields. One black Cuban diplomat said he had no hope of an education, and his grandmother no medical care for her glaucoma, until the revolution came along.
A young girl peeks as Cuban schoolchildren practice marching in the Prado, a historic plaza in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
But listen to some blacks, particularly those born after 1959, and the failures of the revolution also become clear.
"Everyone is not equal here," said Ernesto, 37, as he dodged traffic on a Havana street. Tall and athletically built, he once hoped to be a star soccer player. He now gets by selling used clothing, and said he's continually hassled by police just because he's black.
In recent years, a new attitude has been emerging quietly, almost secretly, among Afro-Cubans on what it means to be black in a communist system that maintains ‘‘No hay racismo aquí'' -- there's no racism here -- and tends to brand those who raise the issue of race as enemies of the revolution.
"The absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens . . . the revolution's social project," wrote Esteban Morales Domínguez, a University of Havana professor who is black, in one of his several little-known papers on race since 2005.
In another paper, he noted that "much of the research that has been done on the subject in general has been put away in drawers, endlessly waiting to be published." Black filmmaker Rigoberto López also broached the sensitive topic in a TV appearance in December, saying that while the revolution had brought about structural changes toward racial equality, "its results do not allow us to affirm that its goals have been achieved in all their dimensions."
A mural declares 'Somos Uno' -- We Are One.(Miami Herald staff)
'A NEW MOMENTUM'
Afro-Cubans familiar with the situation say black and white Cubans also have been establishing a small but growing number of civil rights-type groups. The government has not cracked down on such usually illegal activities, but neither has it officially recognized them.
"There is a new momentum, which the government is surely frightened by," said Carlos Moore, a Cuban-born expert on race issues now living in Brazil.
In recent years, the Castro government has been on the defensive on the race question. In last year's book 100 Hours With Fidel by French-Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Castro admitted that while the revolution had brought progress for women and blacks, discrimination endures.
"Blacks do not live in the best homes; they're still . . . performing hard jobs, sometimes less-remunerated jobs, and fewer blacks receive family remittances in foreign currency than their white compatriots," he said.
Still, Castro added: "I am satisfied by what we're doing to discover causes that, if we don't fight them vigorously, tend to prolong alienation in successive generations."
But Castro's own Communist Party and government fall short on the race front. Only four recognizably black faces sit on the party's 21- member Political Bureau, and only two sit on the government's top body, the 39- member Council of Minis- ters.
The highest-ranking black in Cuba is Esteban Lazo, a former party chief in the provinces of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Lazo was tapped by Castro when he took ill last summer, along with brother Raúl Castro and four others, to help rule Cuba in his absence.
And yet, black faces populate Cuba's political prisons. Some of the nation's best known dissidents are black. They include independent librarian Omar Pernét Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physician Oscar Elias Biscét. The latter was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King's non--violent forms of protest.
"Race is the biggest social issue facing Cuba," said Enrique Patterson, a Cuban-born Miami author who writes extensively about race, and calls this nation's race problem a "social bomb."
"If this problem isn't addressed, Cuba will not be governable in the future."
The work of a German graffiti artist in the Muralendo area depicts two Afro-Cubans dancing. (Miami Herald staff)
RACE STILL DIVIDES
Patterson said he believes that while Castro has kept the lid on the race issue by squashing past attempts by blacks to organize or speak out, a post-Castro Cuba won't be able to contain the frustrations.
"If the Cuban government were to permit black Cubans to organize and raise their problems before [authorities] . . . totalitarianism would fall," he said.
Look beyond the white, brown and black faces in government propaganda murals plastered throughout this island under the slogan Somos Uno -- We Are One -- and race still divides. Today's Cuba is more racially and socially integrated than the United States, but it is far from color-blind.
Whites are clearly preferred in the government controlled and highly profitable tourism industry, from taxi drivers to waitresses and hotel maids. Meanwhile, blacks in Old Havana are continually stopped by police for I.D. checks on suspicion of black market activities.
Television programs overwhelmingly show most blacks in menial jobs, and Cubans, like other Latin Americans, still use a cutting expression for a black they admire: El es negro, pero . . . '' -- He is black, but . . .
"Just look at the cab drivers lined up in Old Havana," Cito, 52, an Afro-Cuban doctor whispered so his neighbors would not overhear his complaint. "You rarely see someone who looks like me."
A tourist poses with a woman dressed in a costume in Havana. Whites are preferred for jobs in the government-controlled tourism industry. (Miami Herald staff)
Nearly three years ago, Cito, fed up with his paltry government salary and what he described as the racist attitude of his white supervisor, left his post. He now makes his living on the black market, buying meat from farmers in the countryside and selling it in Havana.
"This country has taken away all of my will to live in it," said Cito, 52, whose tiny and sparsely furnished apartment seems like a luxury compared with the rest of his crumbling building. Cito, 52, who is dark-skinned and has the body of a linebacker, recalled his early days in medical school when he dated his now ex-wife, who is white.
He recalled a running conversation his future mother-in-law would have with her daughter: "He's not a bad guy. I know his family. But there are a lot of other young men in the school you can date. Why him?"
He knew exactly what she meant; she did not want a black son-in-law.
A woman sways to the sounds of DJ 'El Fruta' as others enjoy the reggae music at a small park in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
DISPARITY IN NUMBERS
Cuba's official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island's 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.
And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.
The disparity between the census' 11 percent and UM's 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.
"You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba," said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso.
For Denny, one of six children, the color quagmire astonishes even him sometimes. One sister is married to a light-skinned Cuban who considers himself white, and another is married to a Spaniard. And even though his complexion would allow him to claim something other than black, he says, adamantly and without any reservation, "Me, I am black. I choose to be black."
Rapper Mario Delgado Sotomayor, aka Soto, idolizes American rappers such as Tupac and 50 Cent. Cuban hip-hop sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism. (Miami Herald staff)
This identification, he says, was reinforced by his experiences in schools where teachers often favored his lighter-skinned classmates.
"Even though he knew they didn't have the answer," he recalled of one teacher, ‘‘he would rather call on them than ask me."
And while Cubans of his mother's and grandmother's generations readily accept endearing uses of negro or negrito, his peers are treating it as their "N'' word.
"It's unacceptable," said Denny, whose access to the outside world via illegal Internet and satellite TV hook-ups have given him a perspective on race that Cubans in general lack.
He pays for those with U.S. dollars he earns, a relative rarity for blacks. Since whites make up the overwhelming majority of the Cuban exile (population), whites get the bulk of the cash remittances sent to relatives on the island. A study in 2000 by UM's Cuba studies institute found that the average white Cuban received $81 a year in remittances, compared to $31 for non-white Cubans.
Denny, the would-be hip hop performer, said he also sees racial changes coming through his kind of music, which sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism.
He remembers one man in particular who landed in jail. ‘‘He was rapping, ‘If you are black, and feel that you are treated equal,' raise your hand. . . . He was arrested by the police."
A man reads the newspaper as two boys practice drumming in Havana. Racial categories can be complicated in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.(Miami Herald staff)
MOVEMENT
On a recent Sunday at a Havana park, a group of mostly black Cubans in their 20s and 30s, including some dreadlocked Rastafarians, carried on an intense discussion on reggae icon Bob Marley, whose songs depicted the black struggle.
"He understands what we are going through," said Omar, 31, proudly showing off a life-size portrait of Marley tattooed on his back.
Such talk can be scary to Cubans who know their history. While blacks made up a good portion of the mambises who fought against Spanish colonial rule, they remained poor and ill-treated after Cuba won its independence. A black revolt in 1912 was brutally crushed, leaving behind hundreds of dead and a deeply ingrained fear.
"Their rights and protection from potential genocide and violence depended on them never trying to organize politically as blacks," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA professor who spent 11 months in Cuba researching his recently published book, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.
That kind of talk also likely scares the Castro government.
A young couple watches a play about Cuban unity by children at a Havana artists colony. (Miami Herald staff)
"There is an unstated threat," Moore said. "Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead."
Yet something of a black movement is indeed growing, he added.
"It's subterranean, and taking place among intellectuals and people in general," said Moore. "The government is frightened to the extent to which it does not understand black Cubans today. You have a new generation of black Cubans who are looking at politics in another way."
