It's a little lengthy, but....
As long as someone feels disadvantaged for a reason that is not based on his/her merits, the notion of racism will continue to exist.
Racism is not just a matter of a majority prejudging a minority, well at least not in the conventional sense.
Usually, when people think of majority/minority, we tend to think in terms of pure numbers. However, a minority is simply a group of disadvantaged peoples, regardless what their actual numbers in population may be.
For this reason, women are seen as a minority, despite women outnumbering men in most societies. They are minorities because they often don't have the same rights and/or don't receive the same treatment men receive in similar situations, whatever they may be.
For this reason I don't agree too much with the final question in DV8's post. While whites in the DR are a minority in number, they are in fact a majority in influence and power. The minority would be the disadvantaged masses who collectively have less rights than a handful of whites, whether they are upper class Dominicans or expatriates from elsewhere.
The only way for racism to fully disappear is to have a classless society and under a capitalistic system, that is highly unlikely to occur.
Sometimes, a little racism can actually be constructive and positive. This is the case in the many affirmative action programs imposed in various countries in the world, meant to give an extra advantage to disadvantaged minorities over a more advantageous majority.
Some of the most famous affirmative action programs includes the program giving American minorities and advantage in gaining access to education, employment, etc. Also, in the United Arab Emirates and in Malaysia, each respective government gives plenty of perks and advantages to their native people, who are often a small proportion of the total population of their countries given that their countries have many people who are either from or descended from other places.
In the case of Malaysia, the bumiputra (I believe that's the name of the program) intentionally gives native Malaysians an upstart and advantage in gaining economic and political participation over the rest of the population. In United Arab Emirates (where Emiratis are an extremely small proportion of the population with most of the people living in UAE being immigrants from Pakistan, Africa, and India) Emiratis are given property and grants by the government in order to keep the native Emirati population at a prominent socio-economic level vs. the rest of the population which is not native to UAE.
India has the largest affirmative action program on earth with the attempt to give equal rights to the "untouchables" who form the lowest caste, so low that many Indians believe that to be touched by the shadow of an "untouchable" requires a purification ceremony in order to avert bad luck. Earlier this year I remember seeing on BBC news demonstrations occuring in India by the majority rejecting new rights being given to the untouchables. Visually untouchables are indistinguishable from most Indians, although the Indian upper class tends to be light skin.
To conclude, racism will exist in all societies that are stratified. Stratification implies an inherent difference between people in a given society. This difference could either be ascribed (ie. born into) or can be attained through merit.
The only way to eliminate racism is by elimination stratification and since Capitalism is a system based on stratification and it's the best way to allocate scarce resources (compared to all the other economic theories that have been applied and have failed such as socialism), the persistence of racism will continue.
The only thing that can be done is patch the symptoms of racism via programs aimed at giving advantages to the disadvantageous, but even then it only works up to a certain point. The people who were part of the minority and received the benefit of such program often develop more things in common with the original majority and in fact, begin to act and think like the majority rather than the disadvantaged minority they once were a part of.
A good example would be the African-American community in the United States. Those who have benefited from the affirmative action programs and have moved up the socio-economic latter actually have more things in common with other upper class Americans than they do with the lower class members of their own race. In fact, because of this difference in socio-economic class, the upper class within the African-American community actually looks down to the lower class African-American community in various, among the many blaming the lower class members for staying in the lower class despite the opportunities available. There are many sociological studies affirming this and trying to understand the schism that has occured within the African-American community between those who moved up the latter and those who remained stuck in the lower class.
In the end, racism is closely link to classism. In fact, I'm convinced that racism is simply a racialized version of classism. The belief in being superior to another person due to education level, income, or heritance is rooted in the racialization of such belief when a particular race or ethnic group has been denegraded and kept at a submissive level in a society (ie. blacks who were decendants of slaves - the lowest class).
For this reason, many racist ideas came to be equating either skin color or physical attributes to the "inherent ability of a human to acheive greatness in life". What such ideas or racist theories failed to take into account was the historical realities which trasended via different types of people falling in different socio-economic class levels.
The deep belief in such and the attempt to keep such belief present lead to the racism many people are familiar with around the world, a racism which is nothing more than a racialized version of classism.
However, as the notion of racial superiority wanes and people begin to mingle and see people of other races and combination of races reaching high levels in their societies as professionals or prominent figures, the notion of racialized classism will wane and we will simply be left with pure classism.
It will no longer be a world where light skin people are believed to be better and smarter than non-light skin people, but rather into a world where some people simply take advantage of the opportunities available to them and others don't and that is what will make the difference between who reaches the status of majority and who remains as a minority, not by the virtue of their population but by the virtue of accrued influence and power an individual attains as he/she lives his/her life.
Is the DR a racist country? I think it's not.
Are there racist Dominicans? Yes there are.
Will this always be the case? Things are changing, slowly, but changing and that gives hope that it will not be the case forever.
Is the DR a classist country? Yes it is.
Are there classist Dominicans? Yes there are.
Will the DR always be a classist country? As long as the society functions on an economic system that is based on stratification, the DR will remain classist.
Is the DR less racist than other countries? I think it is less racist.
Why? The DR has a population that mingles and intermarries and mixes to a degree few other places on earth has witnessed this.
My 2 cents.
-NALs
