Dominican Women Embrace Their Blackness, Just Like Clair Huxtable
15 June 2007, 9:54 AM. By Carlos Posas
An intriguing story comes our way from Santo Domingo, where scores of women pursue the Dominican dream of straight-looking hair by any means necessary. (Extensions, chemical processes, Elmer’s glue: you name it!) The article argues that by taming the natural curls most island women are born with, they consciously deny their African heritage and therefore distance themselves from being Black–a trait that’s associated with being ugly and poor. Like something out of bad hip-hop video, hostility felt by the mainstream towards kinky hair manifests itself on a daily basis:
“I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it,” said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. “They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don’t want that image to be seen.”
In a country whose population is considered to be 90% of Black or mixed background, this instance raises just one question for us: isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? (Shameless Alanis Morissette reference courtesy of an old mix tape we found lying around the office.)
Black denial [The Miami Herald]
Image [Candace Barbot / The Miami Herald]
Earlier, Chonga Beat Explains Why Your Sister Dresses Like
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Clair Huxtable is Black. Whatever culture, What ever language….She’s still black. For black hispanics/latinos to come out now and claim their blackness is a personal expression of self growth but for the rest of us w/eyes we already new you were black (Zoe Saldano, Rosie Perez, Lauren Velez….). Being ashamed of this does not change it. If it did, you would have done it by now. It is obvious to a duck. If black latinos knew just how stupid they sound and look saying shytt like “I’m not black I’m Dominican ( or Puerto Rican etc.) they’d really shut up! If it wasn’t so pathetic, it would be quite funny. As a matter of fact, they’d sooner convince us that they were the aformentioned duck than convince us that they are not black. Hello……..Race, nationality and culture are not one in the same or interchangable at will.
By the way, Phylicia Allen formerly Rashad is not of hispanic. She was born in Texas to Black- non Hispanic American parents but as a child, they lived in Mexico to escape the racism of 1950’s Texas. If the “good old boys” are dragging people behind their trucks in this day and age, can you imagine how it was back then. This is why she and Debbie Allen (”Fame”) speak fluent Spanish.
oooh, I get it. Because her mother is Vivian Ayers
black people who happen to have hispanic roots are trying to say she is latina not black. Here we go again. Well guess what, Vivian Ayers knew she was black and was proud of it! She has done amazing work, been awarded and recognized for it and is known as the first black person to achieve some of it (ex. Rice University). Unlike too many Hispanics she does not try to pretend that just because some ancestor was Spanish/European she is not black. In that case, no Black born American is black. Absolutely everyblack American I know has either Native American and/or European blood in their history. My grandfather was Native American and European but he chose my black grandmother (He said when he saw her she looked like a perfect piece of polished Onyx…beautiful) anyway, her Redbones dauther chose my dad a black man with black and native american roots.His mother was a dark chocolate tone with silver grey eyes. So yeh, we have “good hair” and straight thin noses but we are still black. We brothers and sisters (11) range from high high yellow to milk chocolate. The thing that black latinos hate is that no can tell that they are not black just by looking at them. This is why they go to such crazy lengths to prove otherwise such as Straighten their hair or lighten their skin. They’ll do anything to look less black. This is why that obviously black Dominican woman was so angry when the fertility clinic empregnated her with a black mans seman in lieu of her white husbands. Self hatred is what caused her to marry him in the first place. She set out to water down her race so that by the 3rd or 4th generation, someone would be saying of her “you know my great great great grandmother was black……oops I mean Latina” How disgusting. Yes, it is an awful thing to get the wrong sperm but to be honest the child looks just like her and is only a couple of shades darker than she. If she had not gone public, no one would know that the child is not both of theirs and that she hates her own race so much. People assume that when they marry another race that the child will immediatily and automatically be a lighter, brighter aka whiter. This is not so. When rolling the genetic dice, there is not telling. Like blue or grey eyes, it may skip as many generations as it wish then all of a sudden Bam…..their they are in the brown face of the great great great grandchild of that Native American/European who fell in love with a perfect piece of polished Onyx. Wow. Anyway, cut the crap Latinos it is obvious to a duck that Phylicia Ayers-Allen aka Rashad is Black . She knows it, her mother knows it and they have never tried to deny it or water it down. As a matter of fact, You would sooner convince me that she was that
formentioned duck than convince me that she was not black.
I am Dominican, and I wanted to highlight that the race binary that exist in the U.S, that you either Black or White does not exist in the Dominican Republic. It is very complex way of looking not necessarily at race but the gradations of skin color, compared to the phenotype of the person. We have different names according to how the person looks like. For example my skin color is black, but since my hair is curly and my nose is not broad they refer to me as “morena” not “prieta.” I think looking at the history and knowing that we won our independence from Haiti after 22 years, so our identity is based on what we think we are in contrast to them. So I wish that people can take some cultural sensibility and keep in mind the history that has created this complex race structure.
i am a black latino and i get asked all the time wat am i i would say dominican and they would start a big thing about how im to dark and thats wat it all comes down to is color i have curly hair i speak spanish i was born there but because of my color im classified as a black not latino ppl should really get over the color issuse
I think the best words to explain what you want to say is that there is a difference between race and culture. Anybody can be Hispanic/Latino regardless of color. In Cuba for example there are a bunch of people of Chinese descent who are considered Latino because of there upbringing in Cuba. In Dominican Republic there are Middle Easterners, Europeans that have kids that are born over there. You ask the kids what nationality they are and they will say Dominican. They know that there parents aren’t originally from there but the culture is all they know so they say that they are Dominican. I don’t get mad when people say I look like I could be black since technically I am. The slave ship made a few stops along the way to the US and the Dominican Republic is on of those places.