But the government still has a hold over black Cubans -- the fear that the collapse of the communist system would make their lives even worse.
"Black Cubans are afraid of a return of the people in Miami," Moore said. "They are afraid of a restoration of the U.S. influence. The last link Castro has to the black population is based on those two fears. The third is: They are afraid that the social advantages the revolution brought in terms of health, education and even political participation will be abolished if American influence and white influence are reestablished."
Denny says he shares those concerns, but is willing to take the risk.
"We are never going to be slaves again," he said. "We are not stupid. We know the development of the world . . . We intend to have a better life."
More information about the Cuba:
› AfroCubaWeb.com
› Quarterly journal of Afro-Cuban issues
› TheRealCuba.com
› Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies
› Center for the Understanding of Cubans of African Descent
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this dispatch, and the last name of most of the people interviewed, because the reporter lacked the Cuban journalist's visa required to work on the island. Miami Herald Translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.
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went back a few pages.
when da hell did Anton come back though
when da hell did Anton come back though
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Black denial
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
By Frances Robles
frobles@miamiherald.com
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big *****!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html#storylink=cpy
Thats funny considering Chris Rock's Documentry "good hair" dont have a single hispanic in it.
Try again silly *****
futuremd
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NICARAGUA AND HONDURAS
Dancers Scharllette Allen, 15, and Jennifer Fredricks, 15, will preform in a local Afro cultural festival in the town of Pearl Lagoon. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Afro-Latin Americans:
A rising voice
Black populations in Latin America are undergoing a cultural and civil-rights awakening
By Audra D.S. Burch
aburch@miamiherald.com
PEARL LAGOON, Nicaragua -- In hidden fishing villages straddling the wide, muddy Kukra River along the Atlantic Coast, a quiet cultural and civil-rights movement flickers:
Almost six feet and dark-skinned, a 17-year-old whirls in her kitchen, enchanted by the intricate African beading on the gown she will wear in the village's first black beauty pageant.
A 47-year-old reggae artist who chronicles the pain and hope of his people in song makes history as the first black to win his country's highest cultural award.
A 30-year-old activist finally liberates her hair, lets it grow naturally, an act that screams race more than complexion ever could.
These stories are part of a slow but dramatic shift in consciousness among blacks here and throughout Latin America. In something akin to the civil-rights movement in the United States -- without the lynchings, bombings and mass arrests -- blacks are pushing for more rights and reclaiming their cultural identity.
"For years, it was just so much easier to not 'be' black, to call yourself something else," says Michael Campbell, who grew up 18 miles downriver in Bluefields. "But the key to our future is to strengthen our identity, to say we are black, and we are proud."
Carmen Joseph, a caterer and mother of eight children in Bluefields, Nicaragua, prepares potato salad as her granddaughter Britney Cash, 5, stands by. 'Some folks don't say they are what they are,' she said. 'You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black.' (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
BELATED ATTENTION
Latin American governments are listening and have finally begun to address racial inequities that have simmered since slavery.
Just four years ago, Brazil created a Cabinet-level position to deal with race. In Colombia, activists have won legislation legally recognizing blacks and their history. In Cuba, increasing numbers of non-political groups are forming to tackle race issues, including the Martin Luther King Movement for Civil Rights. And in the nearby Dominican Republic, some blacks are fighting state authorities for the right to be categorized as "black'' on their passports.
Statistics show that blacks in the region are more likely to be born into poverty, to die young, to read poorly and to live in substandard housing.
Authorities are only now starting to count the black population, but the World Bank estimates that it numbers anywhere from 80 million to 150 million, compared with 40.2 million in the United States.
The new push for change is fueled by support from African-American politicians and civil rights groups through globalization -- the technological ability to share common human experiences. Indeed, once isolated Latin American countries now have access to pop-cultural channels such as MTV and BET, which broadcast social messages worldwide.
Students share a bench -- and some candy -- during a break in classes at Moravian High School in Bluefields. A black-history curriculum for public schools is on the agenda of black leaders and activists. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Just last week, U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., led members of the Congressional Black Caucus in a nationally televised townhall discussion in Colombia with President Alvaro Uribe about the living conditions of Afro-Colombians.
"[Afro-descendants] can see what the outside world is doing. That's caused a consciousness where they say, ‘We can do it, too,' '' says Meeks, who is also working with blacks in Peru and Bolivia. "They can see what the civil-rights movement did in the United States and know that they have the ability to benefit also."
The movement challenges a widely held belief that Latin America comfortably witnessed the civil-rights movement in the United States from afar because the region was not racist, and blacks were already integrated.
"The black movements have been able to get people to question that notion, and to acknowledge that racial democracy is a great idea and kind of wonderful dream, but it really doesn't exist on the ground yet," says George Reid Andrews, author of Afro-Latin Americans and a professor of comparative race at the University of Pittsburgh. "That, I think, is a real achievement."
Elizabeth Forbes, 85, known as ‘Ms. Lizzie' -- on the porch with grandchildren Sean, on her lap, and Brandy, and with Jayson MacField, 8, peering from the window -- is helping to revive the ties of Bluefield's blacks to their heritage. Nine percent of Nicaragua's population is black. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
DISADVANTAGED GROUP
Nicaragua's black population is the largest in Central America, but there is only one black member in its National Assembly, Raquel Dixon Brautigam, who was elected last year.
Only about one in five residents in Nicaragua's predominantly black neighborhoods have access to clean water, versus the national average of three in five. Between 4 percent and 17 percent have electricity, compared with the national average of 49 percent.
Twenty years ago, the country recognized blacks and indigenous people through autonomy laws, making it possible for them to claim natural resources, demarcate communal lands, govern themselves and reclaim their ancestral identity.
For years, the struggle has been framed largely in regional terms -- the Atlantic Coast, led by towns such as Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas, versus the Pacific Coast -- English versus Spanish, Creole versus Spanish-indigenous mestizo. Creoles, descendents of English masters and their Caribbean slaves, often identify themselves as black.
"Race and region are inextricably linked," says Juliet Hooker, a native of Bluefields and assistant professor of government at the University of Texas. "We have never really been acknowledged in the national narrative about identity. Much of the discrimination has been through the lens of the coast we live on."
Now, for blacks -- about 477,000, or 9 percent of the 5.3 million Nicaraguans -- the movement is largely about visibility.
A Garífuna boy, kicking a soccer ball, is part of a dwindling group descended from shipwrecked Africans exiled to Honduras in 1797. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
Black leaders and activists say they are collectively defining, and redefining, what it means to be black here. They are working on an ambitious agenda that includes redistricting for better political representation, bilingual education and a black-history curriculum for public schools. And in March, the National Assembly passed a reform measure to include race issues in the new penal code.
Before now, there were no anti-discrimination or affirmative-action laws. Still, a bill that would outlaw institutional racism has languished in the assembly for more than two years, with not enough backers to push it through.
This isn't the first time blacks have mobilized.
A black-power movement started along the coast as early as the 1920s through the nationalist message of Marcus Garvey.
In the 1960s, as the civil-rights movement was unfolding in the United States, blacks formed a coalition to negotiate better living conditions. That effort fell apart with the start of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. After the war, the Sandinistas promised to end racial discrimination and to promote regional cultures. At the same time, they were accused of precisely the opposite -- oppressing groups already disenfranchised.
It would be almost three decades before meaningful steps were taken under the Sandinista regimes. Now, there is cautious hope with the return of that government.
A horse is ferried across the Kukra River, where black awareness is rising in villages. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
RACE CONSCIOUSNESS
Although the Atlantic Coast has been settled since the 17th century, the first road connecting the coast to the rest of the country opened only 50 years ago. It is still impassable during the rainy season and still doesn't go all the way.
The last leg to Bluefields from Managua is by boat, along the Escondido River. Despite the remoteness, it has not been closed entirely to the outside world. Some residents talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch foreign programs on television and a few have access to the Internet. Much of the contemporary movement along the coast came from men who died long ago -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Marley. King's unyielding message of equality and Marley's social lyrics were delivered here starting in the 1970s by kids who got jobs on cruise ships and brought back books and music.
Pearl Lagoon's unofficial leader, William Wesley, a warm guy with an easy smile, lives on the main road with a view of the village. Just inside his living room, a picture of King hangs near the phone.
