Family and Color: The Social and Cultural Roots of Dominican Colorism
In early January, my partner and I became first-time parents. We immediately fell in love with every minute detail of this tiny stranger whom we had brought home. Like many new parents, we sent photos and videos to our family members, hoping to share our joy and introduce our little one to those we love.
The expected congratulations, well-wishes, and blessings rained down on us from our family and friends. They found her precious, cute, and all the other endearing adjectives used to describe newborns. What I did not expect was my family’s not-so-subtle obsession with our daughter’s skin color, especially because within my own immediate family, we have different races. My paternal family is Afro-Dominican with ancestral roots in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic (D.R.). My maternal family is white-passing with ancestral ties to Spain and the Indigenous Arawak people of Hispaniola and South America.
Not yet two days old, the comments sprouted early: “Wow, she came out india,” my grandfather said in Spanish upon seeing her for the first time on WhatsApp.
“Oh no! Don’t you say such things! She is beautiful,” my Afro-Dominican grandmother reproachingly replied as if “india” and “beautiful” canceled each other out. I felt a sharp and poignant sting in my heart. I don’t know if it was anger, sadness, or disappointment, but I did not want that feeling to damper this moment between my grandparents and me. I did not want to linger on this racial violence.
When my mother visited us, the question of race continued to surface. “Her skin is not like her Korean mother’s,” she said in reference to my partner’s fairer complexion, “she looks more morenita.” It pained me to hear my family create distance between our newborn and her mother, and it shattered me to puzzle over the implications of my mother’s words. Why did it matter if she was darker than her mother? Why did her skin color need to be named and contextualized by every family member? Was I overthinking this?
In broken English, my mother told my partner, “My second-born was dark and so was my first grandchild.” In utter shock and confusion, my partner told me about these comments in hopes that I would provide clarity. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. More statements from my mom, seemingly harmless or couched between endearing comments on my daughter’s cuteness, continued to germinate out of thin air. They felt charged with a certain racial tension that seemed to suggest disappointment, like I had let my family down in an unspoken mission to improve upon la raza.
With this barrage of comments and backhanded compliments, I was taken back to my childhood in the D.R.: memories of Haitian vendors being harassed simply for existing while Black; gossip about my paternal family’s Haitian blood and how their Black skin made them violent people. My mind became tormented with rage and sleep deprivation from the long nights with our infant. I felt duped. There I was, sharing the most special person in my life with my family. This was supposed to be jovial, but instead, I felt like I was making our daughter vulnerable to the racial violence that historically shaped our people and nation.
As a multiracial Dominican who came to the United States at six years old, I was initially distanced from a U.S. sense of race. Later in life, while growing up in New York City, I was racialized, usually as “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “brown.” But when I traveled back to my natal island, different people called me different things. I was indio and morenito after a summer under the sun, and rubio after the long winter months. My experience wasn’t singular. All around me were people of different shades of brown.
With this racial complexity comes the deep-seated colorism that I grew up with. Comparisons to my darker-skinned brother and my fairer-skinned sister and cousins were normal. Blackness was overtly demonized whereas whiteness was desired and celebrated. If you had straight hair, you had pelo bueno (good hair). But if your hair had curls or kinks, you had pelo malo (bad hair), una greña (a tangle), or un pajón (big messy hair). Of course, not everyone subscribed to these racist beauty standards, but within my own family, there was still a lot to learn about how to love and accept our racial complexity.
History of Dominican Colorism
Any history of race- and nation-making requires nuance. Therefore, it is crucial for us not to think of the Dominican Republic as a nation of Black denialism. After all, the root of racial bias is and will always be white supremacy. Furthermore, as a nation of mostly Black and multi-racial people that shares an island and history with Haiti in the backyard of the wealthiest nation in the world, we are victims to the socioeconomic radiation of racial capitalism. Thus, before I provide a gloss of the history of Dominican colorism, it is important to note that since the arrival of the first European colonizers, the people of Kiskeya (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) have contested white and European supremacy, often at the cost of their lives. The fight for a racially just future is still a part of Dominican tradition on the island and in the diaspora.
The history of race and colorism in the Dominican Republic emerged as a historical process enacted by settler colonial and, later, national regimes. Spanish monarchs, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand financed the initial voyages and early colonization of Kiskeya. When Christopher Columbus and a crew of about ninety men ran their ship, Santa María, aground on the island in 1492, they encountered Taínos whose brown and Black skin and systems of governance Europeans deemed inferior. With the colonial mission to extract from, evangelize, and eventually occupy the “New World,” European settlers demanded cheap human labor. Indigenous people were initially coerced into filling this role. The Spanish Crown granted government officials, friars, conquistadors, and settlers legal grounds to claim authority - in practice, enslave - Indigenous Americans, including Taínos, under a system of colonization known as the encomienda. Under this system, a certain number of “Indios” (Indigenous Americans, and later, Filipinos) residing in a specific region were required to pay tribute either in goods or labor to a grant holder, known as an encomendero. In return, the encomendero was obligated to protect the “Indios” and ensure they converted to Catholicism. Though ostensibly a grant for control over the labor and income of people, encomenderos often translated their claim to lands as well. Many Indigenous people escaped the encomienda, fleeing to other islands or the South American mainland, while many others died from disease and hard labor. When the continued extraction of Indigenous labor proved unsustainable, Spanish settlers purchased African people kidnapped, sold, and shipped from West and West Central Africa, ultimately coming to rely on the transatlantic slave trade.
