what's wild about all these white women pretending to be Black by saying they're puerto rican & dominican from new york is that i'm actually puerto rican & dominican from new york and i've always been hyperconscious of how much space i take up as a racially ambiguous person. https://twitter.com/WeWillRakiya/status/1307015379827425281

I don't take roles & resources specifically for Black people bc i think those roles & resources should go to *unambiguously* Black people. and i say this as someone who's experienced state violence, too. i hope this reckoning helps us all learn to center dark skinned Black folks.

I recently read a piece by Silvio Torres-Saillant on the history of Blackness in the Dominican Republic that helped me better understand why so many of us grew up with an identity crisis. i'll link it here & share some of what I learned in this thread!
https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/dsi/upload/Introduction_to_Dominican_Blackness_Web.pdf

The island of Hispaniola, now divided into Haiti on the east & the Dominican Republic on the west, is actually the place where Blackness got its modern significance. The first enslaved people brought to the west from Africa were brought to Hispaniola to work on plantations.

The island's indigenous population was decimated by colonizers in the 1500s. In 1519, there were 3K Tainos left. As the Taino population dwindled, the Black enslaved population grew enormously. And as the gold mines exhausted their deposits, white people began to leave en masse.

In 1801, Toussaint Louverture unified the island of Hispaniola and abolished slavery. But in 1802, the French invaded & reinstated slavery, until it was abolished again across Hispaniola by Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer in 1822.

In 1844, a Dominican independence movement established the Dominican Republic as separate from Haiti. The new Dominican government affirmed that slavery would be abolished and formerly enslaved people coming from abroad would become free upon reaching Dominican soil.

Dominicans associated Blackness with slavery, so a deracialized consciousness developed. That was taken advantage of by elites + powerful nations like the US, which constructed a version of history that overstated European influence & sought to erase Dominicans' African roots.

The result has been widespread anti-Blackness in a population that's 90% Black or of mixed European & African ancestry. African descended people accessed social power, but Eurocentrism & white supremacist belief systems survived, even taught in schools.

Most people in the DR didn't consider themselves Black, so anti-Blackness became anti-Haitianism, leading to mass violence against Haitians. Many Dominicans don't experience racialization as Black until arriving in the US. White people & cops certainly see us as Black.

Many Dominicans are taught to identify w our European ancestors & see colonizers as the protagonists in our history, rather than identify with our African ancestors & learn from their struggle. To identify with this Eurocentric narrative is to alienate ourselves from our history.

If we read between the lines of colonizers' versions of history, we can learn about the resistance of formerly enslaved Black people who shaped Dominican culture. There is power in recovering our histories, and using what we learn to reject anti-Blackness in all its forms.

and as an addendum: this thread isn't meant to be a comprehensive history of Blackness, and anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic! i hope that for folks who may be reading & learning from it will continue to read & learn! and again, center & uplift dark skinned Black folks

and, one last addendum, in case it needs to be said: not all Puerto Ricans & Dominicans are racially ambiguous, & acknowledging that someone is light skinned or racially ambiguous doesn't take away their Blackness. i'm just sharing my own experience & my own way of navigating it!