"The kids came home, and they kept talking about these people," says Wesley, a retired teacher. "I knew a little bit already. But I wanted to know more. I found myself in the teachings of King and Malcolm X. I discovered my Afro heritage. We have to take what they said to help us create a direction that we can all follow."
U.S. sports are popular in Pearl Lagoon, on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
In Bluefields, Carmen Joseph, more comfortably ‘‘Miss Carmen," a caterer who is said to make the best potato salad in town, quickly steps outside a neighbor's house. She sits on the front porch, this racial business too touchy for inside talk.
"Yes," she whispers, never making eye contact. "Some folks don't say they are what they are. You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black."
With eight children, Joseph has spent a lifetime trudging up and down the hills of Bluefields, establishing her place as one of the town's matriarchs. "I am not ashamed. I never turned on my color, but some people do."
To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.
This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.
The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.
Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, "passing'' for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.
"It's hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black," says Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman.
A year ago, Shirlene Green Newball, who grew up in Puerto Cabezas, allowed her perm to grow out. "I really wanted to show and know who I am," says Newball, who works for a women's organization.
Newball had thought for a while about what it meant to be black here. She considered all the terms morena, coolie, afro, chocolate, la negra. Then she decided that natural hair -- an enduring barometer of ethnicity was the purest expression of blackness.
"You are seeing an authentic black movement along the coast, but things are moving slowly," says Kwame Dixon, an assistant professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Koreth Reid McCoy, 17, gets her hair combed by 'Ms. Vilma' in preparation for a black beauty pageant in Pearl Lagoon. 'I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry,' she said.(Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
SYMBOL OF CULTURE
In Pearl Lagoon, population 3,000, the dogs sleep on the dock, the main drag is more dusty path than street, the country-western music drifts from open windows and doors, and Koreth Reid McCoy rushes home from school.
She floats the whole way, more than a mile, to behold the lovely lavender gown with beads she is to wear at the beauty pageant. In the last decade, the coast has held annual black beauty pageants, but this is the first one -- along with an African cultural festival -- in Pearl Lagoon.
"I love the way it falls. I love the colors. I love the style," Koreth says, her voice falling into a lullaby. "It reminds me of Africa. I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry."
Leaving her house, Koreth steps into the road, and, carried by the giggles of barefoot little girls, makes her way toward the river and back, as poised and glamorous as she would be on anybody's runway. All of a sudden, and maybe not so suddenly, she is more than a pretty girl in a pretty dress. Koreth is a symbol of cultural possibilities.
"I want people to know where we are from."
Philip Montalban Ellis sings about his hometown, Bluefields. 'I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people,' he said. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
MESSAGE IN MUSIC
For as long as he can remember, and certainly when times were bad, Philip Montalban Ellis -- beautiful dreadlocks to his waist and a guitar that rarely leaves his side -- has been singing about the black experience.
. . . We gotta fight or we will die. . . . Lord knows we need liberation, Lord knows it's the only solution. . . .
Today, Montalban sits on an old, rusted chair under a lime tree in his backyard, strumming away.
"I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people. We have struggled so long," he says. "I have been charged with carrying the message of my people."
Earlier this year, the Nicaraguan government recognized Montalban's art, awarding him its highest cultural honor. Before now, the idea of an unapologetically black man even being considered was unthinkable.
"I feel like I am accepting the award for a whole race of people," Montalban says. "I hope this means something."
Miami Herald staff writer Pablo Bachelet and special correspondent Tim Rogers contributed to this report.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part1/index.html#storylink=cpy
Dancers Scharllette Allen, 15, and Jennifer Fredricks, 15, will preform in a local Afro cultural festival in the town of Pearl Lagoon. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Afro-Latin Americans:
A rising voice
Black populations in Latin America are undergoing a cultural and civil-rights awakening
By Audra D.S. Burch
aburch@miamiherald.com
PEARL LAGOON, Nicaragua -- In hidden fishing villages straddling the wide, muddy Kukra River along the Atlantic Coast, a quiet cultural and civil-rights movement flickers:
Almost six feet and dark-skinned, a 17-year-old whirls in her kitchen, enchanted by the intricate African beading on the gown she will wear in the village's first black beauty pageant.
A 47-year-old reggae artist who chronicles the pain and hope of his people in song makes history as the first black to win his country's highest cultural award.
A 30-year-old activist finally liberates her hair, lets it grow naturally, an act that screams race more than complexion ever could.
These stories are part of a slow but dramatic shift in consciousness among blacks here and throughout Latin America. In something akin to the civil-rights movement in the United States -- without the lynchings, bombings and mass arrests -- blacks are pushing for more rights and reclaiming their cultural identity.
"For years, it was just so much easier to not 'be' black, to call yourself something else," says Michael Campbell, who grew up 18 miles downriver in Bluefields. "But the key to our future is to strengthen our identity, to say we are black, and we are proud."
Carmen Joseph, a caterer and mother of eight children in Bluefields, Nicaragua, prepares potato salad as her granddaughter Britney Cash, 5, stands by. 'Some folks don't say they are what they are,' she said. 'You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black.' (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
BELATED ATTENTION
Latin American governments are listening and have finally begun to address racial inequities that have simmered since slavery.
Just four years ago, Brazil created a Cabinet-level position to deal with race. In Colombia, activists have won legislation legally recognizing blacks and their history. In Cuba, increasing numbers of non-political groups are forming to tackle race issues, including the Martin Luther King Movement for Civil Rights. And in the nearby Dominican Republic, some blacks are fighting state authorities for the right to be categorized as "black'' on their passports.
Statistics show that blacks in the region are more likely to be born into poverty, to die young, to read poorly and to live in substandard housing.
Authorities are only now starting to count the black population, but the World Bank estimates that it numbers anywhere from 80 million to 150 million, compared with 40.2 million in the United States.
The new push for change is fueled by support from African-American politicians and civil rights groups through globalization -- the technological ability to share common human experiences. Indeed, once isolated Latin American countries now have access to pop-cultural channels such as MTV and BET, which broadcast social messages worldwide.
Students share a bench -- and some candy -- during a break in classes at Moravian High School in Bluefields. A black-history curriculum for public schools is on the agenda of black leaders and activists. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Just last week, U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., led members of the Congressional Black Caucus in a nationally televised townhall discussion in Colombia with President Alvaro Uribe about the living conditions of Afro-Colombians.
"[Afro-descendants] can see what the outside world is doing. That's caused a consciousness where they say, ‘We can do it, too,' '' says Meeks, who is also working with blacks in Peru and Bolivia. "They can see what the civil-rights movement did in the United States and know that they have the ability to benefit also."
The movement challenges a widely held belief that Latin America comfortably witnessed the civil-rights movement in the United States from afar because the region was not racist, and blacks were already integrated.
"The black movements have been able to get people to question that notion, and to acknowledge that racial democracy is a great idea and kind of wonderful dream, but it really doesn't exist on the ground yet," says George Reid Andrews, author of Afro-Latin Americans and a professor of comparative race at the University of Pittsburgh. "That, I think, is a real achievement."
Elizabeth Forbes, 85, known as ‘Ms. Lizzie' -- on the porch with grandchildren Sean, on her lap, and Brandy, and with Jayson MacField, 8, peering from the window -- is helping to revive the ties of Bluefield's blacks to their heritage. Nine percent of Nicaragua's population is black. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
DISADVANTAGED GROUP
Nicaragua's black population is the largest in Central America, but there is only one black member in its National Assembly, Raquel Dixon Brautigam, who was elected last year.
Only about one in five residents in Nicaragua's predominantly black neighborhoods have access to clean water, versus the national average of three in five. Between 4 percent and 17 percent have electricity, compared with the national average of 49 percent.
Twenty years ago, the country recognized blacks and indigenous people through autonomy laws, making it possible for them to claim natural resources, demarcate communal lands, govern themselves and reclaim their ancestral identity.
For years, the struggle has been framed largely in regional terms -- the Atlantic Coast, led by towns such as Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas, versus the Pacific Coast -- English versus Spanish, Creole versus Spanish-indigenous mestizo. Creoles, descendents of English masters and their Caribbean slaves, often identify themselves as black.
