Do Dominicans Identify As Black?
About two weeks ago, I asked my cousins in our group chat, there are five of us on there, all of us are Dominican and one is Puerto Rican, if any of them identify as black. I asked because I know many Dominicans don’t, and that question brought up a very valuable discussion.
The question steamed from the book I’m currently reading, “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, and she explained that race is socially constructed.
She says, “The difference we see with our eyes — differences such as hair texture and eye color — are superficial and emerged as adaptations to geography. Under the skin, there is no true biological race.”
After the discussion with my cousins, I told myself I would do more search on the history of the Dominican Republic because I knew that Dominicans are mixed, with Tainos (the indigenous people of the Caribbean), European (Spaniard descent), and African. Furthermore, I learned that the first enslaved people were brought to the Dominican Republic, which began the slave trade in 1503. This occurred 116 years before enslaved people arrived in the United States.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20201117-santo-domingo-the-city-that-kept-slavery-silent
So why is it that so many Dominicans do not identify as black? Well, that depends on what your definition of…