In Spanish-occupied America, multi-racial heredity among settlers, Indigenous people, and African people gave way to a complex casta (caste) system, which categorized a person’s race and ethnicity; hierarchized their social and economic status in terms of labor, servitude, and enslavement; and promoted what historian María Elena Martínez called geological fictions vis-à-vis purity of Spanish-Catholic blood or limpieza de sangre. This casta system was designed to give names to the offspring of a racially diverse people. These names ranged from white Spanish, Mestizo, Mulato, Castizo, and so on (as the image accompanying this article shows). During the mid-nineteenth century, the amelioration and eventual abolition of chattel slavery restructured the racial terrain of the Caribbean yet again. Chinese indentured laborers arrived throughout the colonial Caribbean. The British territories of Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guyana, incorporated indentured laborers as part of a low-wage system that sustained the sugar plantations, which remained a lucrative colonial industry. Chinese workers were also brought to the Spanish Caribbean, including Cuba and the Dominican Republic, to replace and work alongside enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. After obtaining manumission many repatriated to China, but some permanently settled in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Latin American nations. Today, the Dominican Republic has the largest population of Chinese-descended Caribbeans after Jamaica.
Unlike the color line that segregated Black and white people in the U.S., Latin American governments embraced a notion of improving one’s race called blanqueamiento (racial whitening). Blanqueamiento is the white supremacist social practice of “remedying” Blackness and correcting the complexity of race mixing. Blanqueamiento promotes a logic that deems it possible for a people, and ultimately a nation, to aspire to whiteness, that is, to “improve”
upon one’s race if one had white or white-ish offspring. I intentionally use the present tense when defining Blanqueamiento because although it developed from a settler colonial moment, it is still regularly practiced.
Many Latin American nations subscribed to the notion of blanqueamiento. One of the biggest twentieth-century proponents of blanqueamiento was the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo who, in his mission to whiten the Dominican Republic, regarded the nation as a Spanish country in contradistinction to its neighbor Haiti. Trujillo was so obsessed with blanqueamiento that he often carried a vial of white powder which he used on his face to appear lighter. In an attempt to increase the island’s white population during the Second World War, Trujillo expressed a willingness to accept between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand Jewish people seeking refuge from Nazi Germany. He believed that a Jewish population would ameliorate the nation’s race by marrying Dominicans and producing lighter-skinned children. Trujillo’s generosity likely stemmed from his eagerness to have the Western nations overlook his brutal massacre of 25,000 Haitians in 1937.
The story of Dominican colorism isn’t simply historical. It is a part of our lived reality today. The anti-Haitian and anti-Black policies of the current Dominican administration under Luis Abinader allow Dominican authorities to detain, harass, abuse, and deport any Haitian or presumed-to-be Haitian person as an extension of a long history of Black erasure and violence. Anti-racist Dominicans on and off the island who advocate for the rights of Black Dominicans and Haitians often face death threats and backlash from far-right nationalists simply for speaking up. As anthropologist Amarilys Estrella argues in her North American Congress in Latin America (NACLA) piece, “New expressions of ultranationalist violence censoring Black women and migrants harken back to the Trujillo dictatorship. Anyone deemed a threat to Dominican values is a potential target.”
My infant daughter has become intertwined in this long and tangled history of colonization, slavery, and racial capitalism. I naively thought that my family and I were beyond this history, but I was wrong. The first thing family members mentioned upon meeting our half-Dominican and half-Korean daughter was her skin color. “She isn’t milky white like her mother. She is india.” With these words, our infant daughter was placed in a casta system of colorism, one that I have tried arduously to dismantle as an educator and scholar. Now, I feel that I failed to protect her from it.
I know my family loves our daughter. I know that their racially loaded comments don’t come from a place of explicit or intentional aggression, disappointment, or regret. In many ways, they are maneuvering the same internalized racism that haunts me every day. I am not writing to call them out, but, asProfessor Loretta J. Ross says, to call them–and all of us who struggle with these internal dilemmas of blanqueamiento – in for a larger conversation about racialized colonial violence. Maybe then we can learn to accept and perhaps love the colors of our skin.