"Race and region are inextricably linked," says Juliet Hooker, a native of Bluefields and assistant professor of government at the University of Texas. "We have never really been acknowledged in the national narrative about identity. Much of the discrimination has been through the lens of the coast we live on."
Now, for blacks -- about 477,000, or 9 percent of the 5.3 million Nicaraguans -- the movement is largely about visibility.
A Garífuna boy, kicking a soccer ball, is part of a dwindling group descended from shipwrecked Africans exiled to Honduras in 1797. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
Black leaders and activists say they are collectively defining, and redefining, what it means to be black here. They are working on an ambitious agenda that includes redistricting for better political representation, bilingual education and a black-history curriculum for public schools. And in March, the National Assembly passed a reform measure to include race issues in the new penal code.
Before now, there were no anti-discrimination or affirmative-action laws. Still, a bill that would outlaw institutional racism has languished in the assembly for more than two years, with not enough backers to push it through.
This isn't the first time blacks have mobilized.
A black-power movement started along the coast as early as the 1920s through the nationalist message of Marcus Garvey.
In the 1960s, as the civil-rights movement was unfolding in the United States, blacks formed a coalition to negotiate better living conditions. That effort fell apart with the start of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. After the war, the Sandinistas promised to end racial discrimination and to promote regional cultures. At the same time, they were accused of precisely the opposite -- oppressing groups already disenfranchised.
It would be almost three decades before meaningful steps were taken under the Sandinista regimes. Now, there is cautious hope with the return of that government.
A horse is ferried across the Kukra River, where black awareness is rising in villages. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
RACE CONSCIOUSNESS
Although the Atlantic Coast has been settled since the 17th century, the first road connecting the coast to the rest of the country opened only 50 years ago. It is still impassable during the rainy season and still doesn't go all the way.
The last leg to Bluefields from Managua is by boat, along the Escondido River. Despite the remoteness, it has not been closed entirely to the outside world. Some residents talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch foreign programs on television and a few have access to the Internet. Much of the contemporary movement along the coast came from men who died long ago -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Marley. King's unyielding message of equality and Marley's social lyrics were delivered here starting in the 1970s by kids who got jobs on cruise ships and brought back books and music.
Pearl Lagoon's unofficial leader, William Wesley, a warm guy with an easy smile, lives on the main road with a view of the village. Just inside his living room, a picture of King hangs near the phone.
"The kids came home, and they kept talking about these people," says Wesley, a retired teacher. "I knew a little bit already. But I wanted to know more. I found myself in the teachings of King and Malcolm X. I discovered my Afro heritage. We have to take what they said to help us create a direction that we can all follow."
U.S. sports are popular in Pearl Lagoon, on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
In Bluefields, Carmen Joseph, more comfortably ‘‘Miss Carmen," a caterer who is said to make the best potato salad in town, quickly steps outside a neighbor's house. She sits on the front porch, this racial business too touchy for inside talk.
"Yes," she whispers, never making eye contact. "Some folks don't say they are what they are. You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black."
With eight children, Joseph has spent a lifetime trudging up and down the hills of Bluefields, establishing her place as one of the town's matriarchs. "I am not ashamed. I never turned on my color, but some people do."
To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.
This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.
The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.
Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, "passing'' for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.
"It's hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black," says Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman.
A year ago, Shirlene Green Newball, who grew up in Puerto Cabezas, allowed her perm to grow out. "I really wanted to show and know who I am," says Newball, who works for a women's organization.
Newball had thought for a while about what it meant to be black here. She considered all the terms morena, coolie, afro, chocolate, la negra. Then she decided that natural hair -- an enduring barometer of ethnicity was the purest expression of blackness.
"You are seeing an authentic black movement along the coast, but things are moving slowly," says Kwame Dixon, an assistant professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Koreth Reid McCoy, 17, gets her hair combed by 'Ms. Vilma' in preparation for a black beauty pageant in Pearl Lagoon. 'I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry,' she said.(Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
SYMBOL OF CULTURE
In Pearl Lagoon, population 3,000, the dogs sleep on the dock, the main drag is more dusty path than street, the country-western music drifts from open windows and doors, and Koreth Reid McCoy rushes home from school.
She floats the whole way, more than a mile, to behold the lovely lavender gown with beads she is to wear at the beauty pageant. In the last decade, the coast has held annual black beauty pageants, but this is the first one -- along with an African cultural festival -- in Pearl Lagoon.
"I love the way it falls. I love the colors. I love the style," Koreth says, her voice falling into a lullaby. "It reminds me of Africa. I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry."
Leaving her house, Koreth steps into the road, and, carried by the giggles of barefoot little girls, makes her way toward the river and back, as poised and glamorous as she would be on anybody's runway. All of a sudden, and maybe not so suddenly, she is more than a pretty girl in a pretty dress. Koreth is a symbol of cultural possibilities.
"I want people to know where we are from."
Philip Montalban Ellis sings about his hometown, Bluefields. 'I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people,' he said. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
MESSAGE IN MUSIC
For as long as he can remember, and certainly when times were bad, Philip Montalban Ellis -- beautiful dreadlocks to his waist and a guitar that rarely leaves his side -- has been singing about the black experience.
. . . We gotta fight or we will die. . . . Lord knows we need liberation, Lord knows it's the only solution. . . .
Today, Montalban sits on an old, rusted chair under a lime tree in his backyard, strumming away.
"I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people. We have struggled so long," he says. "I have been charged with carrying the message of my people."
Earlier this year, the Nicaraguan government recognized Montalban's art, awarding him its highest cultural honor. Before now, the idea of an unapologetically black man even being considered was unthinkable.
"I feel like I am accepting the award for a whole race of people," Montalban says. "I hope this means something."
Miami Herald staff writer Pablo Bachelet and special correspondent Tim Rogers contributed to this report.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part1/index.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
- 6,448
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- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
Published: June 10, 2007NICARAGUA AND HONDURAS
A Garífuna woman cleans dishes at a window of her home in the Honduran community of La Ensenada. The settlements are touted to tourists, but residents see little help from government agencies. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
A fading culture clings to roots
The small and politically marginalized Garífuna community has maintained its rich African heritage but is struggling for the rights and education needed to survive.
By Nancy San Martin
nsanmartin@miamiherald.com
TELA, Honduras -- The three women in pumpkin-colored skirts, with sand clinging to their naked feet, held maracas over their heads and shook them in rhythm with drumbeats.
Nearby, bare-chested men with colorful headdresses moved with snake-like motions. The men and women then joined for an explosive Baile de Guerra -- a 200-year-old war dance commemorating their ancestors' liberation from English enslavement.
The dancers were Garífuna, descendants of African slaves who were shipwrecked on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in 1665 and mixed with Carib and Arawak Indians. After clashes with the English, they were sent in 1797 to Honduras, from where they spread to neighboring Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize.
Ironically, they the dancers were celebrating a planned tourism development that could further erode a unique community with an already muffled political voice, dwindling numbers and vanishing culture. Blacks account for only 2 percent of the people in this nation of 7.4 million.
With virtually no economic clout, widespread poverty and voter apathy within their community, the Garífuna face a difficult challenge keeping their land.
"The investors and the government divided the [Garífuna] community through money; public opinion was bought," said Domingo Alvarez, 65, a senior official of the Fraternal Black Organization of Honduras. ‘‘Even as there are denunciations, others simply dance to the tune of the state."
Dancers perform in celebration of a planned tourism development that could employ some Garífuna people but that some members of the group fear could further erode their culture. About 35 Garífuna families had to give up their properties to make way for the resort. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
TOURISM V. INVESTMENT
The Garífuna population in Honduras is officially estimated at 45,000, dispersed across more than 30 communities. They speak their own Africa-based language, Garífuna, as well as Spanish and English. But while their communities are promoted in Honduran tourism pamphlets, their numbers are too small to carry political weight.
"We are a minority, and even after 200 years of being here, we are still considered foreigners," Alvarez said.
Today, Garífuna communities can be found in small towns along Honduras' Caribbean coast, including one named Miami, a tiny slice of shoreline where families still live in straw huts.
But they are struggling to maintain their roots amid a dwindling population and several divisive issues -- the most contentious of them the swath of land where the war dance was performed held in October.
The site is being developed into an $11 million Micos Beach and Golf Resort. Land where about 35 Garífuna families had lived for generations was expropriated by the government to make room for the project.
