Settling In

It was a banner day. My downstairs neighbor invited me for a ladies’ luncheon. It is almost a year that I have been in this apartment complex, a small older condominium in the older, no longer quite chic part of the city. I am the only foreigner which makes me feel very safe.

Crime is on the rise here, Ten years ago, Santo Domingo was known as one of the safest cities in the hemisphere but since the US changed its deportation policies, the nation has been plagued with crime. They refer to it as “delinquencia” acknowleging that it is mostly the young men who are at fault. I talk with them when I can, telling them that they must change the word. It is not “delinqencia” when the perpetrators are armed, when they go after credit cards and passports.

But today I felt safe and warm. My hostess used to live in NYC, where she worked for the United Nations. My neighbor from across the hall was there as well and we chatted away, jabbered away in Spanish.

We talked about Quakers (que es eso?) Bush, and Iraq, and racism, and Haiti, and Obama and Hillary. About how most Americans are taught a clean version of history, how they do not know about the number of times the army occupied the DR, and Haiti.

We talked of the African American’s dislike of Latinos, and how these Dominicans could not understand why American blacks had not risen, since they had access to higher education.

I did some shameless campaigning for Barack. How proud I am that he received the majority o the votes of the WHITE MEN in Georgia. Proud of us. How far we have come in only one lifetime.

I reminded them that the United States had a form of racial segregation that was akin to apartheid.

And my hostess remembered. She had been in NYC when Harry Belefonte and Petula Clark held hand, exchanged a chaste kiss on Ed Sullivan – the uproar that ensued.

It is not that “no hay racismo aqui” as they say. Hay racismo. But the racism is a bit softer, a bit easier. For the most part, this is a lovely mixed race nation.

I was almost dancing during my evening walk along the Malecon, feeling the salt water whipping up over the coast line, listening to Wyclef Jean in my Ipod, working up a sweat.

I thought of all the pictures of the winter weather and wondered why more of you are not here.

Seems a pity.

A Delicate Balance

There were two ( and here )films recently about the terrible conditions of the Haitian workers on the sugar cane fields. In addition, a local human rights worker was awarded recognition by the RFK Memorial organization in Washington, DC. The US Embassy here has declared first one then another dance club off limits to Embassy employees because of racial discrimination policies.

There was a concerted push on behalf of some international NGO's, decrying the discrimination against Haitians here. There has been a loud scream that there is no racism here.

It is complicated. There is the issue of national sovereignty, of defending the borders against the "invasion" from a failed state next door.

And then there is racism.

But we have seen this in the US. We have had this discussion. We have come through denial.

Last week, 40% of the white males in the Georgia democratic primary, voted for Obama.

You will hear Dominicans talk about Obama. What they will say is, for the most part, racist.

A small reminder

From a previous post:

Henri Christophe became President of Haiti in 1807. He writes of the French:

Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks,
crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they
not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they
not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to
stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into
boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels
studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they
not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated
by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and
poniard?

An Island of White

The mountains of Western North Carolina are one of the great natural treasures of the planet. They are, it is said, the oldest mountains in the country, far older than the uppity Rockies, even more worn and run down than the northern peaks of the Adirondacks. It is home to moonshiners, Scots Irish Balladeers, rugged mountain folk, devout Baptists and born agains who cling to their families and roots and a small piece of dirt which, perhaps in a good year of tobacco farming, will produce a marginal lively hood. They are, some say, the new feminine center of the United States. Many acknowledge that they have a great healing power. There is something special in the water.

Up in Hot Springs, where the peaks seem to brush the sky, the outlanders are moving in. For years, only the very brave and hardy of “foreigners” would dare to move in, settle in with the copperheads and rattlers and men with tobacco plugs in the cheeks and the words “I protect what is mine - and I don’t call 9-11”. Now it is being discovered by the wave of money coming down from the North and up from Florida where is either too cold, or too hot. Twenty years ago, an acre of steep mountain land (steep as a cow’s face, they say here) would set you back $1300 if you were foolhardy enough to want it. Today there is a gated subdivision selling 5 acre lots for $250,000. The locals are laughing with an edge of fear. Perhaps their way of life, with the grandchildren parked in the trailer out back, will
soon be a thing of the past.

There are no black faces here. In fact there are few places around where Blacks feel safe. I lived up around here for 20 years but finally had to leave for although I am white on the outside, I am black inside. In the last census, I identified myself as mixed race - “Caucasion and African-American” although I have nothing to prove it except a little curl in my hair, a natural ability to dance and drum and an affinity for all things African. Asheville has a population which is 20% black but you have to go looking for them, find them behind some sort of wall. The schools there were only integrated under federal court order in 1976. And here, as in most of the US, one is either Black or White. Not like the Dominican Republic where one is Indian, or wheat, or cinnamon, or mulatto but hardly ever, ever negro, “black” - unless, of course, you are Haitian.

I remember a conversation with a French woman on the beach up in the Samana peninsula.

She spoke of our terrible problem with racism and slavery in the United States. I listened intently, for certainly we do not deny it, we have been working on it for over 200 years.

Then I looked up at her, and held up my palms, weighing one down, then the other,
saying:

“And Africa, for you, would be, what?”