Dominican-American Ethnic/ Racial Identities and United States Social Categories

Abstract

The majority of Dominicans have sub-Saharan African ancestry,' which would make them "black" by historical United States 'one-drop' rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican-American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non-Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype-racialization as black or white makes visible ethnidracial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African-American. This resistance to blacuwhite racialization suggests the transformative effects that post-1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.Although academics over the last decades have increasingly emphasized that United States notions of race are local, mutable and contradictory sociopolitical constructions, the majority of Americans continue to treat individuals of African ancestry as "black" and individuals of only European ancestry as "white." Such categories have long organized the American social world, e.g., through residential patterns, marriage partner choices, church memberships, and overall social hierarchy, and both black and white Americans treat them 'In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco ('white'), 73 percent were classified as indio ('indian-colored), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 1 1 percent were classified as n e p ['black'] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of "whiteness," for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Domingua, 19789). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, "whiten" an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287). 0 2001 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. 0 198-9183/01/3503.0135 ZMR Volume 35 Number 3 (Fall 2001):677-708 677

Neutropenia in 6 ethnic groups from the Caribbean and the U.S.

“…9,19,20 An unexpected finding was that although many Dominicans are of partial African ancestry, women from the Dominican Republic had the highest WBC and ANC. 21 Among the possible explanations for this finding is an as-yet unidentified protective genetic factor. The Dominican Republic was colonized by Spain.…”

Not Haitian: Exploring the Roots of Dominican Identity

“…This language-based sense of self appears to supersede the role of skin color (phenotype), religion, or music (e.g., bachata, salsa, merengue, and reggaeton) in identity (Bailey 2001;Cherry 2015). Interestingly, language can also legitimize Whites' marginalization of Dominicans in the US, given the stigmatization of speaking Spanish as backward (Rosa 2016).…”

Towards a Different Construction of Blackness: Black Immigrant Scholars on Racial Identity Development in the United States

“…The growing presence of Black immigrants in the United States has served both to question and to add critical dimensions concerning what it means to be "Black" (Bailey, 2001;De Walt, 2013;Kretsedemas, 2008;Johnson, 2008;Perry, 2002). Johnson (2008) succinctly illustrated this influence with the use of Hughes ' (1945) "master status" -that is, America's longstanding definition of Blackness founded on its racialized past.…”