A dancer warms up in celebration of a planned tourism development that could employ some Garífuna people but that some members fear could further erode their culture. About 35 Garífuna families had to give up their properties to make way for the resort. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
During the groundbreaking ceremony, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya promised that about $3 million would be set aside to invest in moneymaking projects specifically for the Garífuna -- but the community remains skeptical.
"We live a little poor," said Isaac Arriola, 34, who was at the dance to celebrate the project. "I think we are going to get some work and get some money."
"Maybe we are going to clean or cook, but we won't have the top jobs," countered Climaco Martínez, 66. "We don't have the necessary training to do anything else, and the government won't invest in that."
Martínez's wife, Balbina, said that while the planned resort could provide jobs, she worries about its impact on Garífuna society.
"When I grew up over here, we were innocent," she said. "My grandmother never went to the doctor. She used herbs for ailments. There are hardly any herbs anymore."
Félix Valerio, 70, uses herbs to treat ailments and prays to the spirits for guidance. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
TRADITIONAL BELIEFS
Those who still believe in herbal remedies infused with a dose of spirituality now turn to Félix Valerio, a respected curandero, or medicine man.
The rugged 70-year-old gets around on a rusty bicycle and is always barefoot "to feel the power."
"We are here to combat evil. We've saved a lot of souls," said Valerio, using the ‘‘we" to refer to himself and the spirits he prays to for guidance.
Consultations take place in the bedroom of a modest Caribbean-style home. One corner contains an altar topped with several statues, a portrait of Jesus, candles and flowers. Valerio listens to his clients' problems and seeks guidance from spirits to provide a solution.
Remedies consist of herbs combined with scented water that Valerio prepares in his tiny kitchen. People travel from all over the country to see him. Everyone leaves with a dose of advice and a bottle of herbal brew.
Valerio, whose grandfather settled in the region in 1890, has lived in the same house since he was born. The house faces the ocean -- a Garífuna trademark. "The Garífuna have never liked mountains," Valerio said. "They've always liked the ocean, fishing."
GOVERNMENT SERVICES
In the nearby fishing community of La Ensenada, Garífuna leader Gerardo Colón Rochez complained about a lack of government services as well as a loss of culture. "We have maintained our tradition, but we're also losing it," Colón said. "In part, it has to do with racism, but also partly due to us not mobilizing ourselves."
"Look, this is the most touristic community and we don't even have potable water," he said. "Before, we could take water from the ground and boil it. But now, there are latrines for the tourists, and the septic tanks have ruined the ground."
Garífuna artist Nicolás Colón Gutiérrez is trying to inspire youths by teaching them to paint.
"In the Garífuna community, a lot of talent is being lost," Colón he said. "This is the only ethnic group [in Honduras] that has maintained its language and culture."
"Not all of them can make it to the United States or be doctors or professionals," he said. "But they can make a living as talented artists. Here, the community migrates because the government offers nothing for its citizens. This program is providing a message of hope."
Hope also was at the core of a dance recital at a church in the community of San Juan, where a group of teenage girls held maracas over their heads, shaking them to the rhythm of drums played by a handful of boys.
That performance was not about war. It was about cultural survival -- practicing for a parade that would celebrate their heritage. They planned to dance down sandy streets, behind a banner with these Garífuna words: "Lema Ibagari lau Emenigini Wabaruaguon" -- "Life and hope are just ahead."
More information about the Garífuna:
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part1/honduras.html#storylink=cpy
A Garífuna woman cleans dishes at a window of her home in the Honduran community of La Ensenada. The settlements are touted to tourists, but residents see little help from government agencies. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
A fading culture clings to roots
The small and politically marginalized Garífuna community has maintained its rich African heritage but is struggling for the rights and education needed to survive.
By Nancy San Martin
nsanmartin@miamiherald.com
TELA, Honduras -- The three women in pumpkin-colored skirts, with sand clinging to their naked feet, held maracas over their heads and shook them in rhythm with drumbeats.
Nearby, bare-chested men with colorful headdresses moved with snake-like motions. The men and women then joined for an explosive Baile de Guerra -- a 200-year-old war dance commemorating their ancestors' liberation from English enslavement.
The dancers were Garífuna, descendants of African slaves who were shipwrecked on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in 1665 and mixed with Carib and Arawak Indians. After clashes with the English, they were sent in 1797 to Honduras, from where they spread to neighboring Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize.
Ironically, they the dancers were celebrating a planned tourism development that could further erode a unique community with an already muffled political voice, dwindling numbers and vanishing culture. Blacks account for only 2 percent of the people in this nation of 7.4 million.
With virtually no economic clout, widespread poverty and voter apathy within their community, the Garífuna face a difficult challenge keeping their land.
"The investors and the government divided the [Garífuna] community through money; public opinion was bought," said Domingo Alvarez, 65, a senior official of the Fraternal Black Organization of Honduras. ‘‘Even as there are denunciations, others simply dance to the tune of the state."
Dancers perform in celebration of a planned tourism development that could employ some Garífuna people but that some members of the group fear could further erode their culture. About 35 Garífuna families had to give up their properties to make way for the resort. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
TOURISM V. INVESTMENT
The Garífuna population in Honduras is officially estimated at 45,000, dispersed across more than 30 communities. They speak their own Africa-based language, Garífuna, as well as Spanish and English. But while their communities are promoted in Honduran tourism pamphlets, their numbers are too small to carry political weight.
"We are a minority, and even after 200 years of being here, we are still considered foreigners," Alvarez said.
Today, Garífuna communities can be found in small towns along Honduras' Caribbean coast, including one named Miami, a tiny slice of shoreline where families still live in straw huts.
But they are struggling to maintain their roots amid a dwindling population and several divisive issues -- the most contentious of them the swath of land where the war dance was performed held in October.
The site is being developed into an $11 million Micos Beach and Golf Resort. Land where about 35 Garífuna families had lived for generations was expropriated by the government to make room for the project.
A dancer warms up in celebration of a planned tourism development that could employ some Garífuna people but that some members fear could further erode their culture. About 35 Garífuna families had to give up their properties to make way for the resort. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
During the groundbreaking ceremony, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya promised that about $3 million would be set aside to invest in moneymaking projects specifically for the Garífuna -- but the community remains skeptical.
"We live a little poor," said Isaac Arriola, 34, who was at the dance to celebrate the project. "I think we are going to get some work and get some money."
"Maybe we are going to clean or cook, but we won't have the top jobs," countered Climaco Martínez, 66. "We don't have the necessary training to do anything else, and the government won't invest in that."
Martínez's wife, Balbina, said that while the planned resort could provide jobs, she worries about its impact on Garífuna society.
"When I grew up over here, we were innocent," she said. "My grandmother never went to the doctor. She used herbs for ailments. There are hardly any herbs anymore."
Félix Valerio, 70, uses herbs to treat ailments and prays to the spirits for guidance. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
TRADITIONAL BELIEFS
Those who still believe in herbal remedies infused with a dose of spirituality now turn to Félix Valerio, a respected curandero, or medicine man.
The rugged 70-year-old gets around on a rusty bicycle and is always barefoot "to feel the power."
"We are here to combat evil. We've saved a lot of souls," said Valerio, using the ‘‘we" to refer to himself and the spirits he prays to for guidance.
Consultations take place in the bedroom of a modest Caribbean-style home. One corner contains an altar topped with several statues, a portrait of Jesus, candles and flowers. Valerio listens to his clients' problems and seeks guidance from spirits to provide a solution.
Remedies consist of herbs combined with scented water that Valerio prepares in his tiny kitchen. People travel from all over the country to see him. Everyone leaves with a dose of advice and a bottle of herbal brew.
Valerio, whose grandfather settled in the region in 1890, has lived in the same house since he was born. The house faces the ocean -- a Garífuna trademark. "The Garífuna have never liked mountains," Valerio said. "They've always liked the ocean, fishing."
GOVERNMENT SERVICES
In the nearby fishing community of La Ensenada, Garífuna leader Gerardo Colón Rochez complained about a lack of government services as well as a loss of culture. "We have maintained our tradition, but we're also losing it," Colón said. "In part, it has to do with racism, but also partly due to us not mobilizing ourselves."
