every effect has a cause
In most slave societies, the victimizing "race"and the "victimized race" do not mix to the extent that it has occurred on the island of Santo Domingo over the last few centuries. This produced a particular set of precedents that still linger in today's DR society.
In next door neighbor Haiti, the Africans rightfully revolted against, and essentially wiped out the brutal regime of the European (French) "masters". Interestingly, at the time of the Haitian independence revolution and unlike in most other slave societies, some free creole mulattoes in St. Domingue where as wealthy and educated as the absentee plantation owners in Paris. And they owned slaves too. There were indeed some isolated cases, where African former slaves, that onced freed went on to own slaves themselves. The French "code noir" went into excruciating detail to catalogue every possible permutation of "racial miscegenation" and it stratified societal hierarchies accordingly. Many rights were denied to otherwise free citizens. Affluence and social standing often did not match. Following the French Revolution - the ideas of equalit?, etc..- had a huge impact in this overseas colony, and it evolved into an eruption of racially-defined genocidal violence.
During that time, in Spanish Santo Domingo (today's DR) the population of actually African-born slaves was small. And the conditions in the smaller-scale economic activities of the Spanish colony were also substantially less brutal than in the large plantations of St. Domingue (today's Haiti). The French St. Domingue system was such that slave labor was continuously supplied to replace the many deaths among the exploited laborers. In the eastern part of the island, several generations of native born Whites, Blacks and people of mixed ancestries coexsisted in, what by comparison, was a less rigid caste system. Economic conditions in the Spanish Santo Domingo side allowed for a more relaxed form of racial codification and people of African and European descent had already mixed much more than in Haiti and people of various degrees of "mixing" could achieve equal legal, political and economic standing, if not always the so-called equal standing in "high society".
In colonial times both the DR and Haiti were slave societies, but once the DR was born as a country, Whites, Mulattoes and Blacks all learned to live with one another and racial violence has been practically nonexistent since.
There is no history of Jim Crow, and much less a KKK equivalent in the DR. After slavery is abolished, no institutional forms of segregation were implemented. Strong social biases and inequality, yes. But popular-based organized hatred, not that I know of. The only exception might be Trujillo's killing spree against Haitians in 1937, but race was only one factor, among others such as religion, language and national allegiance issues.
Racial biases do exist, but racial violence is practically unheard of. I believe that this is a significant difference with other societies with a legacy of slave societies. Upward mobility in the DR is quite possibly much more fluid than in other Caribbean and Latin American nations, even in spite of the ugly remnants of racism that persits. Even the terrible conditions of today's bateyes, which is an inhumane economic form of opression, is NOT (contrary to conventional wisdom) a race-based system of opression. Haitians are being exploited in sugar cane fields not for their complexion, but because of their unfortunate economic and migratory reality.
Problems of racial prejudice, including racism, are a a global phenomenon. It just so happens that different societies have dealt with it differently and each has its own manifestations of the problem. Some of you may find apparent contradictions in what I say above, but this only reflects the many contradictions that we find when trying to get a clear picture of race relations in the DR. In many ways it is one of the most racially open societies, and in some others it is still one of the most anachronistic. This is why, I think, that many of the people above cannot believe what the other is saying when referring to the same people. They are simply telling it like they see it, and in this sense everyone is a little right, and quite possibly everyone is a little wrong. Welcome to the world of complex ambiguities.
- Tordok
