Dominican Republic Facts That Have Fueled The Struggle Of Racism

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Racism in the Dominican Republic  is rearing its head. It may even be worse than racism here in the United States.

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The Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic  chose to legally  strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans.

According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.

The US State Department has denounced the Dominican government for this plan, and pointed out that it is a gross violation of human rights according to the U.N. charter. The corpse of a Haitian man was found hanging from a tree in a public park in the Dominican Republic’s second-largest city earlier this year. Huffington Post covered the story. A spokesman for the Santiago police tweeted that investigators had “rejected racism as a motive,” and said investigators believed the killing resulted from a robbery.

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Police declined to speak about the case by telephone with The Huffington Post.

Many view anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic as racist in nature because the vast majority of Haitians and their Dominican-born descendants are black. Most Dominicans are mixed-race or white, and 11 percent are black, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The  Dominican government has given non-citizens until Tuesday to register under an initiative aimed at regulating the flow of migrants from neighboring Haiti. Interior Minister Ramon Fadul said Monday that non-citizens who haven’t registered could be deported. The migration agency has prepared 12 buses and offices along the border to begin repatriating people.

Watch below video that discuss the struggles and the history:

Explored and claimed by Christopher COLUMBUS on his first voyage in 1492, the island of Hispaniola became a springboard for Spanish conquest of the Caribbean and the American mainland. In 1697, Spain recognized French dominion over the western third of the island, which in 1804 became Haiti. The remainder of the island, by then known as Santo Domingo, sought to gain its own independence in 1821, but was conquered and ruled by the Haitians for 22 years; it finally attained independence as the Dominican Republic in 1844. In 1861, the Dominicans voluntarily returned to the Spanish Empire, but two years later they launched a war that restored independence in 1865. A legacy of unsettled, mostly non-representative rule followed, capped by the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas TRUJILLO from 1930-61.

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