"Look, this is the most touristic community and we don't even have potable water," he said. "Before, we could take water from the ground and boil it. But now, there are latrines for the tourists, and the septic tanks have ruined the ground."
Garífuna artist Nicolás Colón Gutiérrez is trying to inspire youths by teaching them to paint.
"In the Garífuna community, a lot of talent is being lost," Colón he said. "This is the only ethnic group [in Honduras] that has maintained its language and culture."
"Not all of them can make it to the United States or be doctors or professionals," he said. "But they can make a living as talented artists. Here, the community migrates because the government offers nothing for its citizens. This program is providing a message of hope."
Hope also was at the core of a dance recital at a church in the community of San Juan, where a group of teenage girls held maracas over their heads, shaking them to the rhythm of drums played by a handful of boys.
That performance was not about war. It was about cultural survival -- practicing for a parade that would celebrate their heritage. They planned to dance down sandy streets, behind a banner with these Garífuna words: "Lema Ibagari lau Emenigini Wabaruaguon" -- "Life and hope are just ahead."
More information about the Garífuna:
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part1/honduras.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
- 6,448
- 1,433
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
BRAZIL
Children play under coconut palms that line the Atlantic shore of Ilha de Maré, an island in the Bay of All Saints in northeastern Brazil. The island's tiny community of Praia Grande was declared a 'quilombo' in 2004, giving its black residents some rights to the land. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Tug of war over land, customs
Afro-Brazilians are pushing for the government to recognize an increasing number of quilombos black settlements to help preserve their culture.
By Jack Chang
jchang@mcclatchydc.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- José Luiz Pinto's grandparents first came to Quilombo Sacopa more than 120 years ago as escaped slaves.
A hillside cave, then in virgin jungle but now in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, provided a good hiding place at first. They later built a house nearby.
That house has since sprouted into a community housing Pinto and about 30 relatives. It has also joined a key part of Brazilian history as one of the country's more than 1,100 recognized quilombos, or historic historical settlements founded by escaped slaves or their descendants.
For Pinto, a 65-year-old musician, living where his grandparents settled to escape an unjust, bloody institution is a point of pride.
"My grandparents died always fighting and resisting the injustice around them," Pinto said on a recent morning while walking through the quilombo. "That's what this community represents."
Increasingly, black leaders are drawing inspiration from that history and hailing the quilombos as symbols of a rising movement to give more political and economic power to Afro-Brazilians. At the same time, more settlements are winning federal recognition and seeking title to the land they are built on.
Pinto said that winning such recognition in 2004 was crucial to ensuring his quilombo's future.
Since his grandparents' days, the surrounding neighborhood has turned into one of Rio de Janeiro's most exclusive, and developers and neighbors have tried for decades to remove Pinto and his family.
Those efforts have since stopped, and Pinto is applying for title to the 4.4 acres that his family lives on. They also receive government aid for quilombos.
Since taking office in 2003, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has jump-started the quilombo movement, and upset powerful landowners, by streamlining the process for granting them the settlements official recognition and land rights.
A fisherman maneuvers his boat off Ilha de Maré. Black residents of a nearby 'quilombo' -- population 40 -- are applying for title to their farms. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Rolf Hachbart, head of the country's land-reform agency, said that helping quilombos is one way the government is paying a historic historical debt for slavery. More than half of the 63 settlements with land titles nationwide received them under Lula da Silva's government.
The Brazilian government estimates that as many as 2 two million people live in recognized and unrecognized quilombos that total about 116,000 square miles of land.
"These people came here as slaves and never had the right to land," Hachbart said. ‘‘They were poor and excluded, and we are trying to fix what was historically wrong."
Landowner groups and other critics, however, have accused the communities of abusing the system to seize more land than they are entitled to. They have also assailed reforms that allow communities to identify themselves as descended from escaped slaves, rather than await word from anthropologists.
"Having these quilombos self-declare has created a very messy system," said Leôncio de Souza Brito Filho, president of the land-issues commission of Brazil's main agricultural industry group. ‘‘This is creating mistrust everywhere."
Hugo Dutra, 11, plays in a 'quilombo' in Rio de Janeiro.(Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Quilombo leaders said their fight wasn't just about land. Many also keep alive the traditions of their communities' founders, including growing the same foods and practicing the same religions.
"The difference between us and other communities is that people are preserving the customs of our ancestors, of the people who came in the 18th century," said Ananias Nery, a leader of a group of quilombos near the northeastern Brazilian town of Cachoeira.
For 76-year-old Gregório Capistano and about 40 farmers and fishermen on an island in the Bay of All Saints near Cachoeira, winning quilombo status in 2004 brought long-delayed self-determination.
The conditions on the island more than 40 years ago were not much better than slavery, Capistano said. Every farmer had to give up to half of his crops to a local family that controlled the island, although even though it was mostly public land. Farmers who refused were beaten.
Now, Capistano and his neighbors get to keep what they produce and are applying for title to their farms.
"When I first came here, there was so much suffering," he said. "Everything we grew, they took. . . . Now, we work for ourselves."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/quilombo.html#storylink=cpy
Children play under coconut palms that line the Atlantic shore of Ilha de Maré, an island in the Bay of All Saints in northeastern Brazil. The island's tiny community of Praia Grande was declared a 'quilombo' in 2004, giving its black residents some rights to the land. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Tug of war over land, customs
Afro-Brazilians are pushing for the government to recognize an increasing number of quilombos black settlements to help preserve their culture.
By Jack Chang
jchang@mcclatchydc.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- José Luiz Pinto's grandparents first came to Quilombo Sacopa more than 120 years ago as escaped slaves.
A hillside cave, then in virgin jungle but now in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, provided a good hiding place at first. They later built a house nearby.
That house has since sprouted into a community housing Pinto and about 30 relatives. It has also joined a key part of Brazilian history as one of the country's more than 1,100 recognized quilombos, or historic historical settlements founded by escaped slaves or their descendants.
For Pinto, a 65-year-old musician, living where his grandparents settled to escape an unjust, bloody institution is a point of pride.
"My grandparents died always fighting and resisting the injustice around them," Pinto said on a recent morning while walking through the quilombo. "That's what this community represents."
Increasingly, black leaders are drawing inspiration from that history and hailing the quilombos as symbols of a rising movement to give more political and economic power to Afro-Brazilians. At the same time, more settlements are winning federal recognition and seeking title to the land they are built on.
Pinto said that winning such recognition in 2004 was crucial to ensuring his quilombo's future.
Since his grandparents' days, the surrounding neighborhood has turned into one of Rio de Janeiro's most exclusive, and developers and neighbors have tried for decades to remove Pinto and his family.
Those efforts have since stopped, and Pinto is applying for title to the 4.4 acres that his family lives on. They also receive government aid for quilombos.
Since taking office in 2003, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has jump-started the quilombo movement, and upset powerful landowners, by streamlining the process for granting them the settlements official recognition and land rights.
A fisherman maneuvers his boat off Ilha de Maré. Black residents of a nearby 'quilombo' -- population 40 -- are applying for title to their farms. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Rolf Hachbart, head of the country's land-reform agency, said that helping quilombos is one way the government is paying a historic historical debt for slavery. More than half of the 63 settlements with land titles nationwide received them under Lula da Silva's government.
The Brazilian government estimates that as many as 2 two million people live in recognized and unrecognized quilombos that total about 116,000 square miles of land.
"These people came here as slaves and never had the right to land," Hachbart said. ‘‘They were poor and excluded, and we are trying to fix what was historically wrong."
Landowner groups and other critics, however, have accused the communities of abusing the system to seize more land than they are entitled to. They have also assailed reforms that allow communities to identify themselves as descended from escaped slaves, rather than await word from anthropologists.
"Having these quilombos self-declare has created a very messy system," said Leôncio de Souza Brito Filho, president of the land-issues commission of Brazil's main agricultural industry group. ‘‘This is creating mistrust everywhere."
Hugo Dutra, 11, plays in a 'quilombo' in Rio de Janeiro.(Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Quilombo leaders said their fight wasn't just about land. Many also keep alive the traditions of their communities' founders, including growing the same foods and practicing the same religions.
"The difference between us and other communities is that people are preserving the customs of our ancestors, of the people who came in the 18th century," said Ananias Nery, a leader of a group of quilombos near the northeastern Brazilian town of Cachoeira.
