Mixed Race Studies

Black In The Dominican Republic: Denying Blackness

HuffPost Live
The Huffington Post
2014-06-10

Marc Lamont Hill, Host

In Latin America and Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic many deny being of African decent, despite 90 percent of the population possessing black ancestry. Where has the blackness gone in the region?

Guests:

• Biany Perez (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Graduate Student at Bryn Mawr College
• Christopher Pimentel (New York , New York) Finance Student at Baruch College
• Robin Derby (Los Angeles, California) Associate Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles
• Kimberly Eison Simmons (Columbia, South Carolina) Associate Professor, Anthropology and African American Studies, University of South Carolina
• Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse, New York) Professor of English, Syracuse University

Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas

Michigan State University Press
April 2012
344 pages
6 x 9, notes, references
ISBN: 978-1-61186-040-5

Edited by:

Bernd Reiter, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics
University of South Florida

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies; Director of the Latin American Studies Program
University of South Carolina

A detailed analysis of issues facing African descendants in Latin America

Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi- faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.

Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic

University Press of Florida
2009-07-05
176 pages
6 x 9
Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3374-7, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3374-8
Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3675-5, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3675-5

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In Latin America and the Caribbean, racial issues are extremely complex and fluid, particularly the nature of “blackness.” What it means to be called “black” is still very different for an African American living in the United States than it is for an individual in the Dominican Republic with an African ancestry.

Racial categories were far from concrete as the Dominican populace grew, altered, and solidified around the present notions of identity. Kimberly Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominicans’ racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry.

Simmons also examines the movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio are challenged, debated, and called into question. How and why Dominicans define their racial identities reveal shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, and proves intrinsic to understanding identities in the African diaspora.

Navigating the Racial Terrain: Blackness and Mixedness in the United States and the Dominican Republic

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 2 (October 2008)
pages 95–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2008.00019.x

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In this article, I draw on the experiences of students who participated in the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Program in Spanish Language and Caribbean Studies, in Santiago, Dominican Republic, from 2000 to 2004, to situate the seemingly conflicting racial projects of the Dominican Republic and the United States. I discuss how, for African Americans and Dominicans, the question of race is actually very similar when it becomes a question of color as Blackness and mixedness are situated processes that encompass ideas of ancestry as well as phenotypic expression in both countries. I argue that racial discourses, and the politics surrounding race and color, for Dominicans in the United States, and African Americans in the Dominican Republic, is very similar because of historical colorization—which I define as intragroup racial and color-naming practices. I suggest that growing interactions between African Americans and Afro-Dominicans, and a growing understanding of race and the racial systems in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, contribute to how identities are being reconstructed. Particularly, African Americans in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States encounter a racial dilemma—how one is racially defined within a new national context as categories are often based on the state’s own definitions, series of laws, and informal ways of classifying people based on skin color.

Read or purchase the article here.