For 76-year-old Gregório Capistano and about 40 farmers and fishermen on an island in the Bay of All Saints near Cachoeira, winning quilombo status in 2004 brought long-delayed self-determination.
The conditions on the island more than 40 years ago were not much better than slavery, Capistano said. Every farmer had to give up to half of his crops to a local family that controlled the island, although even though it was mostly public land. Farmers who refused were beaten.
Now, Capistano and his neighbors get to keep what they produce and are applying for title to their farms.
"When I first came here, there was so much suffering," he said. "Everything we grew, they took. . . . Now, we work for ourselves."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/quilombo.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
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- 1,433
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
Published: June 17, 2007ISSUES AND IDEAS
A group of Garifuna dancers get ready to welcome a new resort in Honduras. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
Building identity
Many governments in the Americas quietly bolster the battle against racism
By Pablo Bachelet
pbachelet@miamiherald.com
PANAMA CITY - Until recently, Latin American leaders treated racism as if it were somebody else's problem. South American presidents in 2000 even issued a statement condemning its resurgence in "other parts of the world."
If Afro-Latin Americans were poorer and less educated than whites, and underrepresented in government or corporations, the thinking went, it was a problem of class, not skin color.
Then, a quiet but stunning U-turn.
Governments have not only stopped ignoring racism but are drafting anti-discrimination laws, negotiating a tough hemispheric agreement to deter racism and counting the number of blacks in their midst -- all moves that activists say are needed to lift the veil of invisibility that has shrouded Afro-Latin Americans for centuries.
These advances have not come with the searing drama that marked the U.S. civil rights movement. But for a region where many blacks have long led a marginalized existence, it is heady stuff.
"That there is an awareness that you need to create government institutions, implement public policies, name black justices, is a drastic change," said Ariel Dulitzky, an expert on the subject at the Organization of American States.
The turning point came when Latin American governments and more than 1,700 activists descended on Santiago, Chile in 2000 to prepare for a U.N. worldwide conference on racism and discrimination the next year.
Until that moment Afro-descendants were more concerned with validating their African culture than fighting for political rights, says Carlos Quesada, Latin American Director for Global Rights Partners for Justice, a Washington group that trains grassroots organizations.
But after the Santiago conference, Latin American governments issued a statement recognizing that ignoring racism "contributes directly and indirectly to perpetuating the practices of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."
Governments also for the first time used the unifying term Afro-descendants.
"It's very powerful in terms of unifying people," said Judith Morrison, South America and Caribbean director with the Inter-American Foundation, a U.S. government agency that funds community organizations, "because in the past you'd say I'm ‘African-American,' ‘I'm Afro-Latin,' or ‘I'm Afro-Caribbean' or ‘I'm African'."
The historical reasons for racism and the lack of political participation by blacks are not that different for Latin America than for the United States.
Latin America has a longer and more intensive history of African slavery and racial segregation laws existed for centuries during the colonial period, says George Reid Andrews, with the University of Pittsburgh.
Indigenous groups became more politically active sooner because their Spanish colonial masters let them preserve their way of life in many parts, providing an institutional and social basis for the formation of Indian movements, culture and society. Blacks, Reid Andrews says, lacked these foundations.
END OPTIONAL TRIM
Today, blacks in Latin America face daunting obstacles. Chances are they will get a shoddy education, drop out of school early, earn less money than whites and fade into the masses of urban and rural poor.
But some things are changing.
Governments census takers are counting blacks more carefully to determine the relationship between race and poverty in a region that already suffers from the world's worst income distribution.
Since 2003, the World Bank has done studies of black communities in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Panama, showing blacks were consistenly undercounted.
And more people are telling census takers they are afro-descendents. While Colombia's 1993 census found 500,000 blacks, by the mid-2000s the number had jumped to nearly five million. A government study estimated there were almost 300,000 blacks in Uruguay in 2006 -- 50 percent more than a decade before.
One of the World Bank studies concluded that Argentina has around 2 million Afro-descendants -- far more than the 1.21 million estimated for "non-white groups'' by the CIA's World Factbook.
The World Bank estimates Afro-descendants at 80-150 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone has 90 million, more than any other country except Nigeria.
And they are growing increasingly aware of their rights.
On Christmas day, 2004, Johana Acosta, an Afro-Colombian, wanted to go dancing with her white friends. On two occasions, her friends were allowed into night clubs, but she was not.
She took her case all the way to the constitutional court and won. The club owners were sentenced to pay retributions and study human rights and Afro-Colombian heritage. The court also instructed authorities to make sure such abuses never happen again.
Brazil now has a cabinet-level position to promote racial equality and federal affirmative action programs for public universities and the foreign service. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, created a special post to report on racism in 2005.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who needs the votes of black members of the U.S. Congress for a free trade agreement, last month appointed the 28-year Oxford University graduate Paola Moreno as minister of culture -- the first black cabinet appointment in a half-century. Colombia also reserves two congressional seats for blacks.
Argentina is drafting a "national plan'' to fight racial discrimination. Special government ombudsmen dealing with racism now operate in every Latin American country except El Salvador, Chile and Paraguay.
And last year, the 34-member OAS began debating a Brazil-proposed convention ‘‘combatting racism and all forms of discrimination and intolerance." Any violations could taken up by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. The United States, which does not recognize the court, is waiting to see how the convention comes out before pronouncing its position.
Beyond governments and multilateral institutions, Latin American blacks are organizing across borders to win greater visibility and heft.
"Many people don't realize there are blacks in Bolivia and Peru," says Elvia Duque, who runs the Washington office of AfroAmericaXXI, a group that brings together 170 community organizations in 13 Latin American countries.
Though such actions are celebrated, the few black politicians that have attained positions of influence are quick to put things in perspective.
María Isabel Urrutia is a congresswoman and Colombia's only olympic gold medalist. ‘‘We have gained much, we are recognized," she said at a recent event for activists on the side of an OAS meeting in Panama. But she complained appointing a black as culture minister only reinforced stereotypes that blacks were good at sports and entertainment. ‘‘They are continuing to have us dance," she said.
Epsy Campbell, a prominent Costa Rican politician, says blacks make up one-third of the region's population but account for fewer than 80 of its 4,200 legislators.
"We have to blacken the dialogue on democracy in Latin America," she says.
Ultimately, the region's democratic health depends on being inclusive, says Dulitzky, the OAS official.
"Equality, as it relates to race, gender, ethnicity, or anything else," he says, "is still far from being viewed in the region as an essential and basic requirement for democracy."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/racism.html#storylink=cpy
A group of Garifuna dancers get ready to welcome a new resort in Honduras. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
Building identity
Many governments in the Americas quietly bolster the battle against racism
By Pablo Bachelet
pbachelet@miamiherald.com
PANAMA CITY - Until recently, Latin American leaders treated racism as if it were somebody else's problem. South American presidents in 2000 even issued a statement condemning its resurgence in "other parts of the world."
If Afro-Latin Americans were poorer and less educated than whites, and underrepresented in government or corporations, the thinking went, it was a problem of class, not skin color.
Then, a quiet but stunning U-turn.
Governments have not only stopped ignoring racism but are drafting anti-discrimination laws, negotiating a tough hemispheric agreement to deter racism and counting the number of blacks in their midst -- all moves that activists say are needed to lift the veil of invisibility that has shrouded Afro-Latin Americans for centuries.
These advances have not come with the searing drama that marked the U.S. civil rights movement. But for a region where many blacks have long led a marginalized existence, it is heady stuff.
"That there is an awareness that you need to create government institutions, implement public policies, name black justices, is a drastic change," said Ariel Dulitzky, an expert on the subject at the Organization of American States.
The turning point came when Latin American governments and more than 1,700 activists descended on Santiago, Chile in 2000 to prepare for a U.N. worldwide conference on racism and discrimination the next year.
Until that moment Afro-descendants were more concerned with validating their African culture than fighting for political rights, says Carlos Quesada, Latin American Director for Global Rights Partners for Justice, a Washington group that trains grassroots organizations.
But after the Santiago conference, Latin American governments issued a statement recognizing that ignoring racism "contributes directly and indirectly to perpetuating the practices of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."
Governments also for the first time used the unifying term Afro-descendants.
"It's very powerful in terms of unifying people," said Judith Morrison, South America and Caribbean director with the Inter-American Foundation, a U.S. government agency that funds community organizations, "because in the past you'd say I'm ‘African-American,' ‘I'm Afro-Latin,' or ‘I'm Afro-Caribbean' or ‘I'm African'."
The historical reasons for racism and the lack of political participation by blacks are not that different for Latin America than for the United States.
Latin America has a longer and more intensive history of African slavery and racial segregation laws existed for centuries during the colonial period, says George Reid Andrews, with the University of Pittsburgh.
Indigenous groups became more politically active sooner because their Spanish colonial masters let them preserve their way of life in many parts, providing an institutional and social basis for the formation of Indian movements, culture and society. Blacks, Reid Andrews says, lacked these foundations.
END OPTIONAL TRIM
Today, blacks in Latin America face daunting obstacles. Chances are they will get a shoddy education, drop out of school early, earn less money than whites and fade into the masses of urban and rural poor.
But some things are changing.
Governments census takers are counting blacks more carefully to determine the relationship between race and poverty in a region that already suffers from the world's worst income distribution.
Since 2003, the World Bank has done studies of black communities in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Panama, showing blacks were consistenly undercounted.
And more people are telling census takers they are afro-descendents. While Colombia's 1993 census found 500,000 blacks, by the mid-2000s the number had jumped to nearly five million. A government study estimated there were almost 300,000 blacks in Uruguay in 2006 -- 50 percent more than a decade before.
One of the World Bank studies concluded that Argentina has around 2 million Afro-descendants -- far more than the 1.21 million estimated for "non-white groups'' by the CIA's World Factbook.
The World Bank estimates Afro-descendants at 80-150 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone has 90 million, more than any other country except Nigeria.
And they are growing increasingly aware of their rights.
On Christmas day, 2004, Johana Acosta, an Afro-Colombian, wanted to go dancing with her white friends. On two occasions, her friends were allowed into night clubs, but she was not.
She took her case all the way to the constitutional court and won. The club owners were sentenced to pay retributions and study human rights and Afro-Colombian heritage. The court also instructed authorities to make sure such abuses never happen again.
Brazil now has a cabinet-level position to promote racial equality and federal affirmative action programs for public universities and the foreign service. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, created a special post to report on racism in 2005.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who needs the votes of black members of the U.S. Congress for a free trade agreement, last month appointed the 28-year Oxford University graduate Paola Moreno as minister of culture -- the first black cabinet appointment in a half-century. Colombia also reserves two congressional seats for blacks.
Argentina is drafting a "national plan'' to fight racial discrimination. Special government ombudsmen dealing with racism now operate in every Latin American country except El Salvador, Chile and Paraguay.
And last year, the 34-member OAS began debating a Brazil-proposed convention ‘‘combatting racism and all forms of discrimination and intolerance." Any violations could taken up by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. The United States, which does not recognize the court, is waiting to see how the convention comes out before pronouncing its position.
Beyond governments and multilateral institutions, Latin American blacks are organizing across borders to win greater visibility and heft.
"Many people don't realize there are blacks in Bolivia and Peru," says Elvia Duque, who runs the Washington office of AfroAmericaXXI, a group that brings together 170 community organizations in 13 Latin American countries.
Though such actions are celebrated, the few black politicians that have attained positions of influence are quick to put things in perspective.
María Isabel Urrutia is a congresswoman and Colombia's only olympic gold medalist. ‘‘We have gained much, we are recognized," she said at a recent event for activists on the side of an OAS meeting in Panama. But she complained appointing a black as culture minister only reinforced stereotypes that blacks were good at sports and entertainment. ‘‘They are continuing to have us dance," she said.
Epsy Campbell, a prominent Costa Rican politician, says blacks make up one-third of the region's population but account for fewer than 80 of its 4,200 legislators.
"We have to blacken the dialogue on democracy in Latin America," she says.
Ultimately, the region's democratic health depends on being inclusive, says Dulitzky, the OAS official.
"Equality, as it relates to race, gender, ethnicity, or anything else," he says, "is still far from being viewed in the region as an essential and basic requirement for democracy."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part3/racism.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
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- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
Who gives a damn what chris rock had to say?Thats funny considering Chris Rock's Documentry "good hair" dont have a single hispanic in it.Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html#storylink=cpyOriginally Posted by FutureMD
Black denial
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
By Frances Robles
frobles@miamiherald.com
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big *****!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Try again silly *****
Hes not from the D.R.
YOU are.
Are you really this "behind"???
Last edited:
futuremd
Banned
- 6,448
- 1,433
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
ACHIEVERS
Women and men dance in a circle during a ceremony of Candomble, a religion of African origin that is practiced in Brazil. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
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.
Correction: Speaker -- Jack Chang, not Leonard Pitts
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.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part5/index.html#storylink=cpy
Women and men dance in a circle during a ceremony of Candomble, a religion of African origin that is practiced in Brazil. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
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.
Correction: Speaker -- Jack Chang, not Leonard Pitts
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.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part5/index.html#storylink=cpy
futuremd
Banned
- 6,448
- 1,433
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
Keep denying it NinjaHood.
We can do this all day.
You're are so quick to deny history that it's hilarious to me.
Again. I don't care what you call yourself, but you're not going to claim that:
A. You don't have partially african origins
B. That african heritage is not a part of the D.R. or the caribbean, central america or south america.
Every latino has african roots. Ya'll are SUPER quick to claim that Spaniard and Portugese side though.
I don't care what you call yourself today, or how you feel about how you present yourself...BUT, there is a history there that you're completely disrespecting and without it, you wouldn't be here.
Its not about what you embrace. Its about recognizing your history. You're not JUST hispanic-affiliated. You're more than that.
and before you come at me with what I said in other threads: When it comes to PROGRESSIVISM and ACTIVISM, its important to not limit ourselves to JUST others that look like us, but the human condition over all.
Thats my point.
If race and ethnicity matter, then you don't get to brush this under the rug.
if they don't matter, then stop defending your "latino" stripes.
You know better.
Now you're just trying to save face.
Saying it over and over again doesn't make it more true.
We can do this all day.
You're are so quick to deny history that it's hilarious to me.
Again. I don't care what you call yourself, but you're not going to claim that:
A. You don't have partially african origins
B. That african heritage is not a part of the D.R. or the caribbean, central america or south america.
Every latino has african roots. Ya'll are SUPER quick to claim that Spaniard and Portugese side though.
I don't care what you call yourself today, or how you feel about how you present yourself...BUT, there is a history there that you're completely disrespecting and without it, you wouldn't be here.
Its not about what you embrace. Its about recognizing your history. You're not JUST hispanic-affiliated. You're more than that.
and before you come at me with what I said in other threads: When it comes to PROGRESSIVISM and ACTIVISM, its important to not limit ourselves to JUST others that look like us, but the human condition over all.
Thats my point.
If race and ethnicity matter, then you don't get to brush this under the rug.
if they don't matter, then stop defending your "latino" stripes.
You know better.
Now you're just trying to save face.
Saying it over and over again doesn't make it more true.
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I always wanted to hear Anderson silva or jacares opinion on racism in brazil Amderson has alluded to whitte brazilians mocking and making fun if him when he was poor and worked at McDonald's and some of the biggest beefs in MMA history in brazil is due to Luta livre which was practiced by black dark brazilians and bjj which was mostly practiced by white brazilians .
cj863
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And the same Spaniards that he champions as his only ancestors would spit on him Champion hoodie, new era fitted and all
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Who gives a damn what chris rock had to say?
Black denial
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
By Frances Robles
frobles@miamiherald.com
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big *****!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part2/index.html#storylink=cpy
Thats funny considering Chris Rock's Documentry "good hair" dont have a single hispanic in it.
Try again silly *****
Hes not from the D.R.
YOU are.
Are you really this "behind"???
And which leaves me da question of WHO DA **** U THINK U ARE defining
WHO I AM?
MY people DEFINE ourselves as HISPANIC/ LATINO.
I DON'T give a **** what anyone else wants to call themselves,
But as far as im concerned IM a 1st generation US born Dominican American
Hispanic from Washington Heights, anyone got a problem with that can